Congressman Frank Wolf busts up a spy ring:
On March 16, in what appeared to be another case of Chinese espionage, FBI agents boarded a plane at Dulles International Airport to arrest Bo Jiang, a Chinese national with a doctorate in electrical engineering from Old Dominion University. Jiang, a former contractor at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk. And that day, it seemed so—Jiang had a NASA-owned laptop in his possession, and was on a plane back to China.
But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. There was no evidence of any sensitive material on the laptop, and Jiang didn’t have clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace. Instead, investigators found, the laptop was loaded with pornography and pirated movies. Since he had lost his job and his work visa was expiring, Jiang simply was going home—with a little entertainment.
Wolf quickly shitcanned a press release crowing about his intrepid detective work (“This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.”)
Smiling Mortician
Has the ruling political class of any society ever been as full of bumbledicks as this one?
cathyx
I’m sure the entertainment industry is applauding this action. Good for Congressman Wolf.
hilts
OT
On Reliable Sources, Dylan Byers is asking Howie Kurtz about his past screw-ups and why it took so long for him to issue corrections and David Folkenflik is asking about why he got involved with Daily Download.
Villago Delenda Est
Can you say Wenn Ho Lee? Sure you can, boys and girls!
This Wolf asshat needs to be found broken and bleeding in a back alley someplace.
Ash Can
Funny story, but to be honest I am not down with Chinese nationals, or anyone else, making off with any NASA-owned computers. Wolf may have originally overreacted, but I can’t say I fault the FBI here.
Poopyman
I’m all for mocking Frank Wolf at every opportunity, but
Sure he’s going home for good, but that sounds like a lot of data is going with him. I sure hope it’s only good American productions from Van Nuys, but there may be more here.
ericblair
Lucky that we prevented all those commercial laptop components from falling into Chinese hands. Um. And pirated videos. Er.
Still, they could have weaponized the pr0n, although I don’t really want to think too hard about this.
Villago Delenda Est
@hilts:
Whoa. How is Mistah Kurtz responding? Without any shame? Is he answering such questions directly, or is he weaseling?
Villago Delenda Est
@Poopyman:
Well, since he was fired, he’s taking the pirated movies back so they can be burned onto discs and sold in the streets of every major city in East Asia. Gotta take your entrepreneurial opportunities while the iron is hot, ya know. That’s a good little nest egg. The pr0n, too, has value there.
The issue is creating the circumstances for such an incident become likely through racist fucktardism, or prophecy fulfillment through rank bigotry ala Wolf.
aimai
@Ash Can:
Yes, but when was the last time they arrested an Irish National, or a German, for industrial espionage? Racial profiling is racial profiling.
Karmus
That’s a real howler.
WereBear
His name is “Bo”? The same as the President’s DOG?
Elebenty!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
I sense a conspiracy.
hilts
@Villago Delenda Est:
Kurtz said all his mistakes matter to him, he’s learned not to take on too much work in the future, and he hopes he’s learned something from his mistakes.
It was nice to see Howie on the receiving end for a change.
Scott P.
Dance, Mr. Bo Jiang, dance.
PeakVT
I don’t see too much to mock here, except Wolf’s involvement. There’s no doubt that the Chinese government is engaged in a massive program to hack into every computer it can. Why wouldn’t it try to acquire the same information in a more-old fashioned manner, too?
ericblair
@Poopyman:
I’m guessing it’s going to be Iron Man 2, and a lot of Iron Man XXX. However, stealing government property is Not Cool and a federal crime, and I’m guessing what set off the whole Dulles overreaction is that he hadn’t turned in his laptop when he was terminated.
If all they’ve got was that he was a Chinese national and his laptop was missing, then the case smells like political theater. From the case studies you get in counterintelligence briefings, there’s usually a lot of other suspicious contacts and events before the feds move in.
Joey Maloney
@Poopyman: Really? The guy was moving to another country. When I moved to another country I had a laptop, an iPod, a tablet, 2 external HDs and a SIM card. Did that make me an espionage suspect?
No, it made me a guy who wasn’t willing to trust his music and photo libraries to baggage handlers, and who bought a SIM at the airport that would work at my destination.
Karmus
@PeakVT:
I dunno. “They already know we’re after their secrets. We might as well try the most obvious and ham-fisted of methods.” Really?
Villago Delenda Est
@ericblair:
Um, I don’t get this. How was he able to leave the premises of his former place of work with the laptop in the first place? I mean, before I was signed out of any military installation I was stationed at, all issued government property had to be accounted for one way or the other before I could leave. I mean, this is not, um, rocket science, to track government property issued to government employees.
scav
‘spose it’s good to learn that instead of just sitting on their duffs and helping govern or something like that, that congessmen are moonlighting or cross-training as HR flunkies and members of Scooby Doo.
