Control freaks: export licensing hurts American companies and doesn't improve national security.

• Author: Miller, John J.

Last October "administration officials" boasted to The New York I Times that history would recognize technology transfers to China "as one of Clinton's most lasting legacies." They suggested that these exports improved national security by aiding the economy, ensuring the United States would keep its place as the planet's single superpower.

Republicans howled. Allowing China to purchase equipment that upgraded its military prowess, they complained, had precisely the opposite effect. Technology transfers indeed may be one of Clinton's "most lasting legacies," but they sure aren't anything to brag about. And now the top-secret report compiled by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and the Select House Committee on Technology Transfers to China is almost ready for declassification. When it becomes public, the White House is expected to take a few hard punches.

The effect has been to cow Clinton. Today, he is reluctant to do the one thing that ought to be a prerequisite for his aides' proud legacy claims. American computer manufacturers and their technological advances are on a collision course with Department of Commerce export controls. Industry officials say that without a fix, they will lose the opportunity to sell tens of thousands of mass-market machines by the end of this year. Even Cox has signaled that his forthcoming report shouldn't stymie free trade. "The committee found that the current export-licensing process is riddled with errors and plagued by delays [and hurts] America's competitiveness in world markets," he wrote in the San Jose Mercury-News on March 28. Yet the Clinton administration has made no attempt to modernize the rules governing American participation in the international computer trade.

Current regulations make it a hassle to sell a personal computer with just two Pentium III chips to a buyer in Beijing. Although this is basic Web-enabling equipment, the Department of Commerce prevents easy shipment of these machines to countries considered proliferation risks.

Even strong supporters of free trade can support the logic of restrictions. Nobody wants rogue states or bomb-building terrorists to get their hands on high-tech devices. If security crimps sales, so be it. Powerful computers built by IBM and Silicon Graphics already have found their way into two of Russia's top nuclear weapons labs. China returned a Sun Microsystems machine last year after U.S. officials discovered that it had been moved from the research...