Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”
He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”
Fair point. The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.
The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.
Setting aside the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.
In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.
In the most recent case, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who became a Democratic staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged under the Espionage Act with leaking information to journalists about other C.I.A. officers, some of whom were involved in the agency’s interrogation program, which included waterboarding.
For those of you keeping score, none of the individuals who engaged in or authorized the waterboarding of terror suspects have been prosecuted, but Mr. Kiriakou is in federal cross hairs, accused of talking to journalists and news organizations, including The New York Times.
Mr. Tapper said that he had not planned on raising the issue, but hearing Mr. Carney echo the praise for reporters who dug deep to bring out the truth elsewhere got his attention.
“I have been following all of these case, and it’s not like they are instances of government employees leaking the location of secret nuclear sites,” Mr. Tapper said. “These are classic whistle-blower cases that dealt with questionable behavior by government officials or its agents acting in the name of protecting America.”
Mr. Carney said in the briefing that he felt it was appropriate “to honor and praise the bravery” of Ms. Colvin and Mr. Shadid, but he did not really engage Mr. Tapper’s broader question, saying he could not go into information about specific cases. He did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.
In one of the more remarkable examples of the administration’s aggressive approach, Thomas A. Drake, a former employee of the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act last year and faced a possible 35 years in prison.
His crime? When his agency was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a software program bought from the private sector intended to monitor digital data, he spoke with a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. He suggested an internally developed program that cost significantly less would be more effective and not violate privacy in the way the product from the vendor would. (He turned out to be right, by the way.)
He was charged with 10 felony counts that accused him of lying to investigators and obstructing justice. Last summer, the case against him collapsed, and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, of misuse of a government computer.
Jesselyn Radack, the director for national security and human rights at the Government Accountability Project, was one of the lawyers who represented him.
“The Obama administration has been quite hypocritical about its promises of openness, transparency and accountability,” she said. “All presidents hate leaks, but pursuing whistle-blowers as spies is heavy-handed and beyond the scope of the law.”
Mark Corallo, who served under Attorney General John D. Ashcroft during the Bush administration, told Adam Liptak of The New York Times this month that he was “sort of shocked” by the number of leak prosecutions under President Obama. “We would have gotten hammered for it,” he said.
As Mr. Liptak pointed out, it has become easier to ferret out leakers in a digital age, but just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be.
These kinds of prosecutions can have ripples well beyond the immediate proceedings. Two reporters in Washington who work on national security issues said that the rulings had created a chilly environment between journalists and people who work at the various government agencies.
During a point in history when our government has been accused of sending prisoners to secret locations where they were said to have been tortured and the C.I.A. is conducting remote-controlled wars in far-flung places, it’s not a good time to treat the people who aid in the publication of critical information as spies.
And it’s worth pointing out that the administration’s emphasis on secrecy comes and goes depending on the news. Reporters were immediately and endlessly briefed on the “secret” operation that successfully found and killed Osama bin Laden. And the drone program in Pakistan and Afghanistan comes to light in a very organized and systematic way every time there is a successful mission.
There is plenty of authorized leaking going on, but this particular boat leaks from the top. Leaks from the decks below, especially ones that might embarrass the administration, have been dealt with very differently.
Reported by Jack Cloherty , Pierre Thomas and Jason Ryan:
The Justice Department today charged that Chinese-controlled companies conspired to steal production secrets potentially worth billions of dollars from U.S. chemical giant DuPont.
The long-running, multi-billion dollar economic espionage plot was revealed as five people and five companies were indicted for allegedly stealing trade secrets to benefit companies controlled by the People’s Republic of China.
The conspiracy reportedly centered on DuPont because it produces one of the world’s most valuable, and ubiquitous, pigments – titanium dioxide. Titanium dioxide infuses a bright, white, reflective glow in coloring paint, plastics, paper and other commercial products. The worldwide titanium dioxide market has been valued at about $12 billion, and DuPont controls the largest share of the market.
The Justice Department indictment charges that the Chinese tried to steal unique, titanium dioxide production technology from DuPont and use it to open a new, 100,000 ton titanium dioxide plant at Chongqing, China.
