TAMPA, Fla.—A Florida engineer was given a four-year prison term for helping the Chinese regime collect intelligence on Chinese dissidents, such as practitioners of the persecuted faith Falun Gong.
The man, Li Ping, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who had worked for Verizon for 30 years. He had acted on behalf of a Chinese intelligence official in the United States for more than a decade, according to court filings.
Li, who turns 60 in December, had passed on a wide variety of information to the Ministry of State Security, China’s top spying agency, including cybersecurity training materials from his tech company employer. Repeatedly, he fed the agency details about pro-democracy advocates living in the United States and Falun Gong practitioners, a major target of the Chinese Communist Party over the past 25 years….