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> Are you all really here in 2022, being like "we can't risk a Chinese national from even seeing our American semiconductor research, they will steal it and use

> Are you all really here in 2022, being like "we can't risk a Chinese national from even seeing our American semiconductor research, they will steal it and use it against us?" There are a number of issues at play here and I can speak to several of them, having either helped the federal government directly or having knowledge of industrial espionage in my industry at the time (semiconductors). Some technology is export-controlled in the United States, full stop. Semiconductor research may absolutely be export-controlled and thus may not leave the United States or be shown to foreign nationals. Any researcher's talk, paper, research, materials, etc. must undergo an export controls review first before it leaves the United States or is shown to a foreign national. This is SOP at every research lab in the United States. If you do not disclose information when asked by the federal government as part of an investigation impacting national security, then woe be unto you. I don't know what else to say there. It appears that this may be what caused this gentleman the issues outlined by the NY Times. Industrial espionage is absolutely a thing in the semiconductor industry. I was once told how Hynix pilfered fab designs from Samsung. The loss was estimated to be $1 billion. I am personally aware of other lesser IP loss through the hands of careless engineers. I hope this helps answer your question. It is absolutely a thing in 2022.

shadowgovt 5y ago
> The estimated loss was estimated to be $1 billion. I always give side eye to the accounting that considers lost sales opportunities to be losses. Not saying Hynix did nothing wrong, only that that number assumes a lot of factors that are in no way guaranteed (stability of the market, no third player independently developing innovations that would create an attractive alternative for customers, the ability of the stealing company to implement the design they've acquired, etc.).
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  > I always give side eye to the accounting that considers lost sales opportunities to be losses. That's a perfectly valid but also somewhat trivial point. Some number has to be assigned as human nature requires it. Maybe the best representation of the situation is to present it as a question. When fabs cost $xx billion and take almost a decade to reach fruition from R&D to the point where they start shipping a viable product, if you were able to shave two to four years off that process, what does that number look like to you?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    It looks like saving a billion dollars in redundant work, which is a net societal gain. Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. ;) ... Hence my unease with the way the question is phrased. I'm not saying we should either mandate corporate espionage or enforce some kind of punishments for not publicizing designs, but my point is it doesn't take a lot of reframing of the question to completely change the numbers, and that makes the numbers suspect for being anything real. It's akin to the sleight of mind that allowed us to put the burden of fraud on consumers with the concept of "identity theft," instead of asking why it should be the responsibility of the person who's information was used that some third party used that information to trick a company into giving away resources. What if the mindset were instead "it's not Alice in Topeka's responsibility that Visa allowed Bob Hacker to scam Walmart out of a bunch of free stuff by pretending to be Alice, and Alice should be required to do exactly nothing to fix Walmart and Visa's problem?" What if instead of having to contract credit monitoring agencies to look out for identity theft, the government held credit reporting agencies responsible with statutory damages for defamation when they incorrectly declare a person has done something they have not? A slight reframing of the problem completely changes the proposed solutions and the value calculus of what was gained and what was lost.
    - newnamenewface 5y ago
      > Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. If we were considering this purely from the lens of consumer choice, allowing IP theft seems like a no-brainer. But it's pretty clear from the last few years how important supply chains are to the countries they reside in (and how their absence is strongly felt). To phrase it another way, suppose IP theft makes an industry outright unprofitable in a country and those jobs disappear in that country. It can take decades to spin that stuff up again and the consequences can be disastrous. From that perspective, it's understandable why governments would want to tamp down on IP theft. That said, the story described in the OP is tragic and reflects a perverse situation where someone who came to America seeking those things we promise to the world was considered guilty for chasing the American dream.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Sales isn't the only part of it. Hynix could have reverse engineered the chip and made a functional copy that wouldn't violate any copyright or patent laws (this last is a maybe, depending on if the interface is patented or just the implementation), but that would have cost millions in engineering hours. They also could have hired engineers to build the fabs, again at the cost of a lot of engineering hours.
- mc32 5y ago
  The time to bring technology to market is also worth lots of money. Do you not think Intel is at a loss financially due to how they fell behind TSMC in fabrication technology? If Intel instead had had the better process, how much more revenue would they have, what market cap would they have? It has material impact. If someone unscrupulous could steal TSMCs tech, do you not think TSMC would suffer? Or how much better off the thief would be?
