Slashdot Mirror
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.
I know someone working at a major university who caught a Chinese national copying piles and piles of unpublished research papers. They found this person had been sending crates of these things off to China to be published as their own. This was probably a good decade or more ago. The culture seems to be one of, "it is only cheating if you get caught."
Sorry, if someone steals dual use tech that has military applications then you best believe it's more than a civil matter.
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.
If an employee steals a physical item, like a computer, it should obviously be a criminal act, no different than stealing a physical item from a private home. Why should the penalty be less serious for corporate intellectual property that has a higher value and the theft of which more seriously impacts a company?
Yes, there are many US laws that are overly general in their descriptions of crimes. The only reason the US legal system seems to work is that in most cases, the prosecution and adjudication of those alleged crimes is carried out with some measure of common sense, i.e., in a way that most people would agree is reasonable.
Actually the culture is "you are the fool for being fooled"
If you are stupid enough to fall for what ever scam is running then it's your fault.
This is standard operations 101 for Chinese government, companies, out sourcing contract manufacturing, etc.
And still we lap it up.
This guy was more than likely being given a leg up in his new company.
Stealing from the west is fair game.
Very good chance they were in on it.
Go back long enough (Chinese hold grudges) and they remember what the west did to their country.
This is very much revenge on a political scale.
Most of what you claim is true, for the wrong reasons. Most Chinese nationals aren’t moving back out of choice and are merely looking to cash in with intellectual property. It was a prerequisite to be able to come here in the first place. They still have family under the thumb of the PRC. Make no mistake, they are not free to do what they want over here. They still answer to the PRC.
In my opinion, any corporation that engages in any government contract should be prevented from hiring any foreign national under any circumstance at this restriction should also extend to their subcontractors as well. If your Company has a government contract didn’t even the people washing dishes in the cafeteria need to be a US citizen without exception.
For those without government contracts, I agree that the government should not cherry pick which companies get protected. I have the same complaint about the ads that they show before movie. Why is it that if I film a movie in the theater I face jail time, but if somebody blatantly steals my code and start selling it on eBay their worst penalty is a civil lawsuit? Could it possibly be that Hollywood always hosts very high dollar, per plate, fundraising events for Democrat politicians?