National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2005 -- (House of Representatives - May 19, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 648 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 4200.

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Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the work done by the gentleman from California and the gentleman from Missouri on this legislation. There are some important pieces to this bill, equipment for our troops and the like. There are matters of concern, for example, the new nuclear program that I have opposition to. But there is an obscure provision of the bill that I want to make sure Members know about and that is section 1404 which would require U.S. companies to get a license before they export any goods listed on the military critical technologies list. According to a copy of the list I found on the Department of Defense Technical Information Center Web site, that includes computers that exceed 1,500 MTOPS. That would be considered military critical. So under this bill, computers, laptops, Sony PlayStations that exceed 1,500 MTOPS would require an export license. That would be to export it anywhere. If you want to sell a Sony PlayStation to Europe, to England, you would need a Defense Department export license. I think that that is a problem.

The outdated metric of 190,000 MTOPS needs to be changed, but to go down to 1,500 MTOPS as a metric is literally the stone age of computing. I believe that if there are specific military critical technologies that are not sufficiently controlled under existing export regulations, say, night vision or surveillance devices, then let us draft something that controls those technologies. But to say that we cannot sell a laptop to somebody in London, that the Ipods cannot be exported to France, that the Sony PlayStations cannot be sold to Japan, I think is a mistake. I know that this is about war. I did not know it was about war on the American economy.