The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have stepped up their scrutiny of colleges and universities in San Bernardino County and elsewhere to ward off efforts by Communist Chinese agents to not only purloin advanced chemical engineering data and other sensitive information but to obtain restricted chemicals as well.
University and college science departments have, generally, unfettered access to chemicals that in most other contexts are considered restricted materials.
In other contexts at universities and colleges elsewhere in the United States, most famously at the University of Florida, Chinese nationals who have matriculated as students or obtained positions as researchers have purchase more than 10,000 samples of organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, biochemicals, drugs, toxins and reagents by ordering them on behalf of various campus laboratories and then diverting them to secondary locations, from which they were illicitly shipped to China.
These activities occurred frequently over a recently-ended seven year period.
Action against some of these perpetrators was initiated by the United States Department of Justice, although in some cases, those involved slipped away and successfully returned to China, the FBI has reported.
The effort to prevent further occurrences includes both regular and random auditing of laboratory purchases as well as electronic surveillance of laboratories, along with human agents monitoring likely circumstances in which highly purified chemicals and drugs are requisitioned.
-Mark Gutglueck