To achieve that goal, the Justice Department charges, “companies controlled by the PRC government, specifically the Pangang Group companies … conspired and attempted to illegally obtain titanium dioxide (TiO2) technology that had been developed over many years of research and development … by DuPont.” The Pangang Group is the Chinese company that was to build the titanium dioxide plant in Chongquing , according to the Justice Department
Pangang and four other corporate defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets and attempted economic espionage. The Justice Department said the Pangang Group companies paid “significant sums of money” to at least five insiders for DuPont’s trade secrets.
The five people charged today are:
Walter Lian- Heen Liew , aka ” Liu Yuanxuan ,” 54, of Orinda , Calif. Liew is a naturalized U.S. citizen and co-owner of USAPTI. Liew is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets, attempted economic espionage, attempted theft of trade secrets, possession of trade secrets, conveying trade secrets, conspiracy to obstruct justice, witness tampering, conspiracy to tamper with evidence and false statements. Liew was charged in August 2011 with obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. He was arrested at that time and has been ordered detained pending trial based on a finding by Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins that he is a flight risk.
Christina Hong Qiao Liew , aka “Qiao Hong,” 49, of Orinda . Christina Liew is a naturalized U.S. citizen and co-owner, with her husband, Walter Liew , of USAPTI. Liew is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets, attempted economic espionage, attempted theft of trade secrets, witness tampering, conspiracy to tamper with evidence and false statements. Liew was also charged in August 2011 with obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. She was released by the court on conditions that include travel restrictions and electronic monitoring
Hou Shengdong , 42, a citizen of the PRC. Hou was the vice director of the Chloride Process TiO2 Project Department for the Pangang Group Titanium Industry Co. Ltd. According to the superseding indictment, Hou and other Pangang Group employees requested DuPont blueprints as a condition of working on the Pangang Group project. Hou is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets and attempted economic espionage. A warrant has been issued for Hou ‘s arrest.
Robert Maegerle , 76, of Harbeson , Del. Maegerle was employed by DuPont as an engineer from 1956 to 1991. According to the superseding indictment, Maegerle had access to DuPont TiO2 trade secrets, including specific information regarding DuPont’s TiO2 facility at Kwan Yin, Taiwan. Maegerle is charged with conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets, attempted theft of trade secrets, conveying trade secrets and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Maegerle was arrested this morning in Harbeson .
Tze Chao , 77, of Newark, Del. Chao was employed by DuPont from 1966 to 2002. Chao is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage.
“The theft of America’s trade secrets for the benefit of China and other nations poses a substantial and continuing threat to our economic and national security,” Assistant Attorney Lisa General Monaco said. “We are committed to holding accountable anyone who robs American businesses of their hard-earned research. I thank the agents and prosecutors who helped bring about this important case.”
The case is being prosecuted by the Special Prosecutions and National Security Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco, and the Counterespionage Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. The investigation, which is ongoing, is being conducted by the FBI.
DuPont spokesman Dan Turner issued this statement late today:
“DuPont has taken, and will continue to take, aggressive measures to protect its proprietary, unique and confidential technologies for the benefit of our shareholders, employees and customers. We are disappointed that former DuPont employees working together with certain companies allegedly stole our proprietary technology. Upon learning of the apparent breach, we took prompt action and filed a civil suit. We also referred the theft of our technology to law enforcement.” “Because this matter is pending both criminally and civilly, we cannot comment further.”
The Chinese Embassy did not immediately return calls for comment.
TAIPEI, April 27, 2012 (AFP) – Taiwan’s top court has rejected an appeal by an ex-general sentenced to life in prison for spying for China, the toughest punishment meted out in an espionage case in decades, officials said Friday.
The supreme court made the final decision Thursday on the case of former major general Lo Hsien-che, who is also the highest-ranking official ever to be convicted of spying in Taiwan, defence officials said.
Lo, who was born in 1959, reportedly started working for China in 2004 and was suspected of handing over information relating to a project that gave the Taiwanese military some access to US intelligence systems.
