Physicist Admits Sending Space-Related Military Secrets To China 278
piemcfly writes "Chinese-born physicist Shu Quan-Sheng Monday pleaded guilty before a US court to violating the Arms Export Control Act by illegally exporting American military space know-how to China. The 68-year-old naturalized US citizen, pictured here on his company profile, admitted handing over the design of fueling systems between 2003 and 2007. Also, in 2003 he illegally exported a document with the impossibly long name of 'Commercial Information, Technical Proposal and Budgetary Officer — Design, Supply, Engineering, Fabrication, Testing & Commissioning of 100m3 Liquid Hydrogen Tank and Various Special Cryogenic Pumps, Valves, Filters and Instruments.' This contained the design of liquid hydrogen tanks for space launch vehicles. He also admitted to a third charge of bribing Chinese officials to the tune of some 189,300 dollars for a French space technology firm."
Here's the FBI press release regarding Shu's plea.
Industrial espionage (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless the FBI is simply foaming at the mouth to create FUD and bungle this like they bungle everything else. It's more of a matter of industrial espionage rather than national security.
A crime called 'Treason'. (Score:5, Insightful)
Only a few years ago, this would be called 'TREASON' and possible punishment could be death, but more likely life imprisonment.
What say he goes free...
Only 10 years? (Score:2, Insightful)
What happened to treason?
Individuals can't but corporations can? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder how many corporations , universities and other organizations routinely share and profit from the global movement of information? When was the last time you saw a multinational corporation become the target for these types of investigations?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the guy, personally, I just think all this secrecy is stupid, useless and evil.
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A crime called 'Treason'. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, it's not like rockets can be weaponized or anything.
On a more serious not, this stuff is all for liquid hydrogen rockets - that wouldn't make a very effective weapon... it does a fine job in the Space Shuttle main engine, but keeping rockets that run on liquid hydrogen flight-ready is pretty expensive. AFAIK, most of the US military rockets are solid fuel.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't get good scientists internally then you are putting your secure projects at risk.
Umm, wasn't he a naturalized American citizen? Or do you mean to suggest that it's a risk to employ anyone who wasn't a natural-born citizen on secure projects? This traitorous asshole notwithstanding, most immigrants to this country are fiercely patriotic. You tend to have an appreciation for the United States if you immigrate here from a poorer/more oppressive country -- whereas those of us who were born here tend to take what we have for granted.
The odds against him being caught are huge (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't claim any personal experience with counter-intelligence but everything I've read on the matter makes the feebs out to be completely incompetent jackasses. Potential intelligence assets will walk in the front door and the FBI and CIA couldn't manage to recognize them for what they were. It seems like the operative rules are along the lines of:
1. First, don't fuck up.
2. Doing things increases the chances of fucking up; the less you do, the less likely you fuck up, unless your fuck up was not doing anything.
3. Your primary enemy is other intelligence services competing for your budget and turf. Cut those bastards off at the knees.
4. In your spare time, see if any foreign agents might be up to something.
For a case in point, Operation Pastorius.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=949 [damninteresting.com]
German defectors walk right up to the FBI and the G-men had to be beaten over the head before they realized something was up. And Hoover, ugh, don't even get me started on that bastard. The Brits couldn't stand working with that transvestite media whore in WWII. No sooner would a German agent be sniffed out and the FBI would roll him up and bring in the pressmen so German intel could find out their operation was blown and there would be enough details blabbed to the press so the Germans would know how they were sniffed out. The Brit approach was to figure out who the agents were, then keep a close eye on who they associated with so they could discover the larger spy network. They would also use these agents to unwittingly feed bogus intel back into German hands. That that was all too subtle for the swinging dick approach favored by American intel.
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:2, Insightful)
Correction, those of us who were born here and didn't take the responsibility ourselves to educate... OURSELVES!
I hardly take what I have for granted, but I read a lot about how we got to where we are today. You know, that thing called history that the people you are really referring to ignore completely and pretend it has no relevance to today.
I wouldn't let this one bad apple ruin the bushel. People seem to forget some of our greatest scientists EVER were defectors from our old enemies like, you know, Nazi Germany.
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the problem with not properly promoting scientific education within American schools. If you can't get good scientists internally then you are putting your secure projects at risk.
It's a mixed bag. For every foreign-born turncoat you can find, I can find you one who is loyal to the US because he has a huge beef with whoever is running the show back home. Likewise, for every loyal native-born son of liberty I can show you a homegrown turncoat. Look at all the moles in the CIA, corn-fed Americans.
