http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110507/ap_on_re_us/us_stealing_for_china

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The young man stood before the judge, his usually neatly trimmed hair now long enough to brush the collar of his prison jumpsuit. Glenn Duffie Shriver had confessed his transgressions and was here, in a federal courtroom with his mother watching, to receive his sentence and to try, somehow, to explain it all.
When the time came for him to address the court, he spoke of the many dreams he'd had to work on behalf of his country.

"Mine was to be a life of service," he said. "I could have been very valuable. That was originally my plan."
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — China, ever more powerful, has become a major instigator of espionage in the United States. First of a two-part series on Beijing's efforts, many successful, to steal American secrets and technology.
___
He had been a seemingly all-American, clean-cut guy: No criminal record. Engaged to be married. A job teaching English overseas. In letters to the judge, loved ones described the 29-year-old Midwesterner as honest and caring — a good citizen. His fiancee called him "Mr. Patriot."

Such descriptions make the one that culminated in the courtroom all the more baffling: Glenn Shriver was also a spy recruit for China. He took $70,000 from individuals he knew to be Chinese intelligence officers to try to land a job with a U.S. government agency — first the State Department and later the CIA.

And Shriver is just one of at least 57 defendants in federal prosecutions since 2008 charging espionage conspiracies with China or efforts to pass classified information, sensitive technology or trade secrets to intelligence operatives, state-sponsored entities, private individuals or businesses in China, according to an Associated Press review of U.S. Justice Department cases.

Of those, nine are awaiting trial, and two are considered fugitives. The other defendants have been convicted, though some are yet to be sentenced.

Most of these prosecutions have received little public attention — especially compared with the headline splash that followed last summer's arrest of 10 Russian "sleeper agents" who'd been living in suburban America for more than a decade but, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, passed no secrets.

Contrast that with this snapshot:
_In Honolulu, a former B-2 bomber engineer and one-time professor at Purdue gets 32 years in prison for working with the Chinese to develop a vital part for a cruise missile in a case that a high-ranking Justice Department official said resulted in the leak of "some of our country's most sensitive weapons-related designs."

_In Boston, a Harvard-educated businessman is sent to prison, along with his ex-wife, for conspiring for a decade to illegally export parts used in military radar and electronic warfare systems to research institutes that manufacture items for the Chinese military. The Department of Defense concluded the illegal exports "represented a serious threat to U.S. national and regional defense security interests."

_In Los Angeles, a man goes to jail for selling Raytheon-manufactured thermal imaging cameras to a buyer in Shanghai whose company develops infrared technology. The cameras are supposed to be restricted for export to China because of "their potential use in a wide variety of military and civilian applications," according to court documents.

More at the link...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110507/ap_on_re_us/us_stealing_for_china