Greetings.
Delighted to see you confirmed. I hope history will rate you as one of our
greatest Attorney generals, if DOJ will have managed to effectively prevent the
stealing of America's classified and proprietary information and yet protect
the rights of American citizens, especially those of Chinese Ams., whom may be
under intense suspicion when the US China relations is tense.
My name
is S. B. Woo, former Lt. Governor of Delaware (1985-89) and currently the
president of 80-20 Educational Foundation, Inc. (EF), a cyberspace organization
having by far the largest email list of Asian Americans.
I
recently ran across an article, entitled "Rules of Conduct for Chinese working in America", written by a prominent member
of our community, Dr. Geroge Koo. He cautioned that "Chinese working in
America" should curtail the exercise of our rights, given the unfortunate
case of Sherry Chen . A New York Times article, entitled
"Accused of Spying for China, Until She Wasn't,"
clearly illustrated how DOJ's careless investigations could ruin a citizen's
life. Dr. Koo cautioned:
" *
The above rules are especially relevant if you work in the technology space.
Remember that the presumption is that you are predisposed to sending
intelligence to Beijing.
* Do not
assume you won't get in trouble if you send publicly available information to
China for the most innocuous reasons. The U.S. is a country of laws and
regulations. If the authorities decide that they want you in jail, they can
find laws that you have not heard of to justify putting the handcuffs on
you."
I
strongly disagree with Dr. Koo's 2 points which suggested self-imposed
restraints by Chinese Americans thereby voluntarily diminishing our rights as
citizens. My organization believes that America is "the land of the free
and home of the brave." We believe that "As citizens, we have the complete
freedom to communicate, visit with, and help people of our respective
"old countries," if we wish, so long as the above forms of visits,
communications and helps do not involve passing of classified information, and
so long as we are not under an explicit legal or contractual duty to keep
information confidential. We define classified information as such information
which is explicitly designated as classified or proprietary, or by similar
terms by either our governments or private institutions."
I
respectfully request a confirmation from you regarding my understanding of our
rights, as stated above. Note that I am NOT asking you to give a categorical
approval of the statements in quotes. After all, it is nothing but a personal
interpretation of my constitutional rights. Nor am I asking you to comment on
anything else, including the statements made by Dr. Koo. I just want to know if
I behave in a way as stated in quotes, I'll not be in trouble with the law.
Being a
good citizen, I am not eager to create troubles for myself and DOJ. I respectfully
request a reasonably prompt reply on such a fundamental point of the rights of
American citizens. This information is being sent to you via an email*, and a
registered and return receipt requested letter.
If I
don't hear from you within a reasonable amount of time, my organization intends
to publicly offer to accept the first 5 requests for public information from
any citizens of an Asian nation, be they civilians or government employees. Our
acceptance will be contingent upon whether we'll have the ability to honor the
request by doing 2 or less hours of research only, and that in helping them we
don't pass on classified and/or proprietary information.
Our
purpose in doing the above is to establish with concrete actions that we, Asian
Ams, have the rights stated in paragraph 4 above. It'll prove to our community
that the chilling effect felt by our entire community owing to the Sherry Chen
episode is NOT real. I hope that you'll soon tell me that DOJ has not
and will NOT infringe upon the rights of Americans, including Asian Americans,
and that America remains "the land of the free and home of the
brave."
Sincerely,
S.B. Woo (302 366-0259)
President,
80-20 Educational Foundation. Inc.www.80-20EF.org
* sent
via http://www.justice.gov/doj/your-message-department-justice ; subject topic:
civil rights; Name: S. B. Woo; email address: sbw@udel.edu; Date: June 15, 2015
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