A San Jose resident who was an engineer at a Southern California defense contractor was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison this week for stealing sensitive trade secrets tied to U.S. missile-tracking technology, federal prosecutors said.
Chenguang Gong, 59, got 46 months in prison, was ordered to pay $77,408 in restitution, and was fined $100,000. Gong pleaded guilty on July 21 to one count of theft of trade secrets.
Federal prosecutors on Monday said Gong, a dual U.S. and Chinese citizen, transferred more than 3,600 files from a Los Angeles-area research and development company where he worked in 2023. Some of the files were later found on storage devices seized from his temporary residence in Thousand Oaks.
The stolen materials included blueprints for infrared sensors used in space-based systems to detect nuclear missile launches and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, as well as designs that allow U.S. military aircraft to detect and evade heat-seeking missiles. Many of the documents were marked “PROPRIETARY,” “EXPORT CONTROLLED,” “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY,” and similar warnings.
Gong was hired in January 2023 as an application-specific integrated circuit design manager responsible for designing and verifying the company’s infrared sensors. Prosecutors said that, from March 30 until his termination on April 26, he copied thousands of files onto personal storage devices, including more than 1,800 files after he had accepted a job at one of the victim company’s main competitors.
The files included trade secrets related to readout integrated circuits used in missile-tracking systems, next-generation sensors capable of detecting low-observable targets, and blueprints for mechanical assemblies used to house and cryogenically cool the company’s sensors. Federal prosecutors previously said the company’s most valuable trade secrets were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
They also linked Gong to multiple applications between 2014 and 2022 to Chinese government-run Talent Programs, which U.S. officials say recruit overseas experts to transfer advanced technologies for military use. Court documents describe proposals in which Gong offered to develop high-performance analog-to-digital converters with radar and missile-navigation applications, as well as “low light/night vision” image sensors for night-vision goggles.
In a 2019 email translated from Chinese, Gong wrote that he “took a risk” traveling to China for Talent Program activities because he worked for “an American military industry company” and believed he could “do something” to support China’s “high-end military integrated circuits.”
In a sentencing memorandum, they wrote: “[Gong’s] conduct is particularly egregious because his deliberate and systematic theft of [the victim company’s] trade secrets is not an isolated incident; it represents the culmination of a long pattern of stealing proprietary technology from U.S. companies to benefit the [People Republic of China’s] military.”
The name of the victim company has not been released.