Engineer convicted of smuggling US Navy information to China

A Guangzhou-born engineer was found guilty of conspiracy to smuggle sensitive information about US Navy submarine technology to China after a six-week trial in California, AFP reported. Chi Mak, 66, a naturalized US citizen, worked for a Navy contractor. He was convicted on two counts of attempting to send sensitive material to China, acting as a foreign agent without notifying the US government and making false statements to federal agents. He was arrested in October 2005 after government agents caught two of his relatives boarding a flight to Hong Kong carrying discs loaded with sensitive encrypted data about the Navy's silent submarine technology known as the Quiet Electric Drive. Mak insists that he did not know the information, which he had written, was off-limits to foreigners because he had presented the information at an engineering conference before.