Seth Moulton is Introducing Legislation in Response to the Recent Harvard and BU Arrests

Rep. Seth Moulton is planning to introduce a bill this week in response to the recent arrests of several scientists in the Boston area.

Federal officials arrested Charles Lieber, the chairman of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, on charges that he secretly received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Chinese university and then lied about it in 2018. Authorities also announced economic espionage charges against Yanqing Ye, a lieutenant in China’s People’s Liberation Army and Boston University researcher, and Zaosong Zheng, a former cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Ye remains in China; Zheng was detained last month at Logan Airport).

Moulton, who has raised alarms in the past about local colleges’ ties to China, says his legislation aims to better protect American intellectual property against “China’s aggressive campaign to steal our ideas and technology.”

“America leads the world in new technologies because our scientists and researchers have the freedom to create,” the Massachusetts congressman said in a statement. “Our adversaries would rather exploit those freedoms to steal our work than create it themselves.”

Moulton’s bill would makes changes to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires researchers in the United States to disclose if they are being paid to conduct work for foreign governments.

Some foreign policy experts have criticized the 1938 law — originally passed to combat German propaganda in the lead-up to World War II — for being poorly written and overly broad, making it easy to weaponize and difficult to enforce. Moulton’s bill is primarily aimed at the latter issue, though it could address both.

According to the Salem Democrat’s office, the legislation would make FARA easier to enforce by narrowing those who must register as foreign agents to only people working on behalf of foreign governments or foreign political parties.

The current rules include those being paid by any non-American citizen or organization outside the United States, as well as “any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.” As a result, Moulton’s office says the registry has been “flooded with information,” hindering the government’s ability to detect people who fail to disclose their activities.

The bill would also add civil penalties — in addition to criminal penalties — to the law and digitize the registration process so it is easier to search and monitor.

The legislation would also close FARA’s academic exemption for countries that violate human rights laws. Moulton’s office specifically names China, which has been criticized for its repression of religious and ethnic minorities, as well as its persecution of the ruling Communist Party’s political opponents. As it currently exists, FARA has exemptions for activities that are solely commercial, religious, scholastic, academic, scientific, or related to the fine arts.

Even if they’re exempt from FARA, federal grant recipients — like Lieber — are required to disclose potential foreign financial conflicts of interest, including funding from foreign governments, as The Boston Globe reported Tuesday. According to The New York Times, more than 180 investigations have been opened into potential theft of biomedical researach from American institutions; most of the cases reportedly involve individuals accused of stealing for China.