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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.'"
droned on and on too but I wouldn't send them to prison for it!
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?
I had no idea that the US Military would get pissed if I shared details about how to build flying robots with people from Iran and China! I swear it!
Best Slashdot comment ever
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.
and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work
Did George Lucas get offspring in Iran or something?
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
I'm not entirely surprised by either the sentence, or the seeming lack of security consciousness on the part of the professor and possibly his school. When working on defense-related work it's always best to treat sensitive material with the respect it deserves - in many cases there's no need to go overboard with encryption, physical security, or whatnot, but reasonable measures (e.g., not bringing the Goddamned laptop overseas) should always be taken.
However, from what I heard, the project Dr. Roth was working on wasn't entirely black-ops sort of stuff - he was merely integrating technology previously developed by himself (and others) under funding not remotely related to defense.
"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.
OK, so I'm in Canada, and everyone knows that Canadians are slackers when it comes to security (sarcasm for the humor challenged).
The prof had to be ignoring the rules deliberately. The paperwork I had to sign required the details of every student working on the project. They didn't have to be security cleared but they sure did have to be Canadian or American. There was no chance to skip over that clause in the contract; a security guy read it to me out loud and made damn sure I understood what it meant.
My experience with US security clearance was exactly as you describe. I literally had 8 hours of reading/signing documents and had to sign at least 3 that told me explicitly who I could and could not talk to about what I was doing. Each was read to me after I read it myself, and they went line by line to make sure I understood it. Roth is completely full of crap if he claims he didn't know. The process left me with the distinct impression that if I even had a hint that I shouldn't be talking about it or wasn't sure, I should keep my big mouth shut. The funny part is, I'm not sure I actually saw anything classified during my stint. Not that I'm going to be talking about any of it, because I'm just not sure, but still. Doubly funny was debriefing, that also took 8 hours where they went over everything again that I had gone through when I received clearance in the first place.
...until I Googled "plamsa actuator" and found a relevant article ranked number one...
http://www.engr.uky.edu/~jdjacob/fml/research/plasma/index.html
...and a bunch of other good articles listed after it.
Does the DOD think they not have the Internet in China and Iran?
Just by reading this article, you can get a good sense of the concept, which has to do with creating high-speed, non-mechanical aircraft control surfaces via boundary layer manipulation. Is this really that big of a secret?
I'll post more on this after I investigate the thump on the roof and see who's at the front door.
that's just for grunts. Once you get really senior, you can show classified documents to press photographers in public
The first time I obtained security clearance, we were all told that not only were we barred for life from talking about any classified data without permission, but that they would keep the physical piece of paper that we signed stating we understood all this for at least 75 years.
They want to preclude the possibility that you will EVER think about claiming you didn't know the restrictions.
SirWired
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.
Since he seems to have been convicted under the EAR, which is a set of regulations having to do with rendering technical aid to foreigners, and not the ITAR, which is a set of regulations about exporting actual objects (such as munitions or rocket-control thingies), there is very close parsing required of the law to figure out what is Right or not.
After all, the material he distributed wasn't classified, and in principle the 1st Amendment to the U.S. constitution allows you to say whatever you want to whomever you want (provided that you aren't directly inciting a crime, or lying, or distributing classified information). It's especially interesting because most violations of the EAR never get to trial -- they are generally settled by defense contractors who are eager to make good so that the flow of federal dollars doesn't dry up -- so this is likely to be a strong legal precedent. In this case, as in so many, my guess is that he had the standard language in his federal contract -- essentially "I agree to abide by ITAR and EAR" -- so that the regulations can be enforced via contract law even if the ITAR and EAR are eventually found to be unconstitutional if applied to general citizens.
The most scary situation involving EAR/ITRAR is that I know of no legal precedent at all for the EAR in the case of a gifted, privately funded enthusiast just screwing around -- but it applies to many things that even hobbyists do now. If you take an interest in (say) cheap image stabilization systems or inertial guidance of vehicles, and share your work with some of your friends down at the rocket club (who happen to be exchange students from the Pacific Rim), the regulations say that you are liable for millions of dollars in fines and many years of jail time -- even though those technologies are well within the range of gifted college students today (and affordable for an enthusiast to tinker with). I have no idea what the outcome of such a case would be -- only that the legal bills would be immense and the hypothetical hobbyist's life would be put on hold for years, if the Feds decided to take an interest.
The rules have changed. It is now illegal to "export" ITAR data, that is "sensitive" defense technology to foreign persons. However, this data is not classified. You can tell it to any and every US Person: your friends, family, neighbors, convenience store clerk. SO long as they are a US Person and also know not to tell it to Foreign National, they can know it.
However, telling it to a Canadian can get you sent to prison.
The rules have changed. And it's damaging to critical industries and research institutions.
ShoutingMan.com
If this is ITAR and not classified data, then there may not be the signing of voluminous forms. ITAR just is. If your company is on top of it, then the staff will get powerpoint briefings about it. But there aren't signatures and forms and etc.
And everyone is liable regardless of whether they've heard of ITAR, had the powerpoint briefings or don't even work in defense industries. If you, say, bought a bulletproof vest from eBay and then traveled to Mexico you'd be guilty of an ITAR violation. (real example)
ShoutingMan.com
And this is how ITAR is damaging to our national security. As the DOE and DOD are major funding agencies at universities and national labs, we are now creating a research system that prevents foreign nationals from participating. And since they are a large percentage of our grad students, that's a major problem. It subsequently makes the US a less enticing place for the skilled students we'd like to immigrate here.
ShoutingMan.com
My experience with US security clearance was exactly as you describe. I literally had 8 hours of reading/signing documents and had to sign at least 3 that told me explicitly who I could and could not talk to about what I was doing. Each was read to me after I read it myself, and they went line by line to make sure I understood it. Roth is completely full of crap if he claims he didn't know. The process left me with the distinct impression that if I even had a hint that I shouldn't be talking about it or wasn't sure, I should keep my big mouth shut. The funny part is, I'm not sure I actually saw anything classified during my stint. Not that I'm going to be talking about any of it, because I'm just not sure, but still. Doubly funny was debriefing, that also took 8 hours where they went over everything again that I had gone through when I received clearance in the first place.
I used to have a top secret clearance and my experience was nothing close to yours. I simply had to take an oath and sign a one page document. My debriefing was even shorter. In fact, now that I think about it, my oath was taken when my secret clearance was granted. I did nothing further when my T/S went through.
My point is simply that this guy may have had an experience similar to mine and from the summary, (unless I skimmed too fast) it doesn't sound like he even had a clearance. This is an ITAR issue. Which by the way, seemed to be taken way more seriously at my company because people actually get thrown in prison for violating it when those violations are simply negligent. Negligent classified information violations were normally punished with a nasty gram email and a "don't do that again!" letter.