California man pleads guilty to ‘secretly funnelling’ aeronautics software to Beijing
The US Department of Justice (‘DoJ’) has said that a California man, Jonathan Yet Wing Soong, pleaded guilty, 17 January, to ‘violating export control laws in connection with a scheme to secretly funnel sensitive aeronautics software to a Beijing university.’
It said that ‘between August 2016 and September 2020, Soong, 35, of Castro Valley, Calif., was employed as a program administrator by Universities Space Research Association (USRA), a nonprofit research corporation focusing on advancing space science and technology.
‘In April of 2016, USRA contracted with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to, among other things, license and distribute aeronautics-related Army flight control software for a fee. Soong’s duties included, among other things, conducting and servicing software license sales, conducting export compliance screening of customers, generating software licenses, and exporting software pursuant to purchased licenses.
‘As part of his duties, Soong was responsible for vetting customers to ensure they did not appear on certain restrictive lists – including the Department of Commerce’s Entity List and other U.S. government lists – that placed limitations on the transfer of products to identified entities. In pleading guilty, Soong admitted that he willingly exported and facilitated the sale and transfer of restricted software to Beihang University knowing that the university was on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List.’
The DoJ said that Beihang University ‘was added to the Entity List due to the University’s involvement in People’s Republic of China military rocket systems and unmanned air vehicle systems,’ and that, ‘in his plea agreement, Soong acknowledged he used an intermediary to complete the export of the program to avoid detection that the real purchaser was on the Entity List.’
