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For years, civil rights groups have accused the US Department of Justice of racial profiling against scientists of Chinese descent. Today, a new report provides data that can gauge some of its claims.
NS studyIndividuals of Chinese heritage are more likely than others to be charged under the Economic Espionage Act, and significantly little likely to be convicted.
“The key question this study seeks to answer is whether Asian-Americans are treated differently on suspicions of espionage,” said Andrew C. Kim, an attorney and visiting scholar at the South Texas College of Law Houston, the report’s author. “The answer to this question is yes.”
The study, which looked at data from economic espionage cases brought by the US from 1996 to 2020, found that just under half of all defendants were accused of stealing secrets that would benefit China. This is far lower than the numbers put forward by US officials to justify the Justice Department’s flagship China Initiative.
The research revealed that 46% of all defendants were accused of stealing secrets that would benefit China, while 42% of cases involved American businesses.
According to the report, 46% of defendants charged under the Economic Espionage Act were accused of engaging in activities that would benefit Chinese individuals or organizations, while 42% of defendants were accused of stealing secrets that would benefit American businesses.
The numbers directly contradict many of the messages surrounding the Justice Department’s China Initiative launched in 2018 to combat economic espionage. The department has made it public – for example, First line of homepage for China InitiativeIt reflects “theft on a scale large enough to represent one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history”, with 80% of prosecutions benefiting the Chinese state, FBI director Christopher Wray said. specification in 2020.
Since 2019, the program has largely targeted academic researchers.
“Strong evidence of accusations with less evidence”
The report was based on an analysis of public court filings and Ministry of Justice press releases for all Economic Espionage Act prosecutions between 1996 and 2020. Cardozo Law Review, It covered the period up to 2016.
Both “theft of trade secrets” and “economic espionage” charges were included, accompanied by “economic espionage” charges requiring proof of “linkage to a foreign organization” and higher penalties. (These two categories are only part of the charges under the China Initiative; Kim briefly talks about “false statements and transactional crimes,” and people are accused of grant fraud and lying on visa applications, among other crimes.)
Because demographic information and citizenship data were not included in court files, Kim used names as proxies for race and Google searches when names like Lee and Park were ethnically unclear. For Citizenship, Kim noted that press releases often come to the fore if the defendant is a “foreign national,” so he assumed that all defendants were citizens, unless stated otherwise.
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