Posted on 03/28/2007 8:38:02 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Prosecutors in the trial of US engineer Chi Mak said Wednesday that secret US submarine technology information he had tried to smuggle to China was aimed at helping it take control of Taiwan.
Assistant US attorney Greg Staples said the sensitive data on a computer disk Mak tried to provide China through his brother included information on Quiet Electric Drive, a technology under development to make submarines silent.
China's navy "is supportive of the re-taking of Taiwan (and) the chief impediment to retaking Taiwan is the 7th fleet of the US Navy," Staples said as the federal trial in Santa Ana, California, got underway.
The Chinese navy particularly needs to be able to find US submarines, he said.
"And that is why the Quiet Electric Drive is important."
But Mak's lawyer said he was only sharing information with other scientists and engineers.
"It's a case about technology exchange," attorney Marilyn Bednarski told the jury.
"Scientists and engineers get information from each other and work in a sharing way," she said.
"If someone shares something that's not export-controlled or if someone does and doesn't know it, it's not a violation of the law."
The 66-year-old engineer, born in Guangdong, China, was arrested in 2005 with his wife at his California home.
He had given an encrypted disk with the submarine and other data to his brother Tai Mak, who was arrested with his wife at the same time as they tried to board a flight in Los Angeles to China. The disk was found hidden in luggage, Staples said.
Tai Mak's son Billy was then indicted last year related to his help in encrypting the disk.
Chi Mak is charged with illegally acting as an agent of China in the United States in exporting weapons-related technology without an appropriate export license. He is also charged with making false statements.
But Mak, who has denied the charges, has not been charged with espionage, because the information on the disk was not officially classified.
In the trial Wednesday, prosecutor Staples said Mak, who worked at the engineering firm and defense contractor Power Paragon in Anaheim, California, rejected the defense claim that because the data was not classified, Mak was free to exchange it with the Chinese.
Staples said that Mak had been given intensive instruction in how to handle both classified and sensitive information, and that he should have applied first to the State Department for an export license.
"Barely nothing on these disks could be sent to China," he said.
But Bednarski said the government was exaggerating Mak's actions.
"The case is about an alarmist over-reaction. The case is about misconceptions and prejudice," she said.
Bednarski said Mak worked only on the earliest phase of the quiet submarine system, that it has never been tested, and that he planned to retire before the system design was completed.
"He was not an agent for the Chinese government."
GQ ping
...and to think all they had to do was donate to the klintoon campaign.
If it was nothing but an innocent 'technology exchange', why did the perp feel it necessary to encrypt the disk?
If there was nothing suspicious going on, why all the efforts to smuggle out the data then?
He's a spy, hang the sumb!tch.
Oh, so it's like Open Source meets the Military Industrial Complex? Neat...
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