In a follow-up to a series of state-sponsored spying cases, a federal jury has now convicted Ji Wang, a 63-year-old New York fiber “laser expert” for stealing U.S. defense secrets in an attempt to route info to China’s military science programs. Wang faces up to 15 years in prison for the economic espionage...he was convicted of stealing hundreds of files from an $11.4 million project jointly developed by Corning Inc. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The research was all about increasing fiber laser power by a factor of 1,000 — an advancement that’s critical to next-gen directed-energy weapons (think high power lasers needed to stop incoming missiles or drones). . Just ten days before the theft, Wang applied for China’s “Thousand Talents Plan,” a recruitment program offering financial incentives for scientists to transfer cutting-edge U.S. research to China. Two months later, he received the award and began pitching Chinese officials on a new fiber optics busi...