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For more than three years, the FBI pursued Keith Gartenlaub as a Chinese spy. So why is he now accused of collecting child pornography?
Updated | Three years ago, Keith Gartenlaub was living a seemingly normal life in Southern California. He had a high-paying job as a senior engineer with Boeing, where he had worked for 20 years. His wife ran an art gallery and dabbled in real estate. Once in a while, they were able to visit her elderly parents in Shanghai, and they even bought property there.
Today, that life has been destroyed. The 47-year-old is under house arrest, with an electronic monitoring device on his ankle. He's not allowed to have a computer--or anything else that could give him access to the internet, even a PlayStation 3. He has to submit a drug test three times a month and give his court supervisors two hours' notice to go to the local Starbucks. He and his wife are living on borrowed money.
All this because an FBI agent read a magazine article saying Chinese intelligence might have a spy at Boeing and began poking around. He noted Gartenlaub's wife was born in China and picked up some company grousing about their regular trips there. With a secret warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the bureau obtained records of their telephone calls, emails and bank records and broke into their house to copy their computer hard drives. After a 21-month investigation, which included following them around, the FBI could not make an espionage case against Gartenlaub. But it did find something else: child porn on his computer.
The odd thing is that there is no definitive proof Gartenlaub, a computer systems specialist, ever viewed the pictures. Nor is there any evidence he ever traded in pornography, took photos or videos of children or chatted about his collection of photos online--common practices among pedophiles.
But the porno files gave prosecutors a cudgel: "They said if I helped them on Chinese espionage, they could make the pornography thing go away," recalls Gartenlaub, who heatedly denies any interest in child pornography. "I told them I'd like to help but I...