A court-martial for a 22-year-old Navy sailor charged with attempted espionage while he was stationed at Fort Bragg has been set for May 19.
Navy Reserve Intelligence Specialist Petty Officer 2nd Class Bryan Minkyu Martin of Mexico, N.Y., is accused of attempting to sell classified documents to an undercover FBI agent in November shortly before he was set to deploy to Afghanistan in support of the Army.
Martin enlisted in the Navy in 2006 and received a top secret-level security clearance the following year.
He has been charged with four counts of attempted espionage and 11 counts of mishandling classified information. Martin’s attorneys did not enter a plea at an arraignment hearing Thursday at Naval Station Norfolk, where he is being held in the brig. They also did not immediately decide whether to have Martin’s case decided by a judge or jury.
According to a warrant, Martin accepted a total of $3,500 from an undercover agent in exchange for dozens of pages of documents that were classified as either secret or top secret.
PARIS — A security agent for Renault has been charged with fraud and accused of inventing industrial espionage claims that led the French carmaker to wrongly suspect — and suspend — three executives, the state prosecutor said Monday.
Michel Balthazard, Bertrand Rochette and Matthieu Tenenbaum were suspended Jan. 11 after Renault said it had discovered signs of espionage, had proof the men received “funds from a foreign source” and accused them of selling “information strategic for the company.”
The executives had strongly denied the allegations and investigators could not verify them. Renault’s focus then shifted to a possible scam.
Preliminary charges of “organized fraud” were filed Sunday against Dominique Gevrey, once employed by the Defence Ministry intelligence service and now a member of Renault’s security service, prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin told reporters Monday.
Gevrey had been detained Friday at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport as he prepared to board a flight for Guinea, and has since been jailed.
“Renault is perhaps not a victim of indelicate employees but of fraud,” Marin said.
He said foreign accounts that were alleged to have been held by the three executives, notably in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, do not exist.
After Gevrey’s arrest, Renault quickly convened an extraordinary board meeting and sent a deep apology to the three wrongly accused employees.
Top company chiefs, CEO Carlos Ghosn, and Patrick Pelata, chief operating officer, “acknowledge the serious personal harm that they (the employees) and their families have suffered,” a company statement said, adding that “reparations (will) be made” and “their honour in the public eye (will) be restored.”
Investigators in the French intelligence service found a series of clues the prosecutor contends pointed to Gevrey — the only person in contact with an alleged source who furnished bank information implicating the three executives. That information turned out to be false.
Banking information Gevrey furnished in the 2009 firing of an executive in an unrelated case also was false, Marin said.
“Everything he provided is false or non-existent,” Marin said.
Gevrey’s lawyer, Jean-Paul Baduel, insisted that his client is innocent, saying in an interview that he is “nothing but a little soldier.”
Renault had launched an internal investigation into allegations the three executives had “deliberately and consciously threatened” company assets, after receiving an anonymous letter more than four months earlier denouncing the men. The allegations centred on Renault’s electric car program, in which Renault and partner Nissan had invested $4 billion.
The scandal, which Renault made public in January, led French Industry Minister Eric Besson to openly talk of “economic warfare” being waged on one of France’s leading industrial giants.
Renault filed a criminal complaint on Jan. 13 “against persons unknown” — for acts constituting organized industrial espionage, corruption, breach of trust, theft and concealment — after the carmaker said it had discovered “serious misconduct detrimental to the company” and in particular to its “strategic, technological and intellectual assets.”
The company’s chief operating officer, in an interview at the time with French newspaper Le Monde, had accused an “organized, international network” of obtaining information on its flagship electric car program, including its architecture, costs and economic model. Sensitive, proprietary technological information on Renault’s electric cars had not been compromised by the espionage, Pelata said in January.
Renault’s Ghosn said on the French TV channel TF1 on Jan. 23 that “we have the certitude” and “multiple” proofs of the alleged espionage, although Renault never disclosed any evidence to back up its complaint, saying such information was reserved for investigators.
But by early March, doubt was growing, and Pelata spoke of a possible “manipulation.” The course of the investigation changed dramatically Friday, with Gevrey’s arrest.
A Deerfield man is accused of trying to export government secrets to the Chinese. But his attorney, James Tunick, said Monday that federal prosecutors are mistaken.
“He’s as American as a summer baseball game,” Tunick said.
Sixing “Steve” Liu, 47, was arrested March 8 on charges that he was exporting military secrets to China.
He appeared in federal court Monday, where a judge set a detention hearing for Tuesday.
Liu, who works for a tech firm in New Jersey, traveled to Shanghai, China, in November.
When he returned to the United States, he was detained at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, and authorities searched his laptop.
They allegedly found photos of military weapons systems, hundreds of sensitive documents from the company, as well as “internal communications, analyses, data, test results, schematics, images and security protocols,” charging papers say.
The company, which was not named, develops precision navigations systems for the U.S. Defense Department. Liu was not allowed to take information off the premises of his company, according to charges.
Tunick said his client was attending an international conference in China that had nothing to do with the military and may have had work-related content on a laptop because he was finishing projects.
