Chinese Programmer Arrested on Alleged Theft Try

Sept. 20, 2002

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Chinese programmer who works for the state-run China National Petroleum Corp. has been arrested for allegedly trying to steal software used to map underground oil deposits from a Silicon Valley company, a representative of the software company said on Friday.

Shan Yan Ming was arrested Tuesday by the FBI after workers at privately held 3DGeo discovered him trying to download an expensive, proprietary software program last week, the 3DGeo representative, who asked not to be named, said.

Ming has not yet been formally charged.

The Mountain View, California-based company sells software used in seismic imaging of oil fields.

Ming had been at 3DGeo since late April, being trained to use some of the company's software as part of a contract 3DGeo has with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.

"We have security in place and we monitor any kind of activity like this," said the 3DGeo representative. "As soon as it escalated from being sort of unusual to being threatening activity" the company stopped it and asked Ming to leave.

The company representative said he did not know why the programmer would have been trying to access the proprietary software, which he said costs $200,000 or more.

Representatives from the FBI in San Jose, California, and the Chinese consulate in San Francisco were not immediately available for comment.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=569&u=/nm/20020920
/tc_nm/tech_arrest_dc&printer=1