![]() Members of an FBI Evidence Response Team aboard a Department of Defense vessel assigned to recover material from the Chinese spy balloon on in February 2023. Navy to collect, an operation that could be hampered by weather delays. The official said the balloon is likely part of a huge aerial spy program operated by the Chinese military that has targeted more than 40 countries on five continents with similar high-altitude surveillance balloons.įBI officials familiar with the operation to recover and examine evidence from the balloon said Thursday that much of the equipment remains underwater and will require dive teams from the bureau and U.S. ![]() The balloon had equipment that was "clearly for intelligence surveillance," including "multiple antennas" that were "likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications," according to a statement by a senior State Department official. shot down over the Atlantic Ocean last weekend carried high-tech equipment capable of collecting communications signals and other sensitive information, the U.S. They (Valspar) would have lost their entire company.Washington - The Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. The only reason he got caught is that somebody noticed an anomaly and notified FBI. “He downloaded the entire paint formula library, reorganized it on a separate hard drive and bought a one-way ticket to Beijing,” Halligan said. They have stellar resumes, and then work their way up as trusted employees.”Īnother example of that, he said, came in 2010 at Valspar Corp., a paint manufacturer, “where every paint formula is a trade secret.”Īccording to the FBI, David Yen Lee, a chemist for Valspar, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for stealing company trade secrets valued at up to $20 million as he prepared to go to work for a competitor in China. “You have the top grads from tech schools in China, who then go to the U.S., get master’s degrees and then apply to U.S. Halligan also said Jin’s case and others show that Chinese economic espionage is not necessarily occurring only from thousands of miles away via the Internet, but is frequently done by company insiders. Today, Motorola has been split in two, and Huawei is No. 1 telecom in the world, and Huawei didn’t even exist until 1987. “At a high level, what you can say is that Motorola was the No. “How many other times has this happened?” he said. That suit was eventually settled for undisclosed terms.īut Mark Halligan, a partner at FisherBroyles, who represented Motorola in the suit, noted that while Jin’s attempted theft was prevented, she was only moments away from boarding the flight to China, and that there are likely many other cases where economic spies haven’t been caught. She was also named as a co-defendant in a civil lawsuit later brought by Motorola against China’s Huawei telecoms group over the alleged theft of trade secrets. Jin was convicted in 2012 of stealing trade secrets, sentenced to four years in prison and fined $20,000, but escaped conviction on the more serious crime of violating the federal Economic Espionage Act – stealing the information to benefit a foreign government. The company said the intellectual property was worth about $600 million. The screeners found about $31,000 in cash plus more than 1,200 confidential Motorola documents stored on a laptop, four external hard drives, thumb drives and other devices.
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