Liu attended the International Workshop on Innovation and Commercialization of Micro Nanotechnology, which took place over the dates that Liu traveled to China, Tunick said.
“There were no military issues discussed at the conference,” Tunick said.
Liu has a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and has done work with Chrysler, Ford and John Deere, Tunick said.
While he works in New Jersey, Liu, a permanent resident, lives in Deerfield with his family, including three children — one of whom attends Northwestern University.
Liu came to the United States in 1993 after receiving his education in China, according to court papers.
Prosecutors said Liu could face more than six years in prison if convicted.
Enterprises are not taking the threat of cyber espionage seriously enough, and many have not taken adequate steps to prevent an attack, according to research firm Ovum.
In a new study, the technology analyst claimed that cyber espionage is a major threat to enterprises. But despite this, it has been overlooked, leaving many vulnerable.
Graham Titterington, author of the report and Ovum principal analyst, said: “The threat of cyber espionage must be addressed by enterprises as it is as relevant to them as it is to national security organizations.
“Cyber criminals are graduating from stealing credit cards and banking credentials to targeting corporate plans and proprietary information. They want valuable information such as product and technology blueprints, customer lists, or information that can be used to embarrass or disadvantage a victim.
“Almost every organization has sensitive information that would damage it if it were to be leaked out; however, many have overlooked cyber espionage in their preoccupation with preventing the theft of financial data. This needs to change, and enterprises need to wake up to the danger posed or risk losing valuable information and having to deal with the consequences.”
Cyber espionage is usually aimed at key individuals within an organization, who are sent ‘spear phishing’ emails containing malicious links or attachments that infect their machines. The criminals then use malware to identify assets, decrypt login details and steal the target information.
Titterington commented: “The home computer networks and personal lives of key individuals may be the weakest part in the corporate security defenses. Personal information may reveal passwords and other credentials, and individuals may be susceptible to blackmail.”
The report advised enterprises to increase their awareness of cyber espionage, restrict the distribution of sensitive information, vet users who have access to high-value information, protect data held on third-party sites and conduct a risk analysis, including mobile devices and removable media.
The report also warnd enterprises that holding large amounts of data can increase the risk of falling victim to cyber espionage, and they should look to minimize volumes.
Titterington added: “Every piece of stored data and every copy of this data is a potential leakage incident as it gives spies more potential targets to attack. The increasing volume of data makes it harder to manage the entire data estate.
“The growth in data volumes should be examined critically. At minimum, organizations should make more use of shared data infrastructure and services so individual users can be discouraged from creating their own copies.” — Newsbytes.ph
French prosecutors pressed fraud charges against a Renault SA security manager and sidelined the carmaker’s espionage claims that led to the dismissal of three senior executives.
The Paris prosecutor opened a formal investigation into “organized fraud” and recommended that Dominique Gevrey be kept in detention after two days of questioning, said a Paris court official, who asked not to be identified in accordance with policy. The probe will not address Renault’s original spying claims, which remain on file until the case concludes, the official said.
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“Renault wants the whole truth to come out and will repair any injustice that has been done,” company spokeswoman Frederique Le Greves said by telephone, declining to comment further until the Paris Chief Prosecutor publishes a statement on the case, expected tomorrow.
Renault dismissed upstream development chief Michel Balthazard and two other executives in January after its internal probe concluded they had received payments from Chinese companies via foreign accounts. The company paid 250,000 euros ($347,000) for information about the accounts without knowing who supplied it, company attorney Jean Reinhart said March 9.
Chief Operating Officer Patrick Pelata told Le Figaro last week that he may have been misled over the evidence, pledging that Renault would hold management accountable “right up to me” if the three executives were cleared of selling secrets.
Consistently DeniedBalthazard, his subordinate Bertrand Rochette and deputy electric-car program chief Matthieu Tenenbaum have consistently denied the allegations since their dismissal in January, when Renault lodged its espionage complaint with prosecutors. The three have also filed criminal defamation claims.
“We’ve said from the start that our client is a victim of slander, as well as collateral damage inflicted by Renault’s dysfunctional management,” Balthazard’s lawyer Pierre-Olivier Sur said by telephone. “Renault has posed as a victim, first of espionage and now of fraud, but the only victims here are our client and his co-accused.”
Tenenbaum “is waiting to hear what Renault has to propose” and doesn’t rule out returning to work, his lawyer Thibault de Montbrial said. “First of all we’re waiting for an official declaration of his innocence, since the prejudice he has suffered increases with every day that passes.”
Defending the carmaker’s espionage claims in January, Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn said he had personally overseen the internal probe and its “multiple” findings against the three executives. “If there were no certainties about this, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” he said on TF1 television.
Renault last week publicly ordered Gevrey and his colleague Marc Tixador to reveal the source of the banking information, after police failed to find any trace of the alleged accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, where legal authorities cooperated with the investigation.
Tixador and Renault Security Director Remi Pagnie were also questioned by police over the weekend and released without charge overnight, the court official said today. Gevrey, a former French intelligence agent, was arrested on March 11 at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport as he prepared to board a flight to an African country, the official said.
