Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, was accused of stealing nuclear secrets for China in 1999. Lee later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of mishandling classified computer files but not spying. The Lee case became something of a rallying cry for many Chinese Americans who felt he was unfairly treated by the government.
The latest spying case shocked some in the Chinese American community because the defendants seemed to have long-standing ties in Southern California. The FBI originally alleged in an affidavit that Chi Mak, a lead project engineer on a contract to develop a quiet electric-drive propulsion system for U.S. Navy submarines, transferred information about the system to his home computer.
The affidavit alleged that his wife helped him copy the information onto CDs and then Tai Mak, a broadcast and engineering director for a Chinese cable network, and Fuk planned to take the information to China.
The charges were changed for a number of reasons, some of which cannot yet be divulged, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.
Even if the information copied was only sensitive, not classified, Mrozek said, transmitting sensitive information is inappropriate.
While some of the information on the submarine propulsion system might have been discussed at a conference, discussing this kind of information with military applications at a meeting of American scientists is not the same as handing it over to foreign power, he said.
"These are serious charges they've been indicted on," Mrozek said. "You have people you believe are intelligence operatives for another country and taking information of a military contractor to another country. Should we let them go with it?"
He said that some of the evidence the FBI had presented in the original charges showed that the three people were working for China. Federal agents who searched Chi Mak's trash found a document written in Chinese that "lists a number of military technologies that were sought."
The federal government has had some success in prosecuting Chinese Americans on charges of spying for China.
In 1997, a Manhattan Beach physicist pleaded guilty to revealing classified information about lasers and radar while giving lectures to scientists in China. More recently, four naturalized U.S. citizens pleaded guilty in New Jersey in September to shipping military grade circuits to research institutes controlled by the Chinese government.
