Second China-Bound Apple Car Worker Charged With Data Theft (bloomberg.com) 75
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.
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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
When will people learn? (Score:1)
Chinese steal.
Re: When will people learn? (Score:1)
They're just doing what Jobs wanted. Didn't he say himself that the great artists steal!
Re:My issue with this (Score:5, 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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:My issue with this (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Sorry, if someone steals dual use tech that has military applications then you best believe it's more than a civil matter.
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Pretty much any US corporation could prosecute any of it's employees at any time under this act
Except US corporations could not prosecute any employees under this act because only a Federal Prosecutor (read: direction from the US Attorney General) can bring charges.
Re:My issue with this (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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The flipside of selective enforcement is that someone with an axe to grind against you specifically, or thinks your downfall will lift them up, can throw the book at you even if your actions were moral and didn't contradict the spirit of the law. Do you want your fate to rest on "I know it when I see it?"
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The flipside of selective enforcement is that someone with an axe to grind against you specifically, or thinks your downfall will lift them up, can throw the book at you even if your actions were moral and didn't contradict the spirit of the law. Do you want your fate to rest on "I know it when I see it?"
If the courts are functional and have sufficient safeguards for the rights of the accused, then the system works. If such courts don't exist and there is no common assumption of judicial fairness, then it doesn't matter what the law is or what the police or prosecutors do. This is one of the keys differences between the US and China. It's not so much how the law is written but how the underlying police, prosecutors, and judges function.
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Crooked courts are like a backdoored compiler. However, just because you have an unbackdoored compiler doesn't mean you're not compiling malware (bad laws).
And yes, the police/prosecutors are responsible for the selective enforcement, which is what I was warning of.
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Problem is that "intellectual property" is not well defined. If someone steals a computer it's easy to point to a physical object. If someone learns how your process works and then goes off to work for the competition and uses their knowledge and experience to develop a similar system, did they "steal" your IP?
You didn't lose your IP, your process still exists and works, and you can't reasonably expect them to wipe their memories or not use their accumulated experience in future jobs. Well, you can try with
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Re:My issue with this (Score:5, 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?
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Most Chinese nationals arenâ(TM)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.
This is mostly untrue. Chinese nationals have no trouble getting passports or leaving the country. Of course I'm sure the government targets a few individuals, just like the western ones do, but there is no mass amateur spy programme as some people seem to think.
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 didnâ(TM)t even the people washing dishes in the cafeteria need to be a US citizen without exception.
Aside from anything else that wouldn't work. Do you think native dish washers are any less prone to being bribed or blackmailed?
It's also a very slippery slope. What if a staff member marries a foreigner? What if they date them one time? What if one
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This is mostly untrue. Chinese nationals have no trouble getting passports or leaving the country. Of course I'm sure the government targets a few individuals, just like the western ones do, but there is no mass amateur spy programm as some people seem to think.
Every student coming over here has been indoctrinated to put china first. The idea that china is the center of the universe is fully ingrained in the culture. The characters that mean China literally translate to middle kingdom or central kingdom. Its represented as a square with a line going right through the middle of it. If you think America-First is an offensive concept and that the word Nationalism is a dirty word like Fascism, then you should really really really hate China. What they have redefines t
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Its as if you don't have any experience in this area at all. Do you know what a Cryptological Technician (CT) is? Its a rate (job) in the US Navy that requires a clearance above top secret. They are the handlers of highly classified communication between command staff. Do you know what sort of vocational training a CT receives that correlates to anything in the civilian world? Aside from the linguists, NONE what so ever. So for a CT to lose their clearance is a career ending death sentence. That said, I have seen it happen, to a Senior Chief (E-8). He was a us citizen, his wife was a us citizen. While on deployment, she bounced a check. Thats it. She bounced a check. That's how seriously guarded these secrets are. He had to spend the rest of his 20yr career managing bullshit assignments like 'tech pub library' etc because his only skills were stripped away as a result of his loss of clearance.
While I don't disagree with the bulk of your post, I do with this part... The E-8 may have told you it was simply one bounced check, but I can assure you it was more than that. I do know what you are talking about when it comes to clearances, etc from my 22 years of AD and having held those levels of clearance. A single instance of a check bouncing could occur for many reasons that are not nefarious. (she wrote the check before getting his message he had used the ATM and taken out money so needs to trans
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Is the use of the FBI as a private police force for Corporate America on civil matters.
This is exactly what a police force should be used for. Local police are called to arrest thieves that steal from local stores. The FBI is called to arrest thieves that steal from national companies. It just happens that the shoplifter in this case was headed for China.
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Waymo Uber case (Score:1)
This sounds like the same as the Waymo vs Uber case, though this guy hasnâ(TM)t reported to his new job. Was that Waymo employee arrested on criminal charges?
All signs point to Chuck E Cheese (Score:1)
then the question is who did apple steal it from first?
If you just follow a simple exercise in logic, you can find out easily.
We know that Apple is not producing a car, so the car technology Apple stole must have been from a company also not producing self-driving cars.
If we look at this large diagram of companies I have here (sorry, too large to reproduce in ASCII plus I think it has a curly quote in there somewhere so it wouldn't render right anyway), we can clearly see the only company not in active work
This has been going on for a while now. (Score:5, 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.
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The string should have been "Copyright <year> <company name>"
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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.
Re:This has been going on for a while now. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: This has been going on for a while now. (Score:1)
That doesn't really refute anything.
Cisco's quotes says that strcmp.c is too similar to be co-incidence. Huawei says that the code had similar original sources. Given it is strcmp.c, ie part of standard c libraries, and this was the best example they gave, it seems that Cisco is grasping.
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Cisco is claiming that Huawei copied some library files, which appear to be the standard C ones implementing string functions. They word it so that it sounds like the copied Cisco's routing protocol source, but actually if you read carefully they say "two library files" which are presumably the same as before, C standard library files.
Did Cisco even write those files itself? More likely they are, as Huawei says, widely available online and probably copyright some other third party. Often proprietary compile
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Your arguments appear to be very similar to those of apologists for an ideological and statist competitor.
If you're going to go that way, why don't you talk about Cisco's statism? NSA backdoors for days.
Re:This has been going on for a while now. (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."
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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.
Re: This has been going on for a while now. (Score:1)
Sorta like the US then
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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. 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.
Re:This has been going on for a while now. (Score:5, 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.
Hey Leftists? Where's your crush on China, now? (Score:2)
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Give him ten years . . . (Score:1)