Fergie's Tech Blog

Chinese Grad Student Charged in Criminal Case

Josh Gerstein writes in The New York Sun:

An unusual criminal prosecution concerning a professor's assignment of a Chinese graduate student to work on an Air Force unmanned drone technology project is part of an ongoing federal crackdown on China's efforts to gain American technology through academic exchanges, business deals, and old-fashioned espionage, officials said.

The Justice Department's latest case, which originated at the University of Tennessee, is unprecedented, according to several analysts, because it rests on the notion that academic researchers effectively exported sensitive technical information by letting a foreign student have access to it.

"It's the first university-based deemed export criminal case I'm aware of," a Washington lawyer who writes a Web log on export control issues, R. Clifford Burns, said.

posted by Fergie @ 4/18/2008 11:38:00 AM