‘Army Reservist’ agent of Beijing: Justice Dept
Ex-NSA employee jailed
WASHINGTON, Sept 26, (Agencies): A Chinese citizen was arrested in Chicago on Tuesday on charges that he covertly worked for a highranking Chinese intelligence official to help try to recruit engineers and scientists, including some who worked as US defense contractors, the Justice Department said.
27, first came to the United States in 2013 to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and in 2016 enlisted in the US Army Reserves.
He appeared in a federal court in Chicago on one count of acting as an agent for the Chinese government. Laura Hoey, who is representing Ji in the case, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Speaking in Beijing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang he had “no understanding” of the situation. He did not elaborate.
According to the criminal complaint, Ji arrived in the United States from Beijing in August 2013 on a student visa, and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering in 2015.
Text messages reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that in November 2013, Ji was introduced to an intelligence officer from the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security, referred to in the complaint as “Intelligence Officer A,” by another person only identified as “Intelligence
Chaoqun
Officer B.”
They later met on several occasions in China, and initially the intelligence official told Ji he was a college professor, according to the complaint and affidavit filed by the FBI.
Ex-NSA employee jailed:
A former US National Security Agency employee was sentenced in a federal court in Baltimore on Tuesday to 5-1/2 years in prison, after pleading guilty last December to illegally taking classified information outside the spy agency, the US Justice Department said.
Nghia Hoang Pho, 68, of Ellicott City, Maryland, removed documents that contained classified national defense information and kept them at his home without authorization, the department said in a statement.
Pho will also be required to undergo three years of supervised release after completing his prison sentence. Pho worked in the NSA’s elite hacking unit and he removed what prosecutors described as “massive troves” of highly classified documents containing top-secret national defense information between 2010 and March 2015.
A US intelligence official previously has said on the condition of anonymity that Pho was the same NSA employee who had been identified in media reports for using Kaspersky Lab antivirus software on his home computer.
Some US officials have said software from the Moscow-based company allowed Russian intelligence agencies to pilfer sensitive secrets from the United States through Pho’s computer.
“As a result of his actions, Pho compromised some of our country’s most closely held types of intelligence, and forced NSA to abandon important initiatives to protect itself and its operational capabilities, at great economic and operational cost, said Robert Hur, the US Attorney for the District of Maryland, in a statement.