Mike in NC
Frank Wolf? Jesus, I got so tired of hearing about that shitbird when we lived in NoVA. An old fool who’s held his seat since 1981 (!) but apparently not extreme enough for the GOP to nominate for the governorship.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav:
Counsel for the Mystery Machine on line 2, ranting about defamation.
ericblair
@Villago Delenda Est:
He was a contractor, so that makes things more complicated and I can see how it would happen. You can remove laptops from government sites for telework, which he probably did and just never came back, and when he was terminated from his actual employer they would have made him cough up company property but not necessarily government property. It could have been weeks later by the time the government property manager figured out the laptop was missing.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: rrwouf!
Villago Delenda Est
@ericblair:
Beltway bandits, indeed!
Amir Khalid
A minor point. With Chinese names in Western news media, one can never be sure: is the man’s surname Bo or Jiang?
More to the point, here’s what puzzles me: why take NASA property with him, especially electronic gear whose equivalent he could very easily have bought once back in China? It wouldn’t be worth the grief to be caught with it. And if all Bo Jiang wanted was the porn and the pirated movies they were surely ways to move them without using stolen NASA property.
jon
There is this thing called The Internet. If he was getting data in lumps big enough to be movies, he could have sent data in lumps big enough for satellites and rocket engines. The hard drives are probably going to contain nothing more than shitloads of stuff he worked on. It’s like firing a mechanic: he wants his tools when he leaves the shop.
But the employer should check the toolboxes.
Scamp Dog
@Smiling Mortician: based on how things turned out, the Soviet Union. No, I do not find this comparison encouraging.
Karmus
@jon:
That’s all great, except for this little tidbit:
“and Jiang didn’t have clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace.”
But he’s a Chinese man with a NASA laptop and he’s leaving on a jet plane, so release the hounds! And fire up a press conference! Grand must be the standing this day… wait, what? Porn and… Terminator 2? That CAN’T be all… those darn sneaky Chinese! Call off the press.
Villago Delenda Est
Yes. Introducing secret San Fernando Valley blow job techniques to the Chinese could have decisively altered the balance of power.
“Me love you longer time than that Vietnamese or Korean ho, GI!”
Keith
If the Chinese get the plans for the drill-do, we’re all fucked.
RepubAnon
It’s all a super-secret CIA plot to disable the Chinese hacker community by sending them porn. After watching the porn, they’ll be motivated to engage in activities known to cause blindness and cause hair to grow on the palms of their hands. After a while, the Chinese hackers won’t be able to see their monitors due to declining eyesight, and the palms of their hands will sport Donald Trump-level masses of hair, thus interfering with their keyboarding skills.
What a pity that the good Congresscritter spoiled the CIA’s plan.
(/snark)
Seriously, why are we giving government-issued laptop computers to the employees of contractors without better controls in place? One would think the government’s agreement with the contractor would have some provisions for issuing and tracking any government-supplied equipment. If the computer was too old to be useful (say, an old XP machine), the government should at least get a credit from the contractor…
Wolfdaughter
@Villago Delenda Est: I don’t wish violence upon people (although it’s tempting in this case), but wouldn’t it be sort of poetic justice if Congressman Wolf were caught in a compromising position in an airport bathroom?
eemom
Wolf is one district over from mine and quite literally as dumb as the proverbial box of hammers. But his constituents are richer than shit and he’s been incumbent there forever, so that seat ain’t flippin anytime soon.
In far, far worse Virginia news, a WaPo poll has Cooch up 10 points among likely voters. Kill me now plz. kthxbai.
ericblair
@RepubAnon:
It is tracked: it’s issued to the individual contractor employee, who signs for it, and eventually has to produce it at the end of the contract or whenever the government does a property audit. I don’t think many government organizations actually allow contractors to remove laptops from the facility like government employees can, but there’s not a lot of checking going out. Most of the security checks are actually to make sure that people don’t bring any unauthorized computer equipment into the facility, which is considered the main security threat. Even if he wasn’t allowed to take it out, he could have just walked out with it in his bag and it’s doubtful anyone would have said boo.
You can’t realistically do more than this without turning every government building in the country into a TSA checkpoint.
liberal
@ericblair:
I’m a contractor at a government institution (nonmilitary), and this is my impression—there are annual property audits, but not necessarily a check that says, “BEEP…this guy is no longer an employee…BEEP…please audit his property immediately.”
As for contractors vs government employees, that’s a joke. Lots of people (like myself) are contractors. It’s a stupid shellgame—the contracting company isn’t adding any value, it’s just a way to claim the government has shrunk because there are fewer government employees.
