Does the Man Charged With Federal Reserve Source Code Theft Have Questionable Citizenship?

This week, Bo Zhang, a man who was a third-party contract programmer working for the Federal Reserve of New York, was charged with stealing $9.5 million worth of source code that prosecutors said, according to Bloomberg, “track[s] the billions of dollars that are electronically transferred every day in the U.S.’s general ledger."

Zhang, who was arrested Wednesday, was charged with one count of stealing government property.

The Treasury spokesperson Matt Anderson is reported as saying that no data, personal information or transactions were compromised in the source code theft. Where the issue may get sticky is over the prosecutors accused reasoning for Zhang's theft and Zhang's citizenship. Bloomberg reports the New York federal prosecutors as stating that Zhang took the code for "private use [...] in the event that he lost his job." Joseph Grob, Zhang's lawyer, had no comment over whether Zhang was a naturalized U.S. citizen or still a citizen of China, according to Bloomberg. Bloomberg also states that Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Weimin said he had no knowledge of the case.

According to Reuters, Zhang worked for an unnamed technology consulting firm and was brought on to develop unrelated source code for the New York Federal Reserve. Reuters reports that Zhang claimed to have lost a thumb drive with the code for the Government-wide Accounting and Reporting Program in July 2011, but when questioned by authorities in August, admitted to taking it.

Zhang will appear in court again on Feb. 17.