Navy Restarting Contest for Halted Shipbuilding Program
By David Sharp
Associated Press
Thursday, April 3, 2008; D04

PORTLAND, Maine, April 2 -- The Navy is moving forward with construction of a new type of small, speedy warship after upending the program by canceling contracts last year, officials said Wednesday.
The Navy's formal request for proposals, issued to General Dynamics of Falls Church and Lockheed Martin of Bethesda on Tuesday, calls for construction of three Littoral Combat Ships over the next several years.
The Navy envisions a competition in which the winning bidder is awarded contracts for two of the ships while the other builds a third, Lt. Cmdr. John Schofield said Wednesday.
The Navy, which hopes to eventually build 55 Littoral Combat Ships, wants the smaller warships capable of operating in shallow coastal waters to defend against pirates and terrorists. The ships are a key element of the Navy's goal of increasing its fleet to 313 ships.
But the program has been plagued by cost overruns, and the Navy's handling of the fast-tracked effort has come under criticism.
The Navy put the brakes on the program last year, canceling two ships, after costs of the original ships grew from early estimates of about $220 million to more than $300 million apiece.
The Navy is operating under a congressional cost cap of $460 million per ship, a reflection that the original cost estimates were too low.
Lockheed Martin's LCS-1 is being built by Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, while General Dynamics' LCS-2 is being built at the Austal USA shipyard in Mobile, Ala.
Lockheed Martin's version resembles a traditional frigate or destroyer but features a sleek, semi-planing hull, while General Dynamics' version is an all-aluminum three-hulled vessel.

Recent Espionage Cases Involving China
Thursday, April 3, 2008; A10

March 24, 2008: Chi Mak, a former engineer at a naval contractor, is sentenced to 24 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to export warship technology to China. He was also convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of China.
March 7, 2008: WaveLab, a Reston company, pleads guilty in federal court to illegally exporting "controlled power amplifiers," which have military applications, to China between February 2006 and October 2006.
Feb. 11, 2008: Dongfan Chung, a former Boeing engineer, is arrested after being indicted for allegedly stealing information about the space shuttle, the Delta IV rocket and the Air Force C-17 and passing it to China as an unregistered agent. The indictment said he made many trips to China, giving lectures and meeting with Chinese officials.
Jan. 25, 2008: Ding Zhengxing and Su Yang are arrested in Saipan for allegedly trying to buy and export amplifiers used in digital radios and wireless area networks that are controlled by U.S. export laws.
Dec. 3, 2007: Philip Cheng is sentenced in California to two years in prison for brokering the export to China of Panther series infrared cameras, which have night-vision technology.
Oct. 31, 2007: Bing Xu of Nanjing, China, is charged in New Jersey with attempting to export military goggles from the United States to China. Court papers claim he arrived in New York shortly after his Chinese employer transferred $14,000 to pay for the equipment, which is sold under restrictions.
Oct. 26, 2007: Noshir Gowadia is charged in Hawaii with transmitting information to China related to making cruise missile exhausts hard to detect.
Oct. 18, 2007: Qing Li is charged in California with conspiracy to export military-grade accelerometers, which have some applications in smart bombs, missile development and what the Justice Department described as "calibrating the g-forces of nuclear and chemical explosions."
Sept. 26, 2007: Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge are charged in California with economic espionage and theft of trade secrets from two companies on behalf of a Chinese military program.
Aug. 1, 2007: Xiaodong Sheldon Meng pleads guilty in California to violating the Economic Espionage Act to benefit China's Navy Research Center. He exported source code for simulation software for the precision training of fighter pilots.
Aug. 1, 2007: Yang Fung, president of Excellence Engineering Electronics, pleads guilty in San Francisco to illegally providing microwave integrated circuits to China, in violation of Commerce Department rules.
March 27, 2007: ITT Corp. pleads guilty and pays a $100 million fine for exporting night-vision data to China, Singapore and Britain, one of the largest such fines for export-control violations.

