26 ms·
Chinese battery expert is charged with stealing trade secrets from US employer
- oh_sigh 8y agoHow much is the expected upside for crimes like this for the individual? Basically, even if you make this alleged crime punishable by life in prison, will people still attempt it because the upside is so much?
- mtgx 8y agoThere's probably more than just a financial upside, but I imagine someone like this would pretty much be considered a hero at home (even if not publicly admitted as such). It seems like this issue is pretty systemic/coordinated by a centralized party.
- stretchwithme 8y agoStatus is a powerful motivator.
- fipple 8y agoYou’re thinking about this the wrong way. These people are on a mission for Mother China. It’s patriotism and loyalty. It’s why militaries everywhere get people signing up for a “glorious death” protecting the assets of billionaires.
- shawn 8y agoPatriotism and loyalty usually come at a price. I think the question was more about the price than the loyalty.
- fermienrico 8y agoHumans are still very barbaric in large masses. Tribalism persists in our very psyche.
- throw-far-away 8y ago"Still?" Always have been, always will be. Wishing and hoping are idealistic, utopian pipe-dreams.
- whatshisface 8y agoNow that we have multiple hypotheses (patriotic motivation and materialistic motivation) we should think about how we could tell which one it was. I can't think of any way that we could ever know the difference.
- fipple 8y agoSpying isn’t new. There’s always a combination of the two.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoChinese people in general aren’t really like that. They aren’t especially patriotic or loyal when compared to Americans (most will eye roll at the above accusation). A lot of it just about money and opportunity that isn’t otherwise present in the states (corporate espionage is less common in the USA because it is prosecuted aggressively). Likewise, most soldiers don’t do soldiering for the glory or death, they do it for the money/opportunity.
- megablast 8y agoIt might just be money. You will get paid more if you have worked for a well known company.
- Confusion 8y agoIf you are asked to swipe some IP of your employer, with a subtle reminder you still have family in your home country and they know where to find them, what would you do?
- Pica_soO 8y agoEspecially if your new "home country" aka the US&A, does not go on the barricades if you a citizen get abducted, threatened or otherwise extorted.
- eklavya 8y agoNote: I am only talking about the military part. So they will only protect billionaires? No, that doesn't drive people to make sacrifices. In my opinion it's just about protecting what you love. There are some things worth fighting for even if it means a “glorious death”. Soldiers aren't stupid, I know some. They just can't not take the responsibility. In my eyes they are heroes.
- alextooter 8y agoWhat a joke here.I think there are no patriotism and loyalty. Those just in dreams and stories.
- swimfar 8y agoThe guy who stole the wind turbine software and gave it to a Chinese competitor was promised a 5-year $200k/year employment deal. Although, it sounds like he may not have gotten it in the end. (Maybe there was a clause about getting caught.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanlappin/2011/09/27/american-superconductor-and-its-rogue-employee-both-duped-by-sinovel/#7700fa595faa https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanlappin/2011/09/27/american-... https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626683457/judge-orders-chinese-wind-turbine-maker-to-pay-59-million-for-stealing-trade-sec https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626683457/judge-orders-chines...
- thelittleone 8y agoI suppose the guy was outraged by the poor ethics of the Chinese competitor when he didn't get the job.
- microtherion 8y ago5 years @ $200K a year? This guy could use some negotiation advice from Anthony Levandowski.
- jk27277 8y agoThe guy was an idiot. No Chinese company would stick to such a deal. Promise the world, deliver nothing.
- pizza 8y agoMICE: - Money - Ideology - Compromise/Coercion - Ego/Extortion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_spying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_spying
- cauldron 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Chin... There are also local level derivatives. That guy who edited babies no long ago is one of it, apparently he raked in hundreds of millions of both government and private investment, claiming he invented an industry-leading gene sequencing machine that in fact is a failed US product he bought from his professor. Also, Huawei in their early ages stole one of Cisco router's source code and priced out Cisco with an exact same product compatible with Cisco systems, one Chinese academic invovled in modifying admitted it in an article. One of the role model stories.
