Chinese Spies on the Rise?

April 3, 2008

Today, my friend Edwin pointed me to this article
from the Washington Post. I am not sure if it's the same people. If
it's not, then damn, them "Chinese spies" must be taking over America.

Excerpts from this news article read,

Some of those secrets may have been obtained with the help of Mak, a
67-year-old electrical engineer who became a naturalized U.S. citizen
in 1985 along with his wife, Rebecca Chiu Mak. The two settled in
Southern California, where Mak eventually accepted a job with Power
Paragon, a defense contractor that specialized in advanced naval
propulsion technology. In 1996, Mak was given a security clearance at
the "secret" level, which gave him access to sensitive engineering
details for U.S. ships and submarines.

and

Mak, who testified in his defense at his six-week trial, denied he was
a spy and said the information he copied was available from
nonclassified sources on the Internet. Defense witnesses said that
much, if not all, of the documents acquired by Mak were not officially
classified, though transmitting them to China was prohibited under U.S.
export laws. Mak's attorney, Ronald O. Kaye, said his client was a
scapegoat for other U.S. intelligence failures and a "symbol of the
government's cold war against the Chinese."

Hello? Does anyone else find this scary? For those that knows about what happened to Wen Ho Lee's and have read his book, "My Country Versus Me," co-written with Helen Zia, you can practically swap out their names and their stories would sound ridiculously similar.

Wen
Ho Lee was lucky that he had so many people speaking up for him and
trying to prove his innocence. But what about the people mentioned in
this article? Do they have people fighting for them too?

I don't know about this. 

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Contributor: 

Lisa Lee

Publisher

Lisa Lee works in User Operations at Facebook, and has more than five years of nonprofit experience in marketing and communications for multicultural arts and cultural organizations.

Comments

Comments

I am extremely familiar with the Wen Ho Lee case...and in my (disclaimer follows) personal, non-government worker opinion, he was dirty. The only reason he wasn't charged with espionage is because the FBI and other agencies screwed up the investigation so badly, he would never have been found guilty. He would have been kinda like the OJ Simpson of espionage.
now you have my interest. why do you think he's dirty? i think it was interesting that the us thought he was tightly connected with china when he was born in taiwan and had only been to china twice for scholarly conferences. but i am interested to learn more of your personal opinion.