Lee pleaded guilty to a single felony of using an unclassified, unsecure computer to download "information related to the national defense."
He and a large band of supporters, many of them from the Bay Area, claimed the government pursued him simply because he was a Chinese American.
Lee's ethnicity did fuel investigations of him by U.S. Energy Department counterintelligence agents and the FBI, but so did his copying of an extraordinary amount of nuclear weapons software to portable tapes.
He offered a persuasive account of throwing his tapes, containing what federal prosecutors called the "crown jewels" of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, into a Dumpster, which then was emptied into a landfill.
The Dumpster's contents were buried in one of two locations. An FBI team unearthed the shallowest garbage heap and found nothing. Verifying the deeper home of the "crown jewels" would, by FBI estimates, have cost at least $45 million, and it was never dug up.
Lee never persuasively explained his need for the tapes, and his case ended in uncertainty.