A 59-year-old U.S. national who came from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was given a four-year prison sentence for communicating private information about his company with China’s main civilian intelligence agency and plotting to work as a spy for the nation.
According to reports, as early as August 2012, Ping Li, 59, of Wesley Chapel, Florida, was a cooperating contact for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), working at their request to gather material relevant to the Chinese government. Li worked for the telecom behemoth Verizon before moving on to Infosys, a provider of IT services.
Li has been sentenced to four years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine. In late July 2024, he was accused of functioning as a PRC agent without informing the Attorney General. A month later, Li entered a guilty plea to the charges.
“The MSS often uses ‘cooperative contacts’ located in countries outside of the PRC in furtherance of their intelligence goals, which include obtaining information concerning foreign corporate or industrial matters, foreign politicians or intelligence officers, and information concerning PRC political dissidents residing in those countries,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said.
“These cooperative contacts assist the MSS in a variety of ways, including by conducting research on topics of interest to the PRC that can be used to further the MSS’s mission.”
According to the sentencing memorandum, Li gathered information about Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy activists, Falun Gong religious adherents, and U.S.-based NGOs and gave it to two MSS officers, one of whom he had become friends with in China while in high school and college.
Additionally, it was discovered that he gave training software that Verizon uses for new hires, cybersecurity training materials, information about the 2021 SolarWinds cyberattack on the U.S. government, and publicly accessible data about a number of lawmakers. Several anonymous Gmail and Yahoo! accounts were used to send the information.
The finding coincides with the ongoing investigation by the U.S. government into a massive cyber espionage campaign targeting key Chinese telecommunications businesses by Salt Typhoon, a state-sponsored threat actor.
Shujun Wang, a Queens, New York, resident, was also found guilty by the DoJ earlier this August of acting and plotting to operate as a covert Chinese agent while establishing Memorial Foundation, a pro-democracy advocacy group that opposes the current communist government in China.
“This defendant infiltrated a New York-based advocacy group by masquerading as a pro-democracy activist all while covertly collecting and reporting sensitive information about its members to the PRC’s intelligence service,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DoJ’s National Security Division said at the time.
Over 55 instances of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-related espionage have occurred in 20 U.S. states, according to the House Committee on Homeland Security’s (CHS) China Threat Snapshot report, which was published last month.
Transnational repression schemes to target PRC dissidents, theft of trade secrets to further its objectives, delivery of sensitive military intelligence to the PRC, and obstruction of justice are all examples of this.
“Between 2000 and 2023, there have been 224 reported incidents of Chinese espionage directed at the U.S.,” the report said. “About 80% of economic espionage prosecutions allege conduct that would benefit the Chinese state, and there is at least some nexus to China in around 60% of all trade secret theft cases.”
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