NOAA employee charged with stealing U.S. dam information

[IDemo]

Source: Reuters

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employee in Ohio has been charged with stealing sensitive information from a federal database for the nation's dams and lying about the breach to federal agents, prosecutors said.

Xiafen "Sherry" Chen, 59, was arrested on Monday at the NOAA office in Wilmington, Ohio, about 50 miles northeast of Cincinnati, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio said in a statement on Monday.

Chen was charged with theft, illegally accessing a federal database and two counts of making false statements to investigators. She could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison if convicted on the theft charge and five years each if convicted on the other charges, prosecutors said.

Chen was accused of accessing restricted areas of the National Inventory of Dams on various days in May 2012 and downloading sensitive files and providing false information to investigators in June 2013, prosecutors said.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/22/us-usa-crime-ohio-idUSKCN0IB00120141022

[Quackers]

1. Very close to home.

There are some good people at the Wilmington office. I'm very surprised by this.

[XemaSab]

2. I'm surprised they didn't add "espionage" to the charges.

Why else would anyone be downloading that information?

[bananas]

8. Why else? Maybe she's a whistleblower?

Maybe there's a problem with our dams that's being hidden?
With the war on whistleblowers, I wouldn't be surprised.

[christx30]

3. She's getting 20+ years for stealing

information, but Oscar Pistorius only gets 5 years for ending a human life. Shows the priority for the "justice" department.

[LiberalArkie]

4. Stealing what pre 911 and patriot act would have been public domain.

[herding cats]

5. I'm missing your connection between this and Oscar Pistorius.

Oscar Pistorius was tried in the High Court of South Africa, which has nothing to do with this case, or the US Justice Department, in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.

I'm not being rude, I just don't understand what correlation your trying to make here.

[FSogol]

11. You are confused. Pistorius was tried in South Africa, not by Eric Holder and President Obama.

[Nonfatmocha]

6. I wonder what she accessed?

Myself and a friend have been interested in hydrodynamics of dams, specifically spillways we have been able to find blueprints, schematics , and even principal structural stress points. I was blown away the amount of information that was publicly available. I cannot imagine that there is that much information that they are classifying now. I just know all of those government databases once they hit the web you can pretty much guarantee that at least 200-300 data harvester pulled them down before they classified them if they even did. There seems to be a lot of information that is publicly available but is classified in certain federal offices.

[bananas]

7. Terrorist or Whistleblower?

"... the database, which consists of dams meeting certain hazard or height criteria."

Is there a problem with our dams that we should know about?

Is this part of the war on terror or the war on whistleblowers?

[FSogol]

9. "Is there a problem with our dams that we should know about? "

Yes, there is a problem with the nation's dams. They are part of the costly infrastructure we have been ignoring for 40+ years. They are aging and need repairs.

As for whether that person is a whistle blower or stealing the info for financial gain (corporations might want this info), it is unclear.

[hunter]

10. Why waste money fixing our defective and disintegrating national infrastructure?

In the short term it's much less expensive to classify these problems as "secret."

After all we have aircraft carriers and other useless military projects to build and raising taxes on the very wealthy is unthinkable!

[dembotoz]

12. i see the name and i think spy--shame on me

[FSogol]

13. Many hydrologists named Sherry are spies. True fact.