Last week in Santa Ana, CA, jurors convicted engineer Chi Mak of conspiring to export U.S. defense technology secrets to China, including data on an electronic propulsion system that could make submarines virtually undetectable: Engineer guilty of trying to leak U.S. military secrets. Mak was also found guilty of being an unregistered foreign agent, attempting to violate export control laws and making false statements to the FBI. He now faces up to 35 years in prison when he is sentenced September 10.
The government accused Mak of taking thousands of pages of documents from his defense contractor employer and giving them to his brother, who passed them along to Chinese authorities over a number of years. While Mak acknowledged during the trial that he copied classified documents and kept copies in his office, he maintained he didn't realize at the time that making the copies was illegal. His defense team still believes he's innocent. Regardless of if he's guilty or innocent, a spy or just stupid, you know that this conviction is going to fuel the racist rhetoric of some kind of idiot out there. Sneaky Chinese spies among us, they'll say! Shut the hell up, I say.
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