NCO under probe over Aegis data discovery

YOKOHAMA (Kyodo) Kanagawa Prefectural Police and the Maritime Self-Defense Force have teamed up to find out how a noncommissioned officer got his hands on top-secret data on the Aegis defense system and why he obtained them, suspecting someone higher up in the MSDF provided the information.

Police confiscated digital storage devices containing the data during a search in January of the home of the 33-year-old petty officer 2nd class in connection with his Chinese wife, who is suspected of violating immigration law. The couple were not identified, and the law the wife was suspected of violating was not specified.

Information on her current status was not provided.

The hard drives and other storage media contained Aegis destroyer radar data and telecommunications frequencies, sources said.

The U.S. Navy has lodged a strong protest with the MSDF, because the Aegis system is U.S.-developed and its secrets are supposed to be secure, a separate Japanese source said.

Police suspect the noncom violated the confidentiality protection law under the Japan-U.S. defense cooperation agreement by having the data on the advanced missile defense system, the sources said.

Police said the petty officer has cooperated with their investigation and has denied providing the information on core parts of the Aegis defense system to a third party, the sources said.

The petty officer is assigned to the destroyer Shirane, which is part of the 1st Escort Flotilla based in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture.

He is not authorized to access the data in question. As a result, police suspect someone else in the MSDF gave him the data, the sources said.

According to an article in the daily Sankei Shimbun, the sailor told police he had copied the data from the personal computers of former colleagues who had also been aboard the Shirane.

Police and MSDF investigators are questioning the colleagues the sailor mentioned, but their ranks are not high enough to give them access to the data, the paper said.

The paper also said the Chinese wife had been arrested three years ago for theft and deported in February 2004. But she sneaked back into Japan and got a job at an eatery in Yokohama's Chinatown, where she met the noncom. They married last October. Investigators are trying to learn more about her.