I have a friend who works as a contractor doing statistical work for another branch of my institution. In his case, the contracting company arguably adds value, because they have some expertise and really do the hiring. In my case, the company is little more than a passthrough, and unnecessarily duplicates HR functions that the government has to do anyway.
So…in my case it would be odd to prohibit contractors from taking property off site.
liberal
@eemom:
Just move over here to MD. Nice and liberal. We have our share of stupidity, too, like the transit center in Silver Spring that’s missing a good chunk of rebar and will have to be rebuilt, but at least we’re not about to elect a Tea Partier to the guvship.
(Though arguably maybe blues like me should move to places like VA to push it over the edge in the right direction.)
Chet
@aimai: “Chinese” isn’t a race, and neither Ireland nor Germany have made industrial espionage into an official national business strategy. China won’t sign the copyright/patent reciprocity agreements for the expressed reason that it would be a barrier to Chinese industries being able to benefit from American R&D. I dunno if this guy is guilty of anything besides stealing government property, but Chinese trade espionage is a real thing. I know a guy whose ILS antenna design is in wide use across a number of Chinese airports, but only ever made one sale in China.
Davis X. Machina
Wen Ho Lee says “Hello”.
scav
@Chet: Oddly enough, Charles Dickens complained left right up down and center about American publishers not respecting/recognizing copyright. O tempora o mores!
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
You could say that Mister Jiang was caught with his *pinkie to mouth* pants down?
Karmus
That the pants were the property of NASA to begin with was not the best beginning.
Mike in NC
@liberal:
I was pretty content living in what conservative coworkers called The People’s Republic of Montgomery County, but one day I was handed a pink slip and the next job landed me across the river in VA. After battling construction sites and traffic over the American Legion Bridge for several months I finally moved when my lease was up. Location, location, location.
Anyway, fraud waste and abuse among Beltway Bandits is endemic. I saw that for 20+ years at several companies. Employee turnover was absurd and people would steal damn near anything that wasn’t nailed down. Hardware, software, furniture, office supplies and even rolls of toilet paper.
jon
@Karmus: Agreed. I was mostly just generally speculating about the idea of smuggling secret electronic data in the most obvious place possible: a computer or external hard drive. Just doesn’t seem likely to me that that’s the place a spy would put such things. “What is in this file marked ‘US Government secrets’?”
As for this guy’s access to data, I’d say if there are Red flags, there are Red flags. (Yes, I know.)
But I also know that computer will soon be in its rightful place: government surplus auction! It’s probably almost two years old! Must be replaced!
TG Chicago
@Poopyman: Yeah, I’m not going to get on Wolf’s case here. Even if nothing else turns up, a dude returning to China with a NASA laptop is certainly not ideal.
And I have to say, while I’m all about being a world citizen, it does seem odd to allow Chinese citizens to come in and work in NASA for a bit, then go back to China. Sure, he wasn’t given access to sensitive stuff, but it just feels a bit weird.
But even allowing for that, I think it’s totally fair to be concerned when a citizen of an nation unfriendly to the US is bringing NASA property back to their home country.
RepubAnon
@ericblair: I work at a very large company – which has an “off-boarding process” when one’s employment ends. As part of the process, one is required to turn in all one’s company-issued equipment (which is tracked). When we hire consultants and give them laptop computers, we “off-board” them the same way – and get the company-issued computer back right then and there.
One would think that the government and/or the prime contractor providing the consultants would have a similar set of controls to track who has what equipment issued to them, and a process under which they turn it all in when their employment ends. If this isn’t in place, it denotes a sloppy process.
liberal
@Mike in NC:
I know, I know; I’m a (quasi-)Georgist after all.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@jon:
Without being wiped.
Someone brought me an eBay-purchased computer to “fix and clean up” a few years ago. It turned out to be surplus from some Army contractor. It still had the VPN software installed. Only reason I couldn’t get into whatever network it was supposed to connect to was that I didn’t have the password. Login popped up with the user name still filled in.
James E. Powell
@TG Chicago:
it does seem odd to allow Chinese citizens to come in and work in NASA for a bit, then go back to China.
I am just guessing here, but it is probable that the contractor tried very hard to find an equally qualified American citizen to do the work, but just couldn’t find anyone who would do it for low wages, no benefits, no job security.
Again, just guessing, but I’d really like to know more of the facts.
Felonius Monk
Oh, come on. Let the Chinese man have his fun — given what he’s likely returning to in China a few pirated movies and some porn might make his life a little more bearable.
OTOH, the real masturbater here is Congressman Wolf — it is obvious that he is a charter member of the Circle of Jerks.
Porlock Junior
@ericblair:
You mean, they way they did “Wenn ist das Nurnstuck git und Schlottermeyer?” I agree. Don’t want to think about it.