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Preventing incremental material losses suffered by a U.S. mega-corporation isn't very high on my priority list and shouldn't be very high on yours, either, if you are a citizen of this planet. Many parts of the U.S. have third world conditions and the UN recently sent inspectors to parts of West Virginia because things have become so bad there. Millions are without healthcare, children are hungry, etc. Why waste even a breath on protecting proprietary semiconductor technology? The major semiconductor companies have significantly more motivation to protect their proprietary technology than the modicum of care we derive from our saber rattling and trying to maintain geopolitical dominance, and at the end of the day it is up to them to protect their own tech (their real enemy is AMD and ARM anyway). Imbuing certain technologies with vague and in practice largely imaginary export control laws does very little to prevent this kind of behavior, and it is in my mind a misappropriation of resources and mental energy to go out of our way to try to enforce them on a national scale. Shouldn't we, as a society, instead reserve this level of moral and legal outrage for CEOs who price-fix, bribe, and make 100x more than their average employee while people are starving in rural backwaters and dying in the streets and in hospital hallways thanks to COVID?
    - mc32 5y ago
      Oh I agree companies should have greater interest in the well being of their communities and we should effect change that makes them beholden to the communities that allowed them to prosper and not sell the communities out to the lowest bidder overseas. But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over.
matthewdgreen 5y ago
I am a professor in the field of cryptography and there are export restrictions here as well. Under no circumstances would I allow the US government to block publication of my papers or talks based on the theory that my speech is “a technology export.” It’s not even clear that this would be allowed under the First Amendment. The government could obviously try to advance that theory, but I strongly suspect they would run into a hailstorm of First Amendment litigation and public blowback. To me it feels like these prosecutions are an attempt to do exactly that — place restrictions on academic speech and collaboration — but to do it through the “backdoor” of funding agencies and fraud accusations. In other words, if the US said “we are prosecuting you for sharing your open research publications with Chinese scientists,” this would be politically and maybe constitutionally infeasible. So instead they’re trying to achieve effectively the same chilling effect by accusing these scientists of criminal fraud in their funding applications. It is also noteworthy that these cases keep falling apart, which makes me think that they’re exactly as weak as I'm making them out to be. At the end of the day we need to be very careful about this. We are a country that values free speech, has a constitution that guarantees it, and also needs open speech to make science work. “The government passed some laws restricting technology export” does not actually mean the government can and should be able to restrict scientific speech, and it definitely shouldn’t let them do it through weird indirect means like this. ETA: It is important to draw a distinction between proprietary or classified IP (and physical equipment) where espionage or theft of trade secret accusations might make sense vs. open scientific research where it sure doesn’t. These cases keep trying to blur the distinction. I suspect if they were clear examples of the former then the cases wouldn’t keep collapsing. ETA2: I have NSF funding and I just want to add that NSF regulation is byzantine. There are too many regulations surrounding NSF applications and reporting for a human (with an actual job) to be 100% certain that they haven't misstated something or omitted a critical detail. I would guess every US scientist is vulnerable to this sort of (selective, politically-motivated) prosecution.
- kragen 5y ago
  As you are of course aware, but perhaps some people reading this are not, the government did consistently advance the theory that publication of speech about cryptography was "a technology export" subject to export control --- specifically, cryptographic source code --- until Bernstein v. United States, which required a several-years-long court battle. You were a country that values free speech. Now you are a country that values "content moderation" to suppress "misinformation".
namelessoracle 5y ago
We (as in a company i have worked for) have caught employed chinese nationals try to install malware / provided internal account credentials to chinese ip addresses in simple retail big box industries. (I saw this happen personally and was shown what he was trying to install, and how a service account assigned to our group was trying to slurp up and probe the data from an IP address backtraced from China) If that can happen in something relatively trivial you dont think a high stakes industry has it worse?
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  > If that can happen in something relatively trivial you dont think a high stakes industry has it worse? I don't disclose my work for the federal government anymore on public profiles because I became tired of the constant hacking attempts directed at me. Once I scrubbed my profiles they stopped.
justinpombrio 5y ago
> Any researcher's talk, paper, research, materials, etc. must undergo an export controls review first before it leaves the United States or is shown to a foreign national. Are you saying that if a professor in the US doing semiconductor research gave a talk in their university, that talk would have to undergo an "export controls review" before being given (since students could attend the talk, and many students are foreign nationals)? I'm having a very hard time picturing that. Do you have first hand experience, or is this just how you imagine this works?

