New Wassenaar Rule Sent to OMB

On Friday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that it had received a final rule for review from the DOC’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) concerning the latest updates to the 2015 Wassenaar Arrangement implementation. This rulemaking does not appear to address the ‘intrusion software’ issues associated with the 2013 Wassenaar Arrangement.

According to the abstract in the 2016 Spring Unified Agenda listing for this rulemaking this rulemaking will address:

“This rule harmonizes the CCL [the Commerce Control List] with the changes made to the WA List at the Plenary by revising Export Control Classification Numbers (ECCNs) controlled for national security reasons in each category of the CCL, as well as making other associated changes to the EAR. The WA agreements include raising of the Adjusted Peak Performance for high performance computers, therefore other parts of the EAR that have APP limitations are also amended by this rule, e.g., de minimis, License Exception APP, reporting requirements. This rule removes the Foreign National Review requirement associated with deemed exports under License Exceptions APP and CIV, because after years of reviewing these requests with no denials ever coming from this information BIS has determined it is not an efficient use of U.S. Government resources. Because this year's WA agreements include the total restructuring of Category 5 part 2, BIS is taking this opportunity to also streamline and update license requirements and policies associated with Category 5 part 2 [Information Security .PDF download] in this rule.”

The information security license and policy update portion of this rule should probably be watched fairly closely when it is published. Again, this is a direct final rule without the normal publish and comment process being required. This is the same process that was used (and later withdrawn) on the intrusion software rulemaking last year.