This is a witch hunt.

The FBI is using a trumped up charge to perform illegal search and seizure:

1) According to Bo Jiang’s friends (source MITBBS, an overseas scholar message board), Jiang went to NASA with his professor. His boss died in a car accident and his employment contract was not renewed. Without valid work visa Jiang had to go back to China (and there’s no reason to buy a round trip ticket.)

2) The lying to investigator charge is bogus. Jiang was questioned during a layover, and he described to the FBI what he had with him in the carry on. Now the FBI is charging him because he didn’t mention what was in the checked luggage? It’s not even omission based on the context of the conversation.

3) There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation why Jiang had two SIM cards – he canceled his cell phone contract and was using a prepaid SIM card for the last few weeks in the States.

NASA employees and contractors travel overseas with their laptops all the time.  Every laptop has FDE, donchaknow, and we’ve all been background checked out the wazoo.

Seriously, all sarcasm aside (and there was meant to be a lot there, based on NASA losing ten of thousands of employees PII recently, and losing the HSPD-12 privacy battle at the Supreme Court), NASA employees/contractors travel with their laptops overseas all the time.  My boss would be quite disappointed if I was unable to answer email even on a personal trip.  It’s not against policy, though they would like for you to take a clean loaner, especially to designated countries (and I probably would to China, but not to Germany).  But given that that’s a huge PITA and time sink, and the loaners frankly suck (years old and banged up), most people just take their laptops to most places.

Most of the work that NASA does is not classified, and only ITAR restricted because Congress panicked at an earlier time and made everything ITAR restricted and export controlled.  Most of what NASA does with your tax dollars is meant to be published.

I think it was Hitchcock who said, “If you and your wife go on a cruise, book a return ticket for two, no matter your intentions.”  It’s a poor spy, or spy handler who doesn’t know that.

Maybe because there are a lot of smart, talented, highly-educated Chinese nationals who want jobs? And because Chinese nationals are not unique in their vulnerability to blackmail?

Just to be pedantic, Dulles is in Virginia, about 30 miles outside D.C. But yes, in the D.C. area.

Those who should be arrested are those who hired a Chinese national and granted access to sensitive data and/or equipment, as well as they who set up the trap to accuse him of impropriety.

They must prove that there was no communication issue when he was arrested for admitting he has various electronica media like all people do.

I suggest American spies in China should beware of fair responses from their host.

I have a feeling that this guy is an idiot, informant, or both.

He might just be an idiot who thought bringing a NASA computer to China would be a good idea so that he could get some work done.  In that case, he gets a firm slap on the wrists, gets fired for a security breach, and the story is over.  

He also might be an informant. He might have gotten the job naturally enough, and then through either patriotic duty, coercion, or bribes decided to sell information.  If he turns out to be an informant, the value of busting him publicly is that the US gets to wring its hands about hackers and spies.  It is tit-for-tat point scoring.

I personally think he might be both an idiot and an informer who was trying to passing on unsolicited information.  I have a really hard time swallowing that an informant with an actual Chinese spy handler would let him jump on an airplane with a NASA laptop.  It would be a thousand times easier to just hand the laptop off, toss it in a diplomats bags, and call it a day.

He sends some e-mail to his cousin about how he is going to totally score some cash or a job in the Chinese space program by bringing them stolen information.  The feds are reading his mail and conclude that he has no actual contact with Chinese officials.  They nab him on the way out publicly because there is nothing to gain by doing it quietly.  Better to call him a spy (even if China never asked for it) and score a few PR points than just toss him out of the country and calling it a day.

I flew halfway across the country a few months after 9/11, to pick up a car; that one-way ticket definitely got me extra scrutiny, and I’m about as obviously harmless as they come.

It’s weird that we’ve gone so crazy with Manning and Guantanamo, when we have a history of treating spies like normal criminals in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_people_convicted_of_spying_for_the_Soviet_Union

edit: Manning is innocent, btw :)

The fact we know about this guys suggests he is just a schlub.  A poor, doomed totally fucked schlub, since once you have been labelled there is no turning back. 

Just because his name is Buttle and not Tuttle…

With Kerry going to China soon, and with “cyber-espionage” on his docket of things to discuss, I’d guess that this might be a case of the latter.

Multiple US government departments would be sitting on this, and there’d be a wall of secrecy on this guy five miles thick. That we’re hearing rumours about him forgetting to report 2 laptops instead of 1 (very easily seen in airport xrays) suggests to be that they’ve got zilch, and it’s just a matter of milking the appearance of an incident for party political advantage.

Bold prediction: there will turn out to be insufficient evidence or he’ll be exonerated, but he’ll get fired anyway, but by then the news cycle will have moved on and no one will care about following up. You’ll see him referred to again a few years hence in the blogosphere and congress as a proven example of a spy, and so an urban legend is born.

I asked what happened and he said “They were acquired by the US government.”

I asked “What does “acquired” mean?”

He said “Let’s just say that the Men In Black are real.”

I don’t see a problem with stopping a foreign national who has taken a NASA laptop abroad in the past, asking what electronic gear he’s got on himself after he buys a one way ticket abroad, and then arresting him after finding that there’s an additional laptop he didn’t mention.

It might turn out to be an innocent mistake, but it’s worth investigating.