Chung, a 72 year old engineer from Orange, California was charged with eight counts of economic espionage in 2008. According to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice, Chung, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had secret clearance for work on the U.S. Space Shuttle program that he performed as an employee for both Rockwell International and Boeing. According to the indictment, Chung took trade secrets related to both the Space Shuttle and the C-17 military transport aircraft and Delta IV rocket and attempted to pass it on to the People’s Republic of China. According to published reports, Chung – who retired in 2002, but continued to work as a contractor for Boeing until 2006 — stored more than 300,000 pages of sensitive documents on computers in his home. Chung was convicted on six counts of economic espionage and related charges in July, 2009. In sentencing Chung, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney said the government still didn’t know what information – if any – he had passed to China over more than three decades. Chung claims he is innocent and had stored the documents to write a book. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
(Photos via peterkaminski‘s Flickr photostream / United States Department of Justice)
