ITAR

ITAR is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, the US export-control regime administered by the State Department that governs defense articles and defense services. If you design, manufacture, or even handle technical data for an item on the US Munitions List, you are ITAR-controlled. In practice: every employee who touches the technical data must be a US person (citizen, green card holder, or refugee or asylee). Non-US persons cannot be in the room when a controlled drawing is on a monitor. Cloud storage must be ITAR-compliant. Emailing a controlled file to a foreign national is a federal offense. The penalty for a single violation can hit $1.2M civil and the employee can face up to 20 years criminal. For job seekers: many aerospace roles are restricted to US persons specifically because of this. The "US Persons Only" line in a job description is not a preference. It is a hard legal requirement. Roles where this matters: Engineering, Program Management, Operations, Legal, HR.