U.S. probing how American electronics wound up in Russian military gear

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Paul Sonne
@PaulSonne
Federal agents have begun questioning U.S. technology companies on how their computer chips ended up in Russian military equipment recovered in Ukraine. From ⁦@JeanneWhalen⁩:

washingtonpost.com
U.S. probing how American electronics wound up in Russian military gear
Agents from the FBI and the Commerce Department are conducting joint visits to tech companies whose components have been found in abandoned weapons systems in Ukraine.
10:41 AM · Jun 16, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/15/us-computer-chips-russian-military/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/9wuZJ

Federal agents have begun questioning U.S. technology companies on how their computer chips ended up in Russian military equipment recovered in Ukraine.

Commerce Department agents who enforce export controls are conducting the inquiries together with the FBI, paying joint visits to companies to ask about Western chips and components found in Russian radar systems, drones, tanks, ground-control equipment and littoral ships, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive investigations..

“Our goal is to actually try to track that back, all the way back to the U.S. supplier” to determine “how did it find its way into that weapons system,” one Commerce Department official said of the probes.

“Just because a chip, a company’s chip, is found in a weapon system doesn’t mean we’ve opened up an investigation on that company,” the official added. “What we’ve done, though, is we’ve opened up an investigation on how that company’s chip got into that system.”

[Russian drones shot down over Ukraine were full of Western parts. Can the U.S. cut them off?]
It isn’t clear which specific components are being probed. But investigators from a variety of countries have identified Western electronics in Russian weaponry found in Ukraine. Many of those components appear to have been manufactured years ago, before the United States tightened export restrictions after Russia seized Crimea in 2014. But others were manufactured as recently as 2020, according to Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a research group in London that has examined some of the parts.

*snip*

[Boxerfan]

1. Easy-They went to Jared's