A 49-year-old Kentucky man was sentenced last Thursday by a federal judge in Yakima to three months in prison for selling trade secrets involving drone aircraft. Stephen Martin Ward of Owensboro, Ky., was arrested in November 2011 in Indiana after giving a digital copy of an unmanned aircraft maintenance manual to an undercover agent for $10,000, according to a news release issued by Michael C. Ormsby, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington in Spokane.
Ormsby said Ward was hired as a technical writer in August 2011 to create a maintenance manual for a drone, known as the RQ-21A Blackjack, which was developed by Insitu Inc.
The company, located in Bingen and owned by Boeing, employs about 800 people who develop unmanned aircraft systems.
When Ward’s employment was terminated about two months later, he told a former supervisor that he’d taken substantial amounts of data while working at the company, Ormsby said.
During a monthlong undercover operation, Ward agreed to exchange the data for $400,000, Ormsby said. Ward was arrested after accepting a down payment for the return of additional proprietary data, he said.
Ormsby said Ward had also emailed the cover page of the manual to foreign entities in Kuwait to gauge their interest in the information.
Following a two-week trial in April, a jury in U.S. District Court in Yakima found Ward guilty of stealing trade secrets under the federal Economic Espionage Act.
On Thursday, federal District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson sentenced Ward to three months and also ordered him to have no contact with Boeing or Insitu or its employees.
“Unfortunately, Stephen Ward is emblematic of a growing counterintelligence problem: the insider threat,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Frank Montoya Jr. said in the news release.
The investigation was conducted by the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The RQ-21A Blackjack was developed for the Navy and Marine Corps. With twin tails and a 16-foot wing span, the craft is capable of flying for up to 16 hours while undertaking reconnaissance missions and other operations.
Source: Yakima Herald