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Comment by tgflynn | Hacker News Reader

Trying to prevent common cheap components that almost anyone in the world can order online from falling into the hands of adversaries is a lost cause. It would require shutting down over half the economy and instituting a draconian and virtually totalitarian control regime. The Biden administration seems to be playing from a 1960's era playbook that makes zero sense in the 21st century.

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> A game of whack a mole worth playing

Good grief. It's like they know they don't have a strategy, and they're doubling down on it.

Maybe.

If the supplier for iran is centralized then having a catalogue of these specific components and monitoring for purchases of them could tip who the supplier is. If the source of the components are separated into different entities and components are only brought together in Iran, then yea I think it would be super hard to find them.

These parts are commodities. It’s like saying the drone had sheet metal, rivets, screws, wires, and solder. Even if somehow they had all been purchased in one Amazon shopping cart, it would create zero hardship to “force” them to be purchased separately from different vendors.

Why would you think the supplier is centralized when any of X billion people could have bought the component or a product containing it and sold it to someone who sold it to someone who sold it to Iran ?

I don’t think anything about it. That’s why I said “if”.

This is a shallow take IMO; the idea of sanctions are to add enough friction to hurt, not to be able to completely throttle an adversary.

Spending time trying to fund and manage black market networks, raiding recycling centers, buying and dismantling washing machines for chips etc. is all time that the Russians aren't putting towards streamlining cruise missile production.

The level of hardship imposed is going to be minimal once the black market structures are in place. These kinds of sanctions may have had an effect in the first few months of the war but that effect has probably vanished to practically nothing by now.

At the same time sanctions and export restrictions impose costs on the US and its allies. Those costs aren't worth it if the restrictions aren't themselves effective, which they almost certainly won't be for common off the shelf components.

That criminals break laws and crimes require investigation and prosecution which are activities that have associated expenses is not new.

You have to remember that both investigation and prosecution involve a large amount of discretion, so the cost of the sanctions regime is dynamic and variable. Enforcement can put a small effort against low-value components and put a large effort into violations of high-value components. If the small effort put against low-value components deters some activity, then the goals of the sanctions regime are furthered.

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