Liu Sixing, also know as Steve Liu, was arrested at his home in Deerfield, Illinois and charged with one count of exporting defense-related technical data without a license, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Liu, a Chinese national with permanent residency in the United States, worked for the New Jersey-based company from March 2009 until November 2010 as a senior engineer on a team developing precision navigation devices.

Court documents say he boarded a flight from Newark last November to China, but upon returning from Shanghai, he was found to have a non-work issued computer containing hundreds of documents about the company's projects.

There were also images of a presentation Liu made to a technology conference organized by the Chinese government, the statement said.

Officials said numerous documents in Liu's possession were "prominently marked as containing sensitive proprietary company information and/or export-controlled technical data."

Liu was never issued a company laptop, and did not have the authority to access company data outside of its New Jersey facility.

He also never told the company he was traveling or participating in the conference in China.

"According to the complaint, Liu took highly sensitive defense information to China, violating the rules of his company and the laws of this country," said US Attorney Paul Fishman.

Edward Kahrer, head of the FBI's office in Newark, New Jersey found the case "raised very serious questions," describing the technology he helped develop as "critical to our military infrastructure."

"The FBI is committed to working with its partners to prevent such leaks of information and to mitigate them if and when they do occur," Kahrer added.

If convicted, Liu faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

earlier related report
Taiwan confirms US role in cracking China spy case
Taipei (AFP) March 8, 2011 - Taiwan's defence minister has confirmed for the first time that tip-offs offered by the United States had helped crack the island's worst espionage case in 50 years, an official said Tuesday.

Thanks to the US information, "it took only three months for the military and national security units to crack the case", minister Kao Hua-chu said in parliament on Monday, according to his spokesman.

Taiwan authorities in January arrested Major General Lo Hsien-che over claims that he spied for China, reportedly after he was lured by sex and money offered by a female Chinese agent on a 2002-2005 posting to Thailand.

The 51-year-old was head of the army's telecommunications and electronic information department, according to the defence ministry, which said it was Taiwan's most serious espionage case in five decades.

The minister did not go into detail about the information that Lo may have leaked to China, nor did he say how the US authorities became alarmed.

Taiwan's China Times newspaper cited an unnamed security source as saying that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had come across Lo while probing another espionage case in the United States.

In that case, the FBI accused Kuo Tai-shen, a US citizen who was born in Taiwan, of obtaining secret military documents from Pentagon employee Gregg William Bergersen and passing them onto Beijing.

The documents included information about the Po Sheng (Broad Victory) system -- a command, control and communications network that Taiwan is buying from US defence contractor Lockheed Martin for Tw$46 billion ($1.6 billion).

Defence Minister Kao told parliament that he believed the espionage allegations would not hamper arms sales by the United States, which is Taiwan's main weapons supplier.

A senior member of the parliament's national defence committee, Lin Yu-fang, believes damage from the revelations "was probably limited as the army had only just started receiving equipment for the network", an aide told AFP.

China and Taiwan split in 1949 at the end of a civil war but Beijing refuses to renounce the possible use of force to retake the island, despite a warming in relations under Taiwan's China-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou.

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