San Jose, California – A California engineer who quietly walked off with some of the country’s most sensitive missile-tracking technology will spend nearly four years in federal prison, closing a case that prosecutors say underscores the national-security stakes of corporate espionage in the defense sector.
On Monday, 59-year-old Chenguang Gong of San Jose was sentenced to 46 months after pleading guilty to stealing thousands of files from a Los Angeles–area research and development firm where he briefly worked in 2023. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California called the theft “particularly egregious,” noting that the materials Gong took weren’t just proprietary — they were blueprints for systems designed to help the United States detect and survive a missile attack.
According to prosecutors, Gong downloaded more than 3,600 files onto personal devices, including 1,800 after he had already accepted a position with one of the company’s main competitors. The files were marked with warnings familiar in the aerospace and defense world: “PROPRIETARY,” “EXPORT CONTROLLED,” “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.” Together, they represented hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development, and decades of work…