The moral of the story is that there's no rule of thumb to go by on who you can trust, you need to suspect everyone and not make theft any easier than it has to be. Most of these cases, nobody's sitting there giving the spy props because he pulled off some sort of James Bond stunt, it's usually hands slapped against faces as we realize the doors were left wide open, the only mystery is why even more secrets didn't walk out of there.
Re:False dichotomy there, bub (Score:3, Insightful)
I can already predict that some snarky asshole is going to come along and say "long, protracted wars like Iraq." The answer is no. Try the sort of wars where both parties are actually on a generally equal footing, where hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of soldiers end up dead. One of the reasons that governments like the Chinese government don't risk war with us is that they know that with our currently superior equipped and trained military, we can inflict devastating and likely very disproportionate casualties on them. If they are successful at industrial espionage, they close the gap there between our respective militaries and can come much closer to going toe-to-toe with our troops any day of the week.
1. Our military is over-extended already. It's unlikely we even have enough spare troops to invade Guam again at this point.
2. There's no possible scenario I can think of that would see us facing down China in a ground battle.
3. Economic warfare seems to be a far smarter arena to be engaged in than direct military conflict. And they have us over the barrel in that regard.
4. There's a difference between a bombing campaign and a ground invasion of given territory. All the high tech in the world doesn't count for much if you are fighting against an entrenched enemy on home turf. Witness how easily we smoked the standing Iraqi army in both Gulf wars versus the trouble we're facing trying to police cities filled with guerrillas.
The struggle we're looking at right now is over access to markets and resources. Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote. 4th generation guerrilla wars seem to be the likely scenario for as far into the future as we can reasonably gaze.
Re:Spare me (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, what excuse does Slashdot have for not supporting Unicode yet? It's 2008. Not to mention that it's a pain to use on mobile devices (and can't moderate from Opera Mini) and unnecessarily heavy on bandwidth. One would expect better of the archetypal geek site.
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, let's bow down to "Asian American" today.
Tomorrow it will be "Person of Asian Decent, probably of Chinese".
Chinamen only serves to convey a person of a certain area.
This "politically correct" crap has to end. You can't have a different "cultural" name every oh, half decade or so.
Should we call them "American's of Chinese Decent".
PuhLeeze. People getting irate over being called a Chinaman, when they come from China is lame. I can see it if he called them a "Chink", "Slant Eye" or something else.
Or should I get pissed when someone calls me an American Man?
Sheesh.
--Toll_Free
Re:False dichotomy there, bub (Score:2, Insightful)
Our military is over-extended already. It's unlikely we even have enough spare troops to invade Guam again at this point.
And? People tend to forget that in 1941 we had a smaller army than Portugal and a nearly non-existent Air Force. The only branch of the armed forces that was remotely ready for war was the US Navy. My concern with our military being over-extended is not that we'd lose a large-scale industrial war -- it's that we'd lose the the opportunity to nip a problem in the bud before it became a large-scale industrial war.
There's no possible scenario I can think of that would see us facing down China in a ground battle.
What possible scenario could you think of in 1920 that would see us facing down Germany and Italy in a ground battle?
Economic warfare seems to be a far smarter arena to be engaged in than direct military conflict. And they have us over the barrel in that regard.
How do they have us over the barrel? Economics is a two-way street. If we stop buying their exports they lose the incoming capital that they need to pull their hundreds of millions of rural poor out of poverty. They'd wind up being hurt at least as much (if not more so) as we would.
Witness how easily we smoked the standing Iraqi army in both Gulf wars versus the trouble we're facing trying to police cities filled with guerrillas.
We're facing that trouble because we didn't go into the country with enough force to fight a proper counter-insurgency operation. And they aren't really guerrillas in the classical sense -- a lot (most?) of the violence is Iraqi on Iraqi as competing interests vie for power. It's closer to a civil war than a guerrilla war.
Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote.
What are you basing that on? WWII didn't happen in a vacuum. The first thing that happened was the economic rug got pulled out from under the globe -- sound familiar?
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:1, Insightful)
If you aren't born here you shouldn't be allowed clearances. Being born somewhere else is a conflict of interest that represents far too much risk for secure projects.
Re:False dichotomy there, bub (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to consider China an enemy, and think "Aid and Comfort" is enough to convict for treason then you'd better start by locking up the board of Wal-Mart. Then have a look at the contents of your house and wardrobe and decide whether to turn yourself in.