According to Taiwanese media reports, he fell for a honey trap set by a female Chinese agent while stationed in Thailand and received about $1 million from China for his services.
The defence ministry did not specify what type of intelligence Lo gathered for Beijing or how much money he pocketed.
Taiwan and China have spied on each other ever since they split in 1949 at the end of a civil war. Beijing still regards the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
Since 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou became Taiwan’s president on a Beijing-friendly platform, the two sides have seen significant progress. He was reelected in January for a final four-year term.
But Ma has said Taiwan should strengthen its defences against Chinese espionage following a string of spy scandals showing intelligence gathering has continued despite warming ties.
WASHINGTON – An ominous pattern of economic espionage has cost American companies at least $13 billion in recent years as corporate spies sell everything from chemical secrets to military technology – with China being the most persistent perpetrator, according to federal authorities.
“It’s never been a more significant issue than it is right now,” said Frank Figliuzzi, in charge of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
Retired engineer David Wen-Chyu Liou, a naturalized U.S. citizen from China who worked for Dow Chemical Co. and lived for a time in Houston until he was convicted and sentenced to federal prison this year, was paid $600,000 for selling Dow’s chemical secrets to two Chi-nese companies.
“I’m not a Chinese spy,” Liou, who is to start his sentence in June, told the Houston Chronicle. “I am just an ordinary retiree, but they turned me into some kind of international spy.”
While employed by Dow for 27 years, Liou worked on the intricacies of things like Styrofoam, Napalm and Ziploc baggies. After retiring, he developed a business as a consultant helping his native China revolutionize its method of manufacturing chlorinated polyethylene, CPE, a polymer used for automotive hoses, electric cable jackets and vinyl siding.
But there was a problem: The world’s best-selling brand of CPE, Tyrin, belonged to Dow.
A Dow lawsuit against Liou and his business associates led to an FBI investigation, a federal indictment, a guilty verdict and a five-year prison sentence imposed in January.
“The U.S. intelligence community has characterized China as the most active and persistent perpetrator of economic espionage,” said Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who heads the Justice Department’s National Security Division, citing a publicly available 2011 U.S. intelligence report.
Of seven cases prosecuted under the main economic espionage statute in 2010, six involved a link to China, the report said.
Alerts by FBI
Spying today is “not just an effort to get diplomatic or military secrets as in days of yore, but corporate secrets for economic advantage,” Monaco said. For U.S. business, “there’s a demonstrable economic hit. I think it’s rightly viewed as a national security issue.”
To prevent more economic espionage, the FBI is alerting firms involved in vulnerable “pre-classified” research – cutting-edge high-tech innovations that might have a military or military-civilian application down the road – to be diligent.
“You walk in as the FBI and say, ‘Can I speak to your chief security officer?’ and they say, ‘We don’t have one,’ ” Figliuzzi said. “That’s where our focus is.”
Theft of trade secrets is just one front in a growing conflict between the U.S. and China over pirated movies and software, cheap knockoffs of brand-name goods and cyber-espionage – attempts to steal information by hacking into U.S. computer systems.
Ties to China
The economies of the U.S. and China are inextricably intertwined. The U.S. trade deficit with China was $295.5 billion in 2011, the highest on record. U.S. debt to China exceeds $1 trillion.
But U.S. law enforcement officials insist their hands are not tied, and prosecutions are on the rise. From 2010 to now, prosecutors brought at least 30 China-related cases involving economic espionage or violations of the law barring unlicensed export of militarily sensitive technology, according to Justice Department officials. Between 2007 and 2009, they brought 20.
The Liou case did not involve charges of overt Chinese government involvement. But testimony in Liou’s trial last year showed government-connected Chinese companies knew that Liou “had stolen technology from Dow, and that whetted their interest,” said Donald Cazayoux, the U.S. Attorney in Baton Rouge, La., who supervised the prosecution.
Liou himself insisted he never stole anything from Dow and that much of the technology Dow declared proprietary was widely known and publicly available. But one former Dow engineer testified Liou paid him to provide a process manual for Dow’s method of making CPE.
