A federal grand jury has indicted a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, accusing him of plotting to violate the Arms Export Control Act, a law that prohibits disclosing sensitive technology to foreign countries.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel reports today that the professor, J. Reece Roth, was accused of 18 violations stemming from a trip to China that he took in 2006. Mr. Roth was working with a technology firm spun off from the university that had a contract from the U.S. Air Force, and the indictment alleges that he illegally took to China some classified documents with details about unmanned military drones.

When Mr. Roth returned to Knoxville, federal agents seized his laptop and began an investigation. Mr. Roth said that at the time all the information under question was publicly available and that he had done nothing wrong.

The indictment also alleges that Mr. Roth gave unrestricted access to the information to two graduate research assistants, one a Chinese foreign national and the other a Iranian foreign national, also in violation of federal laws. —Josh Fischman