Sentence upheld for aerospace engineer/China spy

[alp227]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

A federal appeals court upheld spying convictions and a prison sentence of more than 15 years Monday for a Southern California aerospace engineer who supplied information about the space shuttle and U.S. rockets to his native China.

Dongfan "Greg" Chung, a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked for Boeing and Rockwell International for nearly 40 years, was convicted of economic espionage for providing sensitive data about his companies' projects to China between 2003 and 2006.

Chung, who spent most of his career working on the space shuttle, first offered to supply information about the shuttle to the Chinese government in 1985, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, quoting letters that prosecutors disclosed at his trial.

He was convicted under a 1996 law that makes it a crime to misappropriate trade secrets for the benefit of a foreign government. Prosecutors did not allege that Chung damaged national security but said the material he supplied was valuable to his employers and to China.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/26/BANH1L9PQF.DTL