Engineer accused of stealing secret U.S. government tech used to detect nuclear missile launches
A former engineer was arrested on federal charges alleging he stole trade secret technology that was developed by the U.S. government to detect nuclear missile launches and to track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
A former engineer was arrested on federal charges alleging he stole trade secret technology that was developed by the U.S. government to detect nuclear missile launches and to track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.
Chenguang Gong, 57, of San Jose, California, was arrested Tuesday morning and charged with theft of trade secrets, the Justice Department said in a news release. Gong is a native of China and became a U.S. citizen in 2011, the Justice Department said.
Gong appeared in court Wednesday and was released on $2.5 million bond with location monitoring and a curfew, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said.
At the hearing, which took place in San Jose, he was represented by a deputy federal public defender. He was ordered to make a court appearance in Los Angeles by Feb. 20, and it remains unclear who will represent him in that hearing, the spokesperson said.
While he was briefly working at a Los Angeles-area research and development company — from March 30 to April 26 — Gong transferred 3,600 files from his work laptop to personal storage devices, court documents allege. Some of the files were later discovered on devices taken from Gong's temporary residence in Thousand Oaks, California, the Justice Department said, citing an affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint.
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