Some time in 2007, a Chinese national was hired at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center in Phoenix. Lizhong Fan had been picked up as a contract employee specializing in facial recognition technology. A team of minders watched him every moment inside the center, even accompanied him to the bathroom.
Five months into his stay, in June of that year, Fan packed up his equipment and left to Beijing with possibly an extensive amount of sensitive information, including the Arizona's driver's license database.
The breach, which occurred during Janet Napolitano's gubernatorial stay, had been kept a secret for years.
Pulitzer winning investigative reporter Ryan Gabrielson, alongside Andrew Becker from the Center for Investigative Reporting, broke the story in an article that was published on ProPublica.org, a nonprofit news outlet, this week. The pair had been digging for years.
On that day seven years ago, Fan walked out with a hard drive and had computers clean. Essentially, then disappeared from the radar.
Gabrielson's initial exposure to the breach came thanks to Becker, who had received a tip on allegations against a Maricopa Sheriff official, David Hendershott, which said he had sold military secrets.
That name led to Steven Greschner, owner of a startup company called Hummingbird Defense Systems, which was interested in specializing in facial recognition systems. Hendershott and Greschner needed someone who could make the system function, so they brought in an outside contractor, Fan, to establish himself at the counter terrorism center.
"While he was working...when he was inside the intelligence facility, he was being watched rigorously not by people that could really tell what he was doing with the computers, none of the people watching him had background on computer science, and Mr. Fan had an extensive experience..." Gabrielson recalled during Friday's broadcast of Arizona Week. "And yes, after five months working day in and day out in the intelligence facility loading all kinds of sensitive data...he just up and went to Sky Harbor, bought plane tickets to Beijing and fled."
During those five months, Fan had also been allowed to take laptops in and out of the center. "A big no-no."
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office doesn't deny what happened, but they have not acknowledged Hendershott's existence or relationship with the office.
"Who, for most of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's time in his current office, has been the No. 2, the guy who ran the office day-to-day, he was viewed as perhaps the person everyone was scared of at the...office...the one making things happen," Gabrielson pointed out.
He said he tried contacting Hendershott, but once he did Hendershott hung up on him.
Reportedly, Fan is still a big mystery, and Gabrielson said it's not clear whether an investigation was even ignited. The FBI or any other federal agency has ever disclosed any findings.
"We found one of the Maricopa Sheriff's, one of the deputies who had been one of the minders for Fong, and she said that she hadn't even been interviewed, she wasn't even aware that he fled in the way he did," he said.
Breaches happen often, but what compelled Gabrielson about this one is how it happened.
"This is one where we let the guy into the building and then when it came time to fess up about the mistakes, nobody would say anything," he said.
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