US National Security and Espionage

[RobDog888]

Can you believe that these people really think that they can get away with selling US Top Secrets. They just found out that some engineer that worked on the B2 Stealth Bomber has sold information to China and 7 other countries for several hundreds of thousands of dollars! What a fool! He could have got millions for the secrets concerning the technology for aircraft to aviod heat seaking missles.

And now just today the news is telling us that the FBI has arrrested 4 Chineese nationals that were caught trying to steal the quiet engine technology used in high-end submarines to avoid detection. They found a laundry list in the trash at the home of these 4 Chineese that shows the Chineese requested the info. Two were arrested at their home caught red-handed and the other two were arrested when trying to board a flight to China.

Why would anyone with half a brain think that they could get away with it! Now other countries may have the technology and use it for the worst.

Why do they keep hiring these security risks into sensitive positions? Guess they just dont learn.

[mendhak]

It's not like Chinese spies would be just in the US. You'll find them in Japan and India, for example. And you'll find American spies in China and Japan.

It's all part of the power-balancing games. All secrets are eventually shared. It's what prevents one country from blowing up another one.

Oh wait...

[RobDog888]

Yes, I agree that there are spies all over but if the secretes are soooo sensitive why dont they take precautions?Its like that saying "Fox guarding the hen house".

[mendhak]

I'm sure they try. But you must have heard of the secret CIA jails recently. They do take precautions, but we're all humans and are quite resourceful, wouldn't you agree?

[RobDog888]

Yes, but these four that were busted yesterday were so obvious that if they didnt get caught we would be the laughing stock of the world.

They walked out the doors of the company (L3 Communications I thinnk) with the CDs in hand and plain sight. Come on, you work on a Top Secrete project and you have the clearance, dont you think someone is going to say something about what your carring out of the building?

They even had some witness that seen them burning copies at their home. I'm not sure if the 2 that were busted trying to flee the country had the CD copies on them or not but everything points to espionage.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Look at all the spies that remained undiscovered for years. Had any of them quit at some point, they may NEVER have been discovered. Espionage has motivations that are not always simple. Thinking that they could get away with it may not have been a motivating factor.

[RobDog888]

No it wasnt. It was probably money. :rolleyes:

[mendhak]

Gotta love patriotism too.

[RobDog888]

I was just about to post that froggy.

Would any of you sell sensitive national top secrets if you were in the position? I sure wouldnt.

[demotivater]

There are spies everywhere, everywhere I tell ya. I'd imagine it's difficult to sort through what are real, and what are fabricated secrets smuggled out of the country and vice versa. Not a fun business to be in.

Btw, one of my favorite movies back in the day - The Falcon And The Snowman. Great, now I have to find it, haven't seen it in ages.

[dglienna]

Plans for a plane would be something that a few people would be able to understand to build a duplicate. But to build the guidance system, and stealthing systems, I think would require a whole different set of plans of one sort or another. I played a cat and mouse game in the past because I wanted to download the addressbook at work, and that wasn't supposed to happen. Groupwise was user-friendly, so I was able to export it until I left. Then when I came back a few months later, tried to repeat it. They added 3 times the amount of fields, so that the file became over a megabyte.
I found a computer with winzip on it, and still got it, but if that had been their most valuable secret, my first attempt at saving it would have alerted them that it was valuable. Their efforts to protect it still failed, though, if someone had a usb drive. :(

[demotivater]

If you look at Chinese military hardware, even their newest fighter jet - the majority of it is cloned from US technology. They either get it from the Russians, or they steal it from us. Either way, it kills you just the same. But, it's the bells and whistles that we have to protect. Like the Venezualen president threatening to give F16's we sold him to China or Russia, kind of a "see how you like that" move. Well, China and Russia probably know our F16's inside and out. It's the bells and whistles technology we have to protect, and only high level clearence people know about that stuff. Not that it doesn't get sold now and then, but I think we have a pretty good handle on it.

[mendhak]

Read this article about the next generation of warfare to be coming soon to space: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/cc71b07fd0837010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

You can be sure that this had been in the planning stage for quite some time now, and you'll see that this does have something to do with a small, but sudden, re-interest in going into outer space. This too, had to have been 'stolen' by their intelligence.

[moeur]

I think one of the reasons that the FBI doesn't push too hard here is that they remember the Wen Ho Lee case at Los Alamos. They bungled the investigation so badly that they ended up having to let him go. They were embarrassed and chastised by the political community and don't want to repeat that experience.

What pisses me off is that I have been turned down for jobs because I don't have a current security clearance and yet they are giving them to Chinese Nationals.