Intellectual property security

THE CHINA SPY SCANDAL THAT ENTANGLED HARVARD COULD HIT YALE AND MIT NEXT

The federal dragnet is so massive that investigators have given the case the code name "Lurking Giants."

This sweeping investigation into academia concerns not Hollywood celebrities who paid tens of thousands of dollars to secure college admission for their kids, but hundreds of millions of dollars that have poured into the country's most prestigious universities as gifts and contracts—unreported—largely from governments hostile to the U.S. The alleged theft of American taxpayer-funded military and scientific research would be a violation of the federal Higher Education Act. A recent Congressional report called the practice a threat to homeland security.

Federal law enforcement sources tell Newsweek that last month's arrest of Charles Lieber, the Chair of Harvard University's Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, is just "the first domino to fall."

Federal investigations are targeting "multiple scientists and researchers" at leading universities who have allegedly been enriching their bank accounts by endangering intellectual property paid for by grant monies from the U.S. Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health, several sources told Newsweek.

Lieber was one of those scientists whom federal prosecutors have identified as allegedly putting U.S. secrets at risk by double dealing: collecting $15 million in DOD and NIH grants for his work as a Harvard professor while simultaneously working as a Thousand Talents Program researcher for Beijing. Lieber was grilled about his work for the Chinese earlier this year by both federal investigators and Harvard officials and provided what the FBI called a "series of materially false, fictitious and fraudulent" statements.