Real life Chinese spy case ends in Silicon Valley
The new James Bond film may be wowing audiences in theaters, but industrial espionage in Silicon valley is making headlines. Two Chinese nationals were sentenced to one year each in Federal prison on Friday. The sentencing hearing marked the end of a seven-year-old case involving the theft of chip designs from Valley manufacturers, destined for use by mainland China chip manufacturers.
According to the AP, the two were the first people convicted of the most serious crime under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996. The first defendant was Fei Ye, a United States citizen. The second was Ming Zhong, who is a permanent resident of the United States. They were both accused, under the EEA, of attempting to provide economic benefit to China via the chip designs that they had stolen. The prosecutors in the case stopped short of alleging that the Chinese government was are of the activities of Ye and Zhong.
The two defendants were arrested in 2001 at the San Francisco International Airport, trying to board a flight to China with luggage containing sensitive design documents describing how to manufacture specific computer chips. The documents had been taken from four Silicon Valley manufacturers for whom the pair had worked. The firms from whom the secrets had been stolen were NEC Electronics Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Transmeta Corp. and Trident Microsystems Inc.
At the time of their arrest, Ye and Zhong were also carrying documents showing that they had been working with Chinese government agencies who would be providing funding for the Chinese start-up venture they were planning. The Economic Espionage Act was used in the prosecution because the combination of evidence strongly suggested that the abilities of China in the area of chip manufacturing would have been substantially advanced by the information stolen by Ze and Zhong.
The two could have been sentenced to as much as 30 years each for the crimes, but prosecutors asked for the one-year sentences passed down because the two industrial spies had cooperated in the investigation of the charges.
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