- daviesliu 8y ago> Also, Huawei in their early ages stole one of Cisco router's source code and priced out Cisco with an exact same product compatible with Cisco systems, one Chinese academic invovled in modifying admitted it in an article. One of the role model stories. Source?
- zeist 8y agoInternet stories
- throw-far-away 8y agoDeveloping countries are strongly motivated to steal tech from established ones; it's self-righteous, moral panic furor to judge Chinese nationals as somehow acting differently than Americans did when their nation was young.
- rhegart 8y agoI don’t agree that much with the Trump administration, but their overall policy and effort on China is commendable. It might be that the news is just focused on China lately making it seem like we’re doing more to combat the IP theft and other abuses, but I don’t think so. I’m glad we are finally getting tough. I know one case isn’t indicative of this but the overall trend is clearly in the right direction. Appeasement over a decade has yielded literally nothing.
- zwaps 8y agoAt this point, its best to assume CCP it talking, promising, manipulating and strongarming everyone with ties to China. Be as careful as you can
- scruffyherder 8y agoThey just get your family.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Babiker 8y agoI'm gonna assume in this case he was negatively charged ...
- Scoundreller 8y agoAre you sure?
- quickthrower2 8y agoI think it’s a battery joke.
- evancox100 8y agoMissed opportunity: "Are you positive?"
- Scoundreller 8y agoI was hoping for “I’m positive”
- Proven 8y agoIt seems his expertise in stealing want sufficient. Note to CCP: improve employee training!
- maxerickson 8y agoInformation wants to be free (except for trade secrets of US corporations). Note that this is sarcasm about the incongruity in attitudes, not support of this sort of theft.
- nopetrain 8y agoIf that information damaged your livelihood, would you still want it to be free? Not advocating for anything here, just pointing out.
- origami777 8y agoNormally I'm all for hiring the best and brightest from all over the world. But with the mission that China seems to be on, I think US startups should be wary of hiring Chinese nationals. Of course they are not all spies. But, it only takes one to fuck your company. I don't know what the solution is. I don't think companies should flat out stop hiring Chinese nationals, because that's punishes the ones with good intent. But it's clear there is enough danger that you need some plan to take on the risk.
- vincnetas 8y agoWhat makes you think that China can't recruit non Chinese nationals to spy for them? This agains reminds me about similar "bright" idea : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
- origami777 8y agoGood point. I should have left the nationality out and just said that companies good security policies to protect their IP. The threats come from many places.
- zachguo 8y agoAnything worth stealing in US startups?
- quickthrower2 8y agoThe seed money?
- lvs 8y ago"They" ... "the ones" ... "it only takes one" ... It takes only one bigoted executive to screw up your company fairly well too, but I think we all know what to do about that one. Edit: Fine, "bigoted" for the guy having a pedantic problem with the word "racism." Prejudice is prejudice.
- zachguo 8y agoHe spent more than a decade in Caltech, his brain probably stores more knowledge than the USB drive.
- zachguo 8y agoIn the past year, there were several charges from DOJ against Chinese companies, employees and scientists related to IP theft. Those charges made a lot of noises, but what are the case outcomes?
- zeist 8y agoWho cares, people are primed to consider China as enemy. These BS charges/stories(Bloomberg) are only going to help it.
- ardy42 8y ago> In the past year, there were several charges from DOJ against Chinese companies, employees and scientists related to IP theft. Those charges made a lot of noises, but what are the case outcomes? The wheels of justice move slowly. In the US, felony cases can take more than a year to resolve: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-criminal-cases-take.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-criminal-cases-t...: > The amount of time that passes between an arrest and the filing of charges on the one hand, and trial or entry of a guilty or “no contest” plea on the other, varies widely from case to case.... Felony trials can linger without resolution for over a year—and that’s without accounting for any delay between arrest and the filing of charges.