Chinese Spy 'Slept' In U.S. for 2 Decades
Espionage Network Said to Be Growing
By Joby Warrick and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 3, 2008; A01
Prosecutors called Chi Mak the "perfect sleeper agent," though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.
Eventually, Mak's job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China -- fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.
Mak was sentenced last week to 24 1/2 years in prison by a federal judge who described the lengthy term as a warning to China not to "send agents here to steal America's military secrets." But it may already be too late: According to U.S. intelligence and Justice Department officials, the Mak case represents only a small facet of an intelligence-gathering operation that has long been in place and is growing in size and sophistication.
The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an "intellectual vacuum cleaner," has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.
"Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets," Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. "It speaks of deep patience," he said, and is part of a pattern.
Other recent prosecutions illustrate the scale of the problem. Mak, whose sentence capped an 18-month criminal probe, was the second U.S. citizen in the past two weeks to stand before a federal judge after being found guilty on espionage-related charges.
On Monday, former Defense Department analyst Gregg W. Bergersen pleaded guilty in Alexandria to charges that he gave classified information on U.S. weapons sales to a businessman who shared the data with a Chinese official.
In March, the Reston company WaveLab pleaded guilty to violating export laws when it shipped militarily sensitive power amplifiers to China, according to court papers. A lawyer for the company said it neglected to get proper licenses and did not engage in "underhanded" behavior.
Dongfan Chung, a Boeing engineer arrested in February for allegedly passing classified space shuttle and rocket documents to Chinese officials, was accused in court documents of responding to orders from Beijing as long ago as 1979 -- making him a second alleged longtime agent.
Yesterday, federal prosecutors in Chicago indicted a software engineer for allegedly stealing business trade secrets and trying to take more than 1,000 paper and electronic documents from a telecommunications company on a one-way trip to China last year.
The cases are among at least a dozen investigations of Chinese espionage that have yielded criminal charges or guilty pleas in the past year. Since 2000, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have launched more than 540 investigations of illegal technology exports to China.
The FBI recently heightened its counterintelligence operations against Chinese activities in the United States after Director Robert S. Mueller III cited "substantial concern" about aggressive attempts to use students, scientists and "front companies" to acquire military secrets.
Recent prosecutions indicate that Chinese agents have infiltrated sensitive military programs pertaining to nuclear missiles, submarine propulsion technology, night-vision capabilities and fighter pilot training -- all of which could help China modernize its programs while developing countermeasures against advanced weapons systems used by the United States and its allies.
"The intelligence services of the People's Republic of China pose a significant threat both to the national security and to the compromise of U.S. critical national assets," said William Carter, an FBI spokesman. "The PRC will remain a significant threat for a long time as they attempt to develop their military capabilities and to develop their economy in order to compete in today's world economy."
While military technology appears to be the top prize, the Chinese effort is also aimed at commercial and industrial technologies, which often are poorly protected, several officials said. "Espionage used to be a problem for the FBI, CIA and military, but now it's a problem for corporations," Brenner said. "It's no longer a cloak-and-dagger thing. It's about computer architecture and the soundness of electronic systems."
Calls placed to the Chinese Embassy in Washington requesting comment on recent spy cases were not returned. But Chinese officials have repeatedly denied that their country is stealing military technology. "We have reiterated many times that allegations that China stole U.S. military secrets are groundless and made out of ulterior motives," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a recent news conference in Beijing, commenting on the Mak case.
But U.S. intelligence and defense officials say China has been able to use technology of U.S. origin in a new generation of advanced naval destroyers and quiet-running, stealthy submarines.
Some of those secrets may have been obtained with the help of Mak, a 67-year-old electrical engineer who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 along with his wife, Rebecca Chiu Mak. The two settled in Southern California, where Mak eventually accepted a job with Power Paragon, a defense contractor that specialized in advanced naval propulsion technology. In 1996, Mak was given a security clearance at the "secret" level, which gave him access to sensitive engineering details for U.S. ships and submarines.
In 2003, Mak became the subject of an intensive federal investigation that included court-ordered wiretaps, secret property searches and the clandestine installation of a video camera inside his home. Through surveillance, FBI agents discovered that Mak was in the process of copying thousands of pages of technical documents onto computer disks, which he arranged to send to China using his brother and sister-in-law as couriers.
According to court documents, the Maks encrypted the disks to avoid detection and used coded words to arrange a drop-off of the disks to a Chinese intelligence operative. In one phone conversation, the brother, Tai Wang Mak, intimated that he would be traveling with his wife and a third companion he described as his "assistant" -- a reference, prosecutors said, to the disks, hidden in his luggage.
The plan was foiled on Oct. 28, 2005, when agents arrested Tai Wang Mak as he was preparing to board a plane at Los Angeles International Airport. Chi Mak and his wife were arrested at their home the same day.
A key piece of evidence was a to-do list of apparent intelligence targets, written in Chinese script. The note, which had been shredded, was retrieved from Chi Mak's garbage and painstakingly reassembled to reveal what prosecutors said were instructions from Beijing on the kinds of technology Mak should seek to acquire.
Mak, who testified in his defense at his six-week trial, denied he was a spy and said the information he copied was available from nonclassified sources on the Internet. Defense witnesses said that much, if not all, of the documents acquired by Mak were not officially classified, though transmitting them to China was prohibited under U.S. export laws. Mak's attorney, Ronald O. Kaye, said his client was a scapegoat for other U.S. intelligence failures and a "symbol of the government's cold war against the Chinese."
In another recent case, former Northrop Grumman scientist Noshir Gowadia, who helped build the B-2 bomber, was indicted last fall for allegedly sharing cruise missile data with the Chinese government during a half-dozen trips to China. He is scheduled to go on trial in October.
A defense lawyer for Gowadia did not return calls, but Gowadia's family in Hawaii has told local journalists that the charges stem from a misunderstanding.
Robert Clifton Burns, a Washington lawyer who specializes in export cases, said the Chinese acquisition of sophisticated U.S. technology "is fast coming out from under the radar" as authorities crack down on such shipments to foreign powers. But Burns, who closely tracks prosecutions in the area, said the government sometimes overstates the risks of exporting U.S. items.
"People who violate export laws should be thrown in jail, no question about it," Burns said. But he added that there are also people "who would be better addressed by . . . a civil result where they get a small fine."
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report

