Hacker News Reader

Comment by sn_master | Hacker News Reader

Rules are made to cause trouble for the average law-abiding citizen, but have almost no effect on actual criminals. e.g when you buy an AR magazine online (just a piece of cheap plastic and a single spring all there is) it says very clearly these are not to be exported outside the US.

If you're a lawful citizen and by mistake take one to the airport and get caught with it, would be a lot of trouble, but criminals will just ignore than warning, buy a few hundreds and smuggle them through land or sea no problem.

If these components were allowed to be purchased by civilians without a specialized license, then the companies can't really be blamed for it. There's no way to prevent things like that from being smuggled abroad.

View on HN

People do get caught for smuggling export-controlled goods. Some Russians were caught a few years ago for trying to export a few night-vision goggles (around 20 or so?). You could probably smuggle out a couple dozen from the consumer market, but hard to do so in higher quantities (enough to outfit a military) without attracting attention.

Russia has had issues with not having enough optics, so there's speculation that the Russian NODs for sale to American LARPers for years as milsurp might not have actually been surplus...

> (around 20 or so?)

So, literally nothing. That's small guys getting slapped for breaking rules. Wake me when France imprisons some Thales executives for selling thermal scopes to Russia (post-invasion!)

By the way, the French government is the largest Thales shareholder.

Not like American export restrictions apply in France.

US sanctions apply to any entity doing business with the US. If a company chooses to violate them, they lose the US market and can get penalized in other ways too by getting their US assets seized.

Well, first, sanctions aren't the same as export restrictions. America can account for NODs sold in America, they can ask vendors who they've sold them to, they get signed statements from anyone who buys one that they can't be exported, but that's not something America can do in France.

How many do you think were caught vs how many were successful? The masterminds back in Moscow don't care if one shipment gets caught when 10 more made it through.

The masterminds in Moscow would like to outfit thousands of men with NODs, but can hardly do it if even an operation to smuggle few dozen gets busted.

These aren't cheap devices. Somebody with a Russian name dropping $100k on a some 20 NODs is going to raise eyebrows.

> if even an operation to smuggle few dozen gets busted.

Right, one such operation failed, but there's many more which succeeded, not to mention all the Western stuff they confiscated from the Ukrainians (verified through videos they posted).

And you're right, it's not realistic for them to outfit thousands of soldiers with that gear, but certainly enough for small groups of special forces, but their real problem isn't bypassing sanctions, but their own corruption which made them not have such gear long before the war started in the first place.

I would be very surprised if any of the Western optics the Russians have that have been captured are American. Or at least the advanced optics available for sale in America but under export controls. Like I said, this isn't hard stuff to keep track of.

It increases costs for criminals, they just never stop them outright.

> Rules are made to cause trouble for the average law-abiding citizen, but have almost no effect on actual criminals.

I'll bite, how do you think the justice system should work?

Laws and their corresponding punishments are deterrents. And judges have flexibility in applying them to handle issues of accidental vs. intentional rule violation.

> how do you think the justice system should work?

I don't know, and I am not saying we should turn the country into North Korea or China with full government control, that's far worse.

> And judges have flexibility in applying them

They can only apply them to those caught, and that's the problem here. Only a very small percentage of those violating the sanctions are actually caught at all in the first place.

I would disagree that there's a problem here. As mentioned much better in other replies, there's a global supply chain and these are commodity parts. This is on the order of jaywalking or going 2mph the speed limit on the highway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com