The engineer received $13,000 of a promised $50,000 to hand over the material. Liou’s $600,000 was wired to the U.S. by his brother-in-law in Hong Kong.
In China, the intermingling of government and industry is murky. Direct foreign government involvement is hard to prove. “But the smoke is there,” said Figliuzzi, who declined to speak specifically about China.
A common thread in these cases is desire by the scientist defendants, many of them Chinese-American immigrants, to help China advance economically. A case under way in San Francisco involves theft of a DuPont production process for titanium dioxide, which is used to whiten the centers of Oreo cookies as well as the trademark “M” on “MM’s” candies.
One scientist in the San Francisco case, Tze Chao, said in pleading guilty that executives from China “appealed to my Chinese ethnicity and asked me to work for the good of the PRC.”
‘Legal channels’
The Chinese Embassy did not return calls for comment, but China has always denied involvement in any effort to obtain trade secrets illegally.
“Theft of trade secrets should be addressed via appropriate legal channels in a fact-based manner, whether the perpetrator is in China or otherwise,” said John Frisbie, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, which represents some 240 U.S. companies doing business in China.
Three targeted Americans: a career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained – sometimes at gunpoint – and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.
The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security , the U.S. spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney told me, he was tasked to “see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world.”
Throughout the 1990s, the NSA developed a massive eavesdropping system code-named ThinThread, which, Binney says, maintained crucial protections on the privacy of U.S. citizens demanded by the U.S. Constitution. He recalled, “After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA,” as massive domestic spying became the norm. He resigned on Oct. 31, 2001.
Along with several other NSA officials, Binney reported his concerns to Congress and to the Department of Defense. Then, in 2007, as then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being questioned on Capitol Hill about the very domestic spying to which Binney objected, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house, guns drawn. They forced aside his son and found Binney, a diabetic amputee, in the shower. They pointed their guns at his head, then led him to his back porch and interrogated him.
Three others were raided that morning. Binney called the FBI raid “retribution and intimidation so we didn’t go to the Judiciary Committee in the Senate and tell them, ‘Well, here’s what Gonzales didn’t tell you, OK.’ ” Binney was never charged with any crime.
The filmmaker: Laura Poitras is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, whose recent films include “My Country, My Country,” about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and “The Oath,” which was filmed in Yemen. Since 2006, Poitras has been detained and questioned at airports at least 40 times. She has had her computer and reporter’s notebooks confiscated and presumably copied, without a warrant. The most recent time, April 5, she took notes during her detention. The agents told her to stop, as they considered her pen a weapon.
She told me: “I feel like I can’t talk about the work that I do in my home, in my place of work, on my telephone, and sometimes in my country. So the chilling effect is huge. It’s enormous.”
The hacker: Jacob Appelbaum works as a computer security researcher for the nonprofit organization the Tor Project (torproject.org), which is a free software package that allows people to browse the Internet anonymously, evading government surveillance. Tor was actually created by the U.S. Navy, and is now developed and maintained by Appelbaum and his colleagues. Tor is used by dissidents around the world to communicate over the Internet. Tor also serves as the main way that the controversial WikiLeaks website protects those who release documents to it. Appelbaum has volunteered for WikiLeaks, leading to intense U.S. government surveillance.
Appelbaum spoke in place of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, at a conference called Hackers on Planet Earth, or HOPE, as people feared Assange would be arrested. He started his talk by saying: “Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic and international surveillance. I’m here today because I believe that we can make a better world.” He has been detained at least a dozen times at airports: “I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall. … Another one held my wrists. … They implied that if I didn’t make a deal with them, that I’d be sexually assaulted in prison. … They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq War, the Afghan War, what I thought politically.”
I asked Binney if he felt that the NSA has copies of every email sent in the U.S. He replied, “I believe they have most of them, yes.”
Binney said two senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have expressed concern, but have not spoken out, as, Binney says, they would lose their seats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Meanwhile, the House on Thursday approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. Proponents of Internet freedom are fighting the bill, which they say will legalize what the NSA is secretly doing already.
Members of Congress, fond of quoting the country’s founders, should recall these words of Benjamin Franklin before voting on CISPA: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
