Fremont, Calif. ? Cecilia Chang says she used to look the other way when people talked about “heavy stuff” civil liberties, constitutional rights, discrimination.

Now she carries a stack of petitions, cajoling signatures from strangers to bolster a presidential pardon campaign for her friend Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwanese-American scientist once suspected of spying against the United States. Two years ago today Sept. 13, 2000 Lee was freed from nine months of solitary confinement as the investigation around him crumbled.

While convicted on a single count of copying sensitive nuclear weapons data, Lee received an apology from a federal judge for his treatment. The activism Lee’s case inspired continues to flourish in Chang, along with many other Asian- Americans who have no personal connection to Lee.

“It was really a watershed moment in terms of Asian-Americans coming of age,” said Karen Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium in Washington. “For the first time, you had Asian-American professionals thinking about criminal justice and the issue of whether the government is always right.”

In Fremont, Chang has started a new group inspired by the Lee case, Justice for New Americans. In Sacramento, activist Ivy Lee created the Chinese American Political Action Committee, which has about 30 members. And in Detroit, Marie-Ange Weng formed the Council of Asian Pacific Americans, a coalition of organizations with about 1,000 members.

Weng helped create her group shortly after Lee was released.

Like Chang, she never considered herself a civil rights advocate. But two summers ago, the nursing professor marched outside a federal building in downtown Detroit at a Lee case protest she’d organized, waving a red sign that read “Stop Racial Profiling.”

“I was hoping that by building such a coalition, in case another event like Wen Ho Lee occurred, I would be able to reach out to people much faster,” said Weng, 64.

Other people have joined existing national groups, such as the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Lee, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, was suspected of stealing what officials called the “crown jewels” of U.S. nuclear weapons science with the intent of handing them over to China. He was fired, then later arrested though charged with unlawfully copying material, not spying and imprisoned.

In September 2000, he pleaded guilty to a single count of downloading data to computer tape. He has said he made copies to protect data.

The government dropped 58 other counts, and U.S. District Judge James Parker apologized to Lee, saying the Justice and Energy departments had “embarrassed our entire nation” by the way they handled the case.

Lee’s case raised the specter of a stereotype that runs throughout Asian-American history, “of being the foreigner, not necessarily being trusted,” Narasaki said.

“No matter how hard you work and how much you’ve contributed to the community, how well you raise your children, your loyalty is still going to be questioned just because of what you look like.”