- devoply 8y agoSteal brains from a country and no one bats an eye, steal ideas from a country and everyone loses their minds.
- krtkush 8y ago> Steal brains They did not force anyone to migrate to the country.
- devoply 8y agoWhat I was talking about is, if the guy just left the country with all the ideas in his head and went back to China there would be no case. But because there is evidence showing he had access to some ideas that he was not supposed to have access to they have a case against him.
- paganel 8y agoThey kind of did when the best universities in the West have depended at some stage of their life on the host countries doing some bad things to countries like China (think the opium war in the mid-1800s). The reason that countries like China or India don't have their Harvards and Oxbridges is not because the people in there were more stupid and didn't know how to run a higher place of learning, it's because the adversarial socio-economic conditions of that time (many of them imposed by the host countries of the Harvards and the Oxbridges) forbade them to.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- StreamBright 8y agoWho exactly? US government had a program for this after WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
- altvali 8y agoI have a question about trading secrets and working in machine learning. How should a ML company go about hiring people and protecting its tech? I once interviewed for a company that claimed above state of the art results on some datasets (they actually weren't), and they wanted me to sign a contract where I was forbidden to ever work for their current and future clients (that's not enforceable). In ML you usually don't need a flash drive, you learn enough about what makes your team achieve great results that you can go to another company and use what you learned and it seems impossible to prove that you "stole trade secrets" from the previous company.
- ndnxhs 8y agoPay your employees enough that they never want to leave. If you can't afford that then you just have to accept that you don't own the people who work for you.
- sometimesijust 8y agoProject the data, not the model. You need to do it anyway and has the side benefit of making overfitting more difficult. Protecting the model is impossible anyway since most advancements terms to be trying lots of publicly known techniques and discovering that a particular combination works best for your data. Once one knows which techniques those are these nothing stopping a competent engineer from reimplementing them at another company.
- GuiA 8y agoIndeed. For commercially useful applications, collecting the data, labeling it, etc, costs orders of magnitude more than a team of PhDs building the models.
- trott 8y ago> For commercially useful applications, collecting the data, labeling it, etc, costs orders of magnitude more than a team of PhDs building the models. I don't think it's typical. For example, JFT has 350e6 images, and it probably cost ~$35M to hand-label, but Google has paid people far in excess of that to work on image classification.
- yerich 8y ago> The agent said Tan handed the flash drive over to the US company, and the firm found that the deleted files would have allowed his new employers to recreate the product in question. The files had been deleted from the flash drive the day before Tan resigned, the affidavit said. Call me confused, but I don't really see a crime here? The defendant turned over the data before his resignation and is not accused of actually making an attempt to transfer or sell the data to another party, or conspiring to do so. The only accusation is that he had some files that weren't part of his job to have, apparently. But presumably the internal corporate system allowed him access to it and thus he obtained it without breaching any computer system. Perhaps his workplace policy barred him from downloading files onto a USB drive. But is that considered theft?
- abrawill 8y agoWhy were they on the USB drive is what I’d like to know.
- pfortuny 8y agoWell, if the documents contain trade secrets... You may see them on your boss’s desk and read them and memorize them. That does not make your making a copy of them (even from memory) right or lawful.
- baybal2 8y agoI think that's the second Micron case. An exec reports "phone stolen," phone found in his "collaborator's" locker who accidentally shoved it into her bag along with other papers on the table. Both the exec who reported theft and his "accomplice" are send to jail, and a "national security" case just sprung up from two completely unrelated cases thanks to prosecutor's creativity. Same thing here: 1. Apparently they found that he simply had "weird files" on his flash drive. 2. He had full right to access them. 3. He deleted "weird" files he had rightful access to, and voluntary surrendered the physical medium upon his resignation. On the sole premise of him deleting "weird" files, he was accused of espionage, with the charge constructed from nothing but tangents, but no "corpus" to "habeus."
