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Second China-Bound Apple Car Worker Charged With Data Theft (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Bloomberg: An Apple hardware engineer was charged by the U.S. with stealing the iPhone maker's driverless car secrets for a China-based company, the second such case since July amid an unprecedented crackdown by the Trump administration on Chinese corporate espionage. Jizhong Chen was seen by a fellow Apple employee taking photographs Jan. 11 with a wide-angle lens inside a secure work space that houses the company's autonomous car project, about six months after he signed a strict confidentiality oath when he was hired, according to a criminal complaint in federal court in San Jose, California. Prosecutors said Chen admitted to taking the photos and backing up some 2,000 files to his personal hard drive, including manuals and schematics for the project, but didn't tell Apple he had applied for a job with a China-based autonomous vehicle company.
Is the use of the FBI as a private police force for Corporate America on civil matters.
Corporate espionage is a federal crime.
Economic Espionage Act of 1996
The underlying problem is not solved though, professional Chinese workers are looking to leave the USA and return to China, that is a real problem for the US, it seems they a loosing skilled workers. Obviously this guy was looking to feather his nest on the way out and gain some information to sell.
Make no mistake though this is a corrupt corporate law, it should only be a civil matter because virtually anything under that law could be claimed as a crime with a ten year prison sentence.
(a) Whoever, with intent to convert a trade secret, that is related to or included in a product that is produced for or placed in interstate or foreign commerce, to the economic benefit of anyone other than the owner thereof, and intending or knowing that the offense will, injure any owner of that trade secret, knowingly-- ``(1) steals, or without authorization appropriates, takes, carries away, or conceals, or by fraud, artifice, or deception obtains such information; ``(2) without authorization copies, duplicates, sketches, draws, photographs, downloads, uploads, alters, destroys, photocopies, replicates, transmits, delivers, sends, mails, communicates, or conveys such information; ``(3) receives, buys, or possesses such information, knowing the same to have been stolen or appropriated, obtained, or converted without authorization; ``(4) attempts to commit any offense described in paragraphs (1) through (3); or ``(5) conspires with one or more other persons to commit any offense described in paragraphs (1) through (3), and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy,
This shit is wildly dangerous, any corporation could make a claim about any employee altering anything without written authorisation. A law written by corporations, for corporations and against the people. Pretty much any US corporation could prosecute any of it's employees at any time under this act for nearly anything related to anything claimed to be a secret that the employee does not have written authorisation to touch. Pretty much every US employee, should demand every instruction be in writing and only carry out those acts as specified in writing.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The American company was Cisco and the Chinese company was, I believe, Huawei. Yep, the same Huawei that's in hot water right now for purportedly reselling American technology to embargoed countries.
Huawei stole the source code to Cisco's IOS.
Huawei and Cisco’s Source Code: Correcting the Record. Can't believe that they bothered copying a strcmp.c file!
There is a tie to current Trump China policy which actually makes this somewhat relevant. Part of the tariffs and current trade negotiations which many like to proclaim are a waste (due to Trump Derangement Syndrome) deal specifically with technology theft. This is a clear example of one of the things the current administration is trying to get China to stop doing and crack down on companies that engage in it. So, while this is a story about Apple, it is also a story about current trade negotiations and more wide spread problems.
"That sounds extremely unlikely. It would be very easy to detect and very obvious that multiple papers from a single university were being mysteriously plagiarised in China."
It would not be easy to detect once translated, because machine translation still produces extremely uneven results. Plus, you'd have to be looking. Finally, the GP explicitly said that these were unpublished papers. It would actually explain a lot! China's science publishing volume skyrocketed relatively recently, and they publish the largest percentage of material which turns out to be horse shit that no one ever actually researched. The idea that they're publishing papers which were deemed unworthy of publication in other countries fits this idea perfectly. Just omit anything by an author who actually does publish, and you cut the risk of detection dramatically. And if they get caught, they'll just execute some scapegoats, and the world will complain only briefly for fear of getting someone else killed. At least, that's the historical pattern.
"There also isn't much to gain from it - publishing scientific papers brings some kudos but the whole point of it is to make the ideas public and share them with others."
No. That might be the whole point if we were just a bunch of computers or something, but there are plenty of other reasons to publish, human reasons like getting paid, or the fact that prolific publishers have more credibility in some eyes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"