Memo Justified Warrantless Surveillance
The Associated Press

Thursday 03 April 2008

Washington - For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

The 37-page memo has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."

Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Wednesday that the Fourth Amendment finding in the October memo was not the legal underpinning for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

"TSP relied on a separate set of legal memoranda," Fratto told The Associated Press. The Justice Department outlined that legal framework in a January 2006 white paper issued by the Justice Department a month after the TSP was revealed by The New York Times.

The October memo was written just days before Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, briefed four House and Senate leaders on the NSA's secret wiretapping program for the first time.

The government itself related the October memo to the TSP program when it included it on a list of documents that were responsive to the ACLU's request for records from the program. It refused to hand them over.

Late Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said department officials believe the October 2001 memo was not about the eavesdropping program, but he did not explain why it was included on requests for documents linked to the TSP.

Earlier, Roehrkasse said the statement in the footnote does not reflect the current view of the department's Office of Legal Counsel.

"We disagree with the proposition that the Fourth Amendment has no application to domestic military operations," he said. "Whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires consideration of the particular context and circumstances of the search."

Roehrkasse would not say exactly when that legal opinion was overturned internally. But he pointed to the January 2006 white paper.

"The white paper does not suggest in any way that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military activities, and that is not the position of the Office of Legal Counsel," he said.

Suzanne Spaulding, a national security law expert and former assistant general counsel at the CIA, said she found the Fourth Amendment reference in the footnote troubling, but added: "To know (the Justice Department) no longer thinks this is a legitimate statement is reassuring."

"The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration's extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "The administration's lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law."

"Each time one of these memos comes out you have to come up with a more extreme way to characterize it," Jaffer said.

The ACLU is challenging in court the government's withholding of the October 2001 memo.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Go to Original

Memo Sheds New Light on Torture Issue
By David Johnston and Scott Shane
The New York Times

Thursday 03 April 2008

Washington - A newly disclosed Justice Department legal memorandum, written in March 2003 and authorizing the military's use of extremely harsh interrogation techniques, offers what could be a revealing clue in an unsolved mystery: What responsibility did top Pentagon and Bush administration officials have for abuses committed by American troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in Afghanistan; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and elsewhere?

Some legal experts and advocates said Wednesday that the document, written the month that the United States invaded Iraq, adds to evidence that the abuse of prisoners in military custody may have involved signals from higher officials and not just irresponsible actions by low-level personnel.

The opinion was written by John C. Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, the executive branch's highest authority on the interpretation of the law. It told the Pentagon's senior leadership that inflicting pain would not be considered torture unless it caused "death, organ failure or permanent damage," and it is the most fully developed legal justification that has yet come to light for inflicting physical and mental pressure on suspects.

While resembling an August 2002 memorandum drafted largely by Mr. Yoo, the March 2003 opinion went further, arguing more explicitly that the president's war powers could trump the law against torture, which it said could not constitutionally be enforced if it interfered with the commander in chief's orders.

