Chinese programmer arrested in US for e-theft

SAN FRANCISCO: Chinese national, Shan Yan Ming was arrested Tuesday by the FBI after workers at privately held 3DGeo company, discovered him trying to download an expensive, proprietary software program last week. A California-based company The Mountain View, sells software used in seismic imaging of oil fields.

Ming has not yet been formally charged. Ming had been at 3DGeo since late April, being trained to use some of the company's software as part of a contract 3DGeo has with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.

"We have security in place and we monitor any kind of activity like this," said the 3DGeo representative. "As soon as it escalated from being sort of unusual to being threatening activity" the company stopped it and asked Ming to leave.

The company representative said he did not know why the programmer would have been trying to access the proprietary software, which he said costs $200,000 or more.

Representatives from the FBI in San Jose, California, and the Chinese consulate in San Francisco were not immediately available for comment.

(Reuters)