Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.
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.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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