Re:String Him UP! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem, the thing that makes China scary and has people talking about treason and execution in this case is this: deep down we're afraid we've lost our technology balls.
It's been 36 years since America has been to the Moon. An entire generation has been born since then, and have even had their own children. I remember watching Neil Armstrong take that first step on the Moon, an event that to my children that is like my parents talking about Pearl Harbor is to me. Space, to them, is a place where movies are set. The Space Shuttle program was a disappointment, and the Mars initiative is a transparent boondoggle with no significant program milestones on the calendar.
In my lifetime, I have watched the leveraged buyout of the American culture of invention. When I was a kid, America was a country that made things. Of the course of my adulthood, it became something remarkable when a thing was actually made here. Then we were a country that invented things that were made elsewhere, and that is still true, but for how long? The idea of free trade is that countries do what "they do best"; it's a good idea in theory, but in practice our role in the world economy has become to spend the accumulated gains of generations, to send investment overseas.
The idea that we can somehow protect our preeminence in the world by hoarding our past accomplishments is pathetic. Oh, I won't deny that this kind of thing doesn't help China somewhat, otherwise why would they do it? But if you could wave a magic wand and make all these sort things go away, it wouldn't make much difference at all.
China is pursuing technological and economic development, whereas we have become complacent. We have been acting in the last two decades as if national preeminence is not simply a legacy but a birthright.
So we get all worked up about cases like this, because it gives us an excuse for our own lack of initiative and vision. We have elected leaders who pandered to our laziness and anti-intellectualism, and mocked the thoughtful as out of touch, the visionary as insane. We have embraced hypocrisy, insisting the poor should shoulder their economic responsibilities, which is fine by me, but all the while demanding middle class prerogatives as our entitlement. I remember watching a movie in which people were singing that things were so wonderful in America because it is "God's Country", and cringing at the idea that some poor bastard in the third world was watching his children starve because God doesn't like him as much as he likes us. That kind of thinking is more in style today than ever.
Oh, I won't be surprised if lots of people want to hang this guy. That's what passes these days for "feel good" politics.
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Re:Industrial espionage (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:4, Insightful)
So while someone who has been in this country for 20+ years may have the flag flying in their yard and be all "Go USA!" that doesn't change the fact that it would still be easier to get them to give up secrets than a US born.
And that's because natural-born citizens never sell secrets to enemies [wikipedia.org], right?
I agree that having families in oppressive countries is a liability—but, surely the U.S. government can help remove those liabilities (by shortening their immigration process) so that they can hire a qualified man for the job?
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only him: more than one third of American Nobel Prize winners are immigrants [state.gov]. Many of our best and brightest, and, as people who have worked in agriculture and construction can tell you, many of the hardest-working and most dedicated, are immigrants.
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:2, Insightful)
We produce so few scientists and engineers, because the rewards are so pathetic for the capacity of work being done.
We produce an ample supply of scientists given appropriate compensation. As we import more scientists from other countries, wages go down because supply goes up. This will drive Americans out of science and into more lucrative careers. A scientist used to expect to get a faculty position at about 28 to 30 in this country. Now the average is about 38. As we import more scientists, this number will only go up because the imported labor makes it easier to have a larger worker to PI ratio and a larger pool of workers translates into greater and more protracted competition for PI positions.
So what does this mean to all of the kids out there trying to choose a major? Well, as a public service, I will tell them: STAY THE FUCK OUT OF SCIENCE UNLESS YOU KNOW FOR GODDAMN SURE THAT YOU WILL BE PERFECTLY HAPPY RUNNING EXPERIMENTS FOR SOMEONE ELSE FOR MUCH OF YOUR LIFE.
The dream of having a PI position before you turn gray died in the '80s.
Re:Industrial espionage (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire country is founded on immigration obviously, aside from the natives who got mostly wiped out that is.
Believing immigration is bad for America is just navel gazing stupidity. There are no 20th generation American Citizens, from long lines of American ancestry. There are however thousands of years of Chinese dynastic and other histories.
To cut off immigration is to say "we have enough people now" since everyone else is recently immigrated too (from a global historical perspective). There is no otherwise functional difference between the immigrant and the naturally born citizen.
Who bombed the FBI building in Oklahoma after all? A chinaman? Maybe a Russian spy? Yeah.
Re:What "military space know-how"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fixed it for you.
Because the Chinese would never use what they have, rather than exactly copying an American design that they will not have all of until years from now.