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Second China-Bound Apple Car Worker Charged With Data Theft (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the here-we-go-again dept.

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.

6 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My issue with this by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  2. This has been going on for a while now. by Ziest · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Chinese engineers working for American companies in their China office have been stealing trade secrets for years. There was a famous case about 10 years ago where a large network equipment manufacturer based in the Silicon Valley had their entire CVS and Subversion repository stolen. How they found out was the American company had put an Easter Egg in the code and when they poked the software running the network switched made by a Chinese company the software printed out "Copyright "
    Which was the name of the American company.

    This shit has been going on for years and no one seems to want to do anything about it. The top management only see the size of the Chinese market and, really, the management is only there to collect their stock grants and then they are off to the next sucker^h^h^h^h^h company.

    --
    Another day closer to redwood heaven
    1. Re:This has been going on for a while now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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."

    2. Re:This has been going on for a while now. by nctritech · · Score: 4, Informative

      Huawei and Cisco’s Source Code: Correcting the Record. Can't believe that they bothered copying a strcmp.c file!

    3. Re:This has been going on for a while now. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      "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.'"
  3. Re:My issue with this by e3m4n · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?