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Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students
Hugh Pickens writes "Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university's Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. 'The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,' says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. 'We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.' During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. 'This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,' said Roth. 'And it has probably not helped this country, either.'"
Presumably because the students weren't the ones who signed the reams of paperwork acknowledging they were being given access to sensitive data and shouldn't be sharing it with foreign nationals. Unless procedures have changed a lot, you don't get legitimate access to such information without being told ad nauseum who you should and shouldn't be sharing it with and what the penalties are for breaking those rules.
He knew he wasn't supposed to do it, he was warned not to do it, he did it anyway. He pled guilty.
If he didn't read his contract that's his problem. I also find it very unlikely.
Why is this on slashdot?
Should have been 40 years, idiot. Just bringing the laptop to China is shear stupidity.
Let's see, he signed a contract saying he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals, then he shared it with forign nationals. Now he says "he was unaware that hiring the graduate students (to do work in the project) was a violation of his contract"? He's either too stupid to be a professor, or he's lying.
Have fun in prison bub.
You can't work on a top-secret project without signing very serious agreements with Uncle Sam. It just doesn't happen. Therefore he knew damned well he wasn't allowed to share this information, but did so anyway. What the fuck did he expect? What the fuck would *you* expect? If you expected to get away with something like that without consequence, you're a fucking moron.
while it is certainly unfortunate that they got sensitive data - the violation of the ITAR was the professors alone and I am glad he was found guilty - aside from the obvious security issues giving away technology weakens our economic and business advantages as well - part of doing business in this country is playing by the rules - if you don't want to play by these rules, then work on non ITAR technologies instead
"Openness", both ideologically and in the FOSS sense, forms one of the core requirements of successful academia.
I don't blame or absolve the professor - He had a contract, and I suppose the legal details of this boil down to a matter of contract law (though I most certainly do have a problem with prison time rather than monetary damages for breach of contract). But I do blame both his university and the government itself.
I blame the university for undermining any sense of credibility by selling out to the highest bidder at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as their peers all because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed in our Cheerios.
And I blame the government for foisting their homework onto a domain that largely considers secrecy either beneath consideration or outright contemptible. Don't want foreign students to have access to military projects? Simple - Give those projects to standard military-industrial contractors familiar with paranoid levels of obfuscation and mistrust such as Lockheed, Grumman, Boeing or the like. And if they do decide to tap academia for parts of their research, I blame them for not taking care to prevent any one group from having "enough" information to do anything useful with.
You don't spank a baby for giggling at butterflies, and you don't hold it accountable if you give it a gun and someone gets hurt. Simple as that.
Forget the prison sentence, I want to learn about the "plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones". (This is a tech site, remember?) So, how do these work?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
I work on NATO military things.
They're pretty clear what you can talk about and with whom. Moreover to your point, if someone takes a strong interest in your work, you shall document and report it as a potential security breach.
Roth is getting a pretty light slap with four years.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Why are we even talking about this? The prof was either a complete idiot (and should put his Ph.D. back in the cereal box he got it from) or intentionally broke the law as some act of defiance. What is unclear? He knows he's working on a "secret" project used by the military. He probably got told 6 ways through Sunday he can't talk about it. And he goes to jail because he did what he was told to not do. To say he should not get jail time, or that he's from an academic world, defies logic and COMMON SENSE. Gee, this is a secret military project, I think I'll not only take the data/laptop to China, but I'll share it with Chinese and Iranian students. Gimme a break. It makes no sense. It's much more likely, IMHO, that he was giving a one-finger salute to the US. Even if he weren't, he's a moron, and ignorance of the law is not a valid defence.
That worked really well in 1914!
The reason for classifying it is that, without the DoD's extra work, it's difficult to know which ideas really work. There are lots of ideas coming out of academia that look great on paper but won't actually work due to engineering limitations or overlooked variables. If you know which are worth investigating further (because someone else has already done the feasibility analysis) then your R&D costs are much lower. Considering the fact that modern war basically boils down to economics, it's a legitimate concern.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The professor did the world a favor. Sharing defense technology means conflicting powers are on equal strength and are less likely to go to war.
My god, I think he really believes that. What makes people less likely to go to war is having wealth and prosperity ... something to lose, in other words. Giving away advanced military technology just makes it that much easier for a nation that has imperialistic tendencies to try and make something of it. You really need to have a better grasp of history than what you're displaying here.
The unfortunate truth is that being merely at technological parity, militarily-speaking, is not sufficient to dissuade some people from going to war anyways. You have to have demonstrably superior capabilities to have any chance at a deterrent effect. And that isn't counting the pathological types who simply don't care if you kill them or not so long as they can take you with them. Regardless, you want your enemies to know, beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that if they try anything they're going to take an awful pasting. And that means making damn sure they can't equal your ability to wage war without making at least the same investment. Granted, that also means that you shouldn't give them too much reason to want to make that investment, but in either case you don't make it easy for them.
So far as I'm concerned this "well, heck, they're going to get it anyways" attitude is damn near treasonous. I hope that our military R&D types don't share your relative ignorance, because we need to deny our enemies access to our most significant advances. Put it this way: it cost us a lot of money and time: we should see to it that it costs them the same. If it takes China or any other hostile power 'x" number of years to equal our current capabilities, well, that's 'x' years of relative peace we're going to have, because they won't be tempted to try anything. Put them on equal footing, and there's no telling what might happen.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Big defense contractors have done this stuff and nothing happens to them, maybe a little fine. Presidents "authorizing" missile guidance tech transfers to china..zip, no impeachment or charges (example:clinton/loral) Supposedly allied nations (Israel) caught shopping mil gear we gave them, some missile, to china..nothing happens to them. Chinese and other foreign students all over every research establishment/university in the US..every single possible "crown jewel" tech and sensitive "IP" that exists...nothing, totally legal. A subsidiary of cheney's/halliburton, doing business in iran well past the so called embargo..nothing happens to them.
The professors big crime? He isn't a connected fatcat, that's all.