Engineer Guilty Of Attempted Espionage

A Chinese-American engineer could get up to 35 years for trying to funnel classified U.S. defense technology to China. A federal jury in California convicted 66-year-old Chi Mak, a naturalized citizen who worked for an Anaheim defense contractor, of conspiring to send top secret plans for submarine propulsion technology to Chinese authorities over several years.

Mak admits he copied thousands of pages of secret documents. But he still denies the feds' charge that he passed them to Beijing through his brother, and claims he didn't know making the copies was illegal. Mak was arrested in 2005 trying to board a plane to Hong Kong with CDs containing classified information. (More espionage stories.)