OIG, GAO, and Congress Ding NASA on Export Control
NASA Security: Assessing the Agency’s Efforts to Protect Sensitive Information, NASA OIG
“Before highlighting two of the audits and describing the Langley investigation and another special review involving foreign nationals and export issues at the Ames Research Center (Ames) in Mountain View, California, I will highlight several themes from our oversight work that echo findings made by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in their recent examinations of export control practices and management of foreign national access at NASA.”
NASA Management Action and Improved Oversight Needed to Reduce the Risk of Unauthorized Access to Its Technologies
“NASA headquarters export control officials and CEAs lack a comprehensive inventory of the types and location of export-controlled technologies and NASA headquarters officials have not addressed deficiencies raised in oversight tools, limiting their ability to take a risk-based approach to compliance. Export compliance guidance from the regulatory agencies of State and Commerce states the importance of identifying controlled items and continuously assessing risks.”
Subcommittees Examine NASA’s Struggle to Protect Sensitive Information
“These reports confirm our worst fears: that the incidents at Langley and Ames are not isolated incidences. Among conclusions from these reports we find: most centers continue to release Scientific and Technical Information that has not been reviewed for export control purposes. NASA lacks both clear export control policies and the oversight necessary to enforce them. The NASA network has indeed been compromised, and these vulnerabilities could have significant impacts on national security. And finally, a troubling trend we’ve seen across agencies in this Administration: the failure or the unwillingness to hold accountable those responsible for these errors.”
The OIG report doesn’t mention why Bo Jiang was arrested and held for weeks without ever revealing any evidence that he had committed a crime. It cleverly avoids saying there was never any evidence he did anything contrary to the law. There is no mention of the fact that he was not even shown to have violated NASA’s arcane ITAR restrictions. No evidence was even presented that he had downloaded sexulally oriented material over the NASA network; this should have been impossible due to the NASA network monitoring. Most likely Bo was told that if he didn’t confess to something they would simply hold him indefinitely.
How did all this happen? The report doesn’t say. In short, the Office of Inspector General has done itself and the agency a major disservice by failing to investigate how the powerful Congressman Wolf was able to have an innocent man arrested and held in jail for weeks, with no evidence, just because he is Chinese.