Mike Thompson: “First of all, on the deemed export issue, we have had concerns on this side that the legislation did not adequately…”

“First of all, on the deemed export issue, we have had concerns on this side that the legislation did not adequately address the problem of deemed exports. As most who follow this issue know, a deemed export comes about when, in a typical situation, sensitive information is passed to a foreign national who perhaps is working at one of our National Laboratories or working in one of our businesses on sensitive information, who may or may not have a government contract, the idea being that with regard to the physical exporting of an item, that information should then be controlled when giving it to a foreign national. That should be reported. We should go through a reasonable process to make sure no damage is being done. We learned from hearings with regard to our National Laboratories, for example, that we were woefully behind as a government from even private industry; that we were not paying attention in our National Laboratories to the deemed export requirements. There were hardly any deemed export notifications or licenses issued by our laboratories.”