A California-based electrical engineer has been found guilty of attempting to export sensitive military electronics to China and could face more than two centuries behind bars.
Yi-Chi Shih, 64—a part-time professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)—was convicted on 18 federal charges last week, linked to a plot to illegally obtain microchips from an American company and export them to China, where they could be used in a range of military systems including missiles and fighter jets.
The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that Shih faces a faces a statutory maximum sentence of 219 years in prison. A co-defendant—Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California—had already pleaded guilty to smuggling charges linked to the plan in December.
Shih posed as a customer to acquire the hardware—so-called monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs)—from an unnamed U.S. company. Read more
Source: www.newsweek.com