Asia, State Secrets | featured news

The Chinese national taken into custody on an airplane waiting to take off for home had pornography and illegally downloaded movies on his NASA computer, not government secrets, reports say. He is now set to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of violating NASA computer rules. A felony charge of allegedly lying to FBI agents has been resolved, reports say, but it is not immediately clear if it is being dropped outright. Reports do indicate the lying charge is not going forward.

In their first meetings with China’s new leaders, U.S. officials this week pushed for an acknowledgment of the unusual nature of cyberattacks originating from China aimed at stealing U.S. corporate secrets to benefit the Asian giant’s state-owned enterprises.

The FBI said Tuesday it is actively investigating a Chinese man arrested Saturday with a one-way ticket out of U.S. -- a scientist potentially carrying highly confidential military secrets and rocket technology from NASA labs.

U.S. officials suspect Pakistan let the Chinese military see secret technology the U.S. helicopter that crashed in the bin Laden raid.

China's GDP figures are "man-made" and therefore unreliable, the man who is expected to be the country's next head of government said in 2007, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

An American geologist held and tortured by China's state security agents was sentenced to eight years in prison Monday for gathering data on the Chinese oil industry in a case that highlights the government's use of vague secrets laws to restrict business information.

The Anglo-Australian mining giant rejected Chinese allegations that its employees detained in Shanghai were involved in bribery and stealing state secrets.