Last week, the FBI arrested a Raytheon engineer for violating arms export laws . The engineer was transporting information about U.S. defense systems to China . Specifically, he took his company laptop, which contained confidential information , with him on a trip, despite warnings from his employer.
The defendant is Wei Sun, 48, a resident of Tucson, Arizona. He is a U.S. citizen born in China.
According to his LinkedIn, Sun had been working at Raytheon since December 2008, as an electrical engineer.
Court documents state that Sun was involved in Raytheon's Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) programs
Sun 's trip abroad
According to US authorities, on December 1, 2018, Sun told his superiors at Raytheon that he wanted to travel abroad and that he intended to take his company HP laptop with him.
The company warned the engineer that the laptop contained information about arms exports , but Sun ignored the advice of his superiors and left the US on December 18, 2018, taking the computer with him .
On January 7, 2019, Sun logged into his corporate email and contacted his employers at Raytheon to inform them that he was resigning from the company to study and work abroad.
On January 14, 2019, Sun returned to the United States. The next day, he contacted Raytheon security personnel
During their meeting, Sun initially stated that he had been to Singapore and the Philippines. However, security personnel noticed that the information he was giving regarding his trip was inaccurate. Eventually, Sun admitted that he had traveled to China, Cambodia, and Hong Kong.
Sun ( specifically missiles)
According to the indictment, Sun's laptop contained at least five files that required US government to be transferred abroad.
The files contained information about FPGA circuits, which Raytheon has used in programs such as AMRAAM and RKV.
These are US missile defense systems.
The court documents do not state with certainty whether these records were acquired by a foreign state
Raytheon ended its partnership with Sun on January 15, 2019. Sun, however, was arrested last week (January 24, 2020), a year after the incident.