Scott L. Silliman, head of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University and a former Air Force lawyer, said he did not believe that the 2003 memorandum directly caused mistreatment. But Mr. Silliman added, "The memo helped to build a culture that, in the absence of leadership from the highest ranks of the Pentagon, allowed the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere."

Because opinions issued by the Office of Legal Counsel are "binding on the Defense Department," Mr. Silliman said, Mr. Yoo's opinion effectively sidelined military lawyers who strongly opposed harsh interrogation methods.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, rejected the idea that his memorandum helped create a culture for mistreatment.

"The 'culture of abuse' theory has no reliable evidence to support it," Mr. Yoo wrote. He noted that several military investigations had found that what he called "the appalling abuses" at Abu Ghraib were not authorized by any military policy.

"While each case of abuse is regrettable," Mr. Yoo wrote, "it is not possible for a large organization charged with protecting the national security, under extraordinary pressure, to perform its mission error-free."

Top Pentagon officials including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, have said they never condoned mistreatment of prisoners. But the role played by senior military and civilian officials at the Pentagon has never been fully explained, and it is not clear how the legal memorandum, which was addressed to William Haynes, then the top Pentagon lawyer, influenced interrogations.

Several Democratic lawmakers asserted on Wednesday that the memorandum led directly to the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib, although the document specifies that it applies only to "unlawful combatants," a label that would not apply to the largely Iraqi population captured during the Iraq war.

The memorandum did apply to all unlawful combatants detained outside the United States, at a time when the Pentagon was struggling with the rules for interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and in other places, like Afghanistan.

William C. Banks, a specialist on national security law at Syracuse University, said that the memorandum shed critical light on the Bush administration but that it was "far fetched" to think it might be used to overturn convictions of soldiers for abuse at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere.

The document was made public on Tuesday after it was declassified in response to a request by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act.

Both the August 2002 and March 2003 memorandums were formally withdrawn by the Justice Department in 2004, after Mr. Yoo's successors at the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that they went too far.

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer representing Ali al-Marri, a Qatar citizen arrested in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, said he believed that the March 2003 opinion explained why his client was removed from the criminal justice system and placed in a military jail in Charleston, S.C., in June 2003.

"I think they moved him to the military system to be able to use the harsh techniques blessed in the Yoo memo," said Mr. Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Mr. Marri said he was subjected to cold, shackled in uncomfortable positions, deprived of sleep and otherwise mistreated.

Congressional Democrats used the 2003 memorandum on Wednesday to renew their criticism of the administration for policies that Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said threatened "our country's status as a beacon of human rights."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the memorandum showed that the administration "adopted arguments that could be used by other nations to try to justify the torture of American troops."

Both senators called for the release of other Justice Department opinions on interrogation. At least two major ones written in May 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, to justify harsh methods remain secret.

David B. Rivkin, a former White House and Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, said that the wording of the 2003 opinion might be "overly broad," but that legal advisers like Mr. Yoo set out only what might be done legally, not what should be done.

"In a post-Sept. 11 environment, the lawyers tried to give decision makers broad legal flexibility," Mr. Rivkin said. "I don't want to substitute my judgment for John Yoo's as I sit in a comfortable office on a spring day in 2008."

-------

Telecom Immunity Rejection

The March disclosures by telecommunications whistleblower and GAP client Babak Pasdar are being credited with persuading the House of Representatives to not grant immunity to telecommunications companies involved with the warrantless wiretapping and illegal domestic spying scandal.
At the beginning of March, media reports stated that a deal on a House vote granting immunity was close to fruition. Concerned, Pasdar decided to take action. GAP sent an affidavit by Pasdar detailing his allegations to key House members.
Pasdar is a computer expert who discovered a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" at a major telecommunications company's facility in 2003 which provided the federal government unfettered access to all customer mobile phone communications - all calls, emails, text messages, internet use, videos, billing, location - with no record of what was taken.
Armed with and alarmed by Pasdar's affidavit, House Energy and Commerce chairman John Dingell, Oversight Subcommittee chairman Bart Stupak , and Telecommunications Subcommittee chairman Ed Markey collectively sent a 'Dear Colleagues' letter to all other Representatives about Pasdar's disclosures. The House subsequently voted 214-195 to reject blanket immunity for the telecoms.
GAP Client's Disclosures Prompt