Back in the days when the city of Sunnyvale (in the Bay area) was full of defense contractors in hundreds of specialty buildings - some with hidden rooms, some with strangely equipped basements, others with tunnels that connected buildings together and also led on to military base areas - there were also lots of Soviet spies. They hung around the area’s lounges, in particular, and they must have garnered a lot of after-work chatter because their bosses kept paying their bar bills. It was always amazing to me how many state secrets were out in the open, but these guys didn’t have the technical background to recognize them for what they were.
Today it is no different, except that the majority of the baddies are from China. The Chinese-Americans who are in positions of influence in the US are regarded by the FBI as easy targets for the industrial spy, and can be fairly carefully vetted. One of my past bosses, of Chinese origin, was actually visited by the FBI and questioned about his loyalties to the US versus China. I’m sure his was not an isolated case.
So when a Chinese gentleman ordered three infrared night vision cameras from Flir Systems (Wilsonville, OR) they very forcefully told him that he could not ship them overseas without an export license. Flir was assured that they were for domestic customers...but this new customer was the proprietor of a printing business in San Gabriel, CA, and there was no logical reason he should either need them for himself, or have customers who would.
Flir
notified the Department of Commerce.
When the gentleman came back with an order for ten more IR cameras, for $35,000, the FBI put surveillance on the print shop, and watched the delivery of the camera boxes. A few days later - Saturday April 5, 2008 - he was followed to a shopping center where he picked up another Chinese gentleman and they both drove to LAX. After they'd been cheked on] an Air China flight to Beijing, their bags were searched by the FBI. Ten of the cameras – with confirmed serial numbers – were found. The pair was arrested and they are being held in custody for arraignment in late April.
What’s the big deal with IR camera export? Well, although they are used by many civilian folk in law enforcement, the sensitivity, capable wide angle and alternate real and infrared images in the Flir cameras, like the
Recon III, are unmatched by any other company in the world and are in heavy use by the military. The Department of Commerce rightly wants to limit their deployment to any who might not be long-term friendly to the West. Some of those hostiles probably already have examples, of course, left behind by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or taken from their corpses.
These cameras use InSb (Indium Antimonide) sensors freely available in the West. Companies like
InfraRed Associates have been selling them for many years. (The company relocated from New Jersey to Stuart, FL [about 25 miles North of North Palm Beach] and is surrounded, in a 5 mile radius, by at least 20 golf courses, yacht and country clubs, and boring old plain Country clubs – how
do they find clerical help in such an area?)
The Chinese may not realize it, but they even make InSb sensors themselves. The
Nanjing New Zhongxu Microelectronics Company in Jiangsu Province makes extremely good InSb Hall-effect sensors. They have specialized in industrial uses, they claim, but photovoltaic material is just that, and they could equally well make infrared sensors from them.
Presumably, then, a good electronics house could fairly easily reverse-engineer a Flir camera and have Zhongxu make sensors for their copies. Difficult to do with that ban on export licenses, right? But...thirteen cameras were sold to the Chinese print shop in San Gabriel; ten were recovered at LAX. Where are the other three?