- blinko12 8y agoSCMP has a decidedly pro-China slant ever since it was bought by Alibaba owner Jack Ma. I'd be a little careful about trusting this article
- shanghaikid 8y agoJust
- simonhamp 8y agoHeadline should have stopped at: Chinese battery expert charged
- buboard 8y agoall charged batteries discharge, expert or not
- peter303 8y agoUS travelers to China should beware. Three caucasian Canadians are languishing in Chinese jails due to the Huawei executive. Chinese practice allows six months confinement while the prosecutor conducts an investigation. Meng has relatives and friends in high places while this guy may or may not.
- weconserve 8y ago"Canadian held in China questioned daily, no lawyer, can't turn off light: sources" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-canada/canadian-held-in-china-questioned-daily-no-lawyer-cant-turn-off-light-sources-idUSKCN1OK07Q https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-canada/canadian-hel... Canada, US call for 'immediate release' of two Canadians held by China https://www.nst.com.my/world/2018/12/442866/canada-us-call-immediate-release-two-canadians-held-china https://www.nst.com.my/world/2018/12/442866/canada-us-call-i...
- logicchains 8y agoFound the actual complaint: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/HongjinTan.pdf https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Ho...
- dguido 8y agoThank you! I wish more articles would at least link to the complaint. Here are the important bits: > On 12/12/2018 at approximately 10:30 a.m., Tan contacted his supervisor, advised he was resigning from Company A, and gave his two weeks' notice. Tan told his supervisor that he was returning to China to be with his family as he is the only child to aging parents. Tan told his supervisor that he did not currently have a job offer, but was negotiating with a few battery companies in China. > Tan's resignation prompted Company A to revoke his access to company systems, and conduct a Systems Access review of Tan's computer activity. > That review confirmed that Tan had accessed hundreds of files, including research reports. The reports included not only how to make Product A, which, according to Company A, is a complicated and technically difficult process, but also Company A's plans for marketing Product A in China and in cell phone and lithium-based battery systems. These files included information that Company A considers to be trade secrets and outside the scope of Tan's employment with Company A. The review revealed Tan downloaded restricted files to a personal thumb drive. In the course of his regular duties and responsibilities, Tan should have used his company issued laptop. Tan did not have authorization to use a thumb drive to download Company A files. Tan's supervisor confirmed that nothing in the downloaded files was within Tan's area of responsibility. Further Company A confirmed, through Tan's supervisor, Tan did not have a work related need to access or download the restricted files.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deevolution 8y agoIf only more trade secrets were shared, stolen, distributed whatever you want to call it, we'd all be progressing at a much nicer pace. Cheers to all the software pirates out there making the world a better place.
- jgowdy 8y agoYes, as long as every corporation continued to invest at the same rate despite the fact that their trade secrets would be worthless and they'd be undercut by cheaper competition. This fantasy of "if only all commercially valued knowledge were free" ignores the realities of economics, which pays for the development of technology. Even open source software development exists largely on the corporate dollar with a few companies funding most development. If more secrets were shared, stolen, distributed, whatever, that will change the equation for companies deciding to invest. You're better off optimizing for time to market and making a half ass product than trying to achieve technical differentiation/superiority only to have the results of your research and development stolen outright.
- deevolution 8y agoFair points, but a quicker to market half assed product also means it'll likely be cheaper and more widely available which translates to more product iteration cycles because more data, more users, more tests and more competition.
- notacoward 8y ago> a quicker to market half assed product That's not the alternative at all. If companies have insufficient incentive to do certain kinds of R&D, they just won't do it. Entire categories of products wouldn't exist. Do you think any part of the computer you typed that on would be as nice - or exist at all - if the people who invented better screens and batteries and storage media hadn't expected to gain first/most from the basic physics and chemistry and process engineering involved? No, there would have been zero product iteration cycles without the basic innovations on which those depend.