shadowgovt 5y ago

> The estimated loss was estimated to be $1 billion. I always give side eye to the accounting that considers lost sales opportunities to be losses. Not saying Hynix did nothing wrong, only that that number assumes a lot of factors that are in no way guaranteed (stability of the market, no third player independently developing innovations that would create an attractive alternative for customers, the ability of the stealing company to implement the design they've acquired, etc.).

jason-phillips 5y ago
> I always give side eye to the accounting that considers lost sales opportunities to be losses. That's a perfectly valid but also somewhat trivial point. Some number has to be assigned as human nature requires it. Maybe the best representation of the situation is to present it as a question. When fabs cost $xx billion and take almost a decade to reach fruition from R&D to the point where they start shipping a viable product, if you were able to shave two to four years off that process, what does that number look like to you?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It looks like saving a billion dollars in redundant work, which is a net societal gain. Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. ;) ... Hence my unease with the way the question is phrased. I'm not saying we should either mandate corporate espionage or enforce some kind of punishments for not publicizing designs, but my point is it doesn't take a lot of reframing of the question to completely change the numbers, and that makes the numbers suspect for being anything real. It's akin to the sleight of mind that allowed us to put the burden of fraud on consumers with the concept of "identity theft," instead of asking why it should be the responsibility of the person who's information was used that some third party used that information to trick a company into giving away resources. What if the mindset were instead "it's not Alice in Topeka's responsibility that Visa allowed Bob Hacker to scam Walmart out of a bunch of free stuff by pretending to be Alice, and Alice should be required to do exactly nothing to fix Walmart and Visa's problem?" What if instead of having to contract credit monitoring agencies to look out for identity theft, the government held credit reporting agencies responsible with statutory damages for defamation when they incorrectly declare a person has done something they have not? A slight reframing of the problem completely changes the proposed solutions and the value calculus of what was gained and what was lost.
  - newnamenewface 5y ago
    > Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. If we were considering this purely from the lens of consumer choice, allowing IP theft seems like a no-brainer. But it's pretty clear from the last few years how important supply chains are to the countries they reside in (and how their absence is strongly felt). To phrase it another way, suppose IP theft makes an industry outright unprofitable in a country and those jobs disappear in that country. It can take decades to spin that stuff up again and the consequences can be disastrous. From that perspective, it's understandable why governments would want to tamp down on IP theft. That said, the story described in the OP is tragic and reflects a perverse situation where someone who came to America seeking those things we promise to the world was considered guilty for chasing the American dream.
bluGill 5y ago
Sales isn't the only part of it. Hynix could have reverse engineered the chip and made a functional copy that wouldn't violate any copyright or patent laws (this last is a maybe, depending on if the interface is patented or just the implementation), but that would have cost millions in engineering hours. They also could have hired engineers to build the fabs, again at the cost of a lot of engineering hours.
mc32 5y ago
The time to bring technology to market is also worth lots of money. Do you not think Intel is at a loss financially due to how they fell behind TSMC in fabrication technology? If Intel instead had had the better process, how much more revenue would they have, what market cap would they have? It has material impact. If someone unscrupulous could steal TSMCs tech, do you not think TSMC would suffer? Or how much better off the thief would be?
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Preventing incremental material losses suffered by a U.S. mega-corporation isn't very high on my priority list and shouldn't be very high on yours, either, if you are a citizen of this planet. Many parts of the U.S. have third world conditions and the UN recently sent inspectors to parts of West Virginia because things have become so bad there. Millions are without healthcare, children are hungry, etc. Why waste even a breath on protecting proprietary semiconductor technology? The major semiconductor companies have significantly more motivation to protect their proprietary technology than the modicum of care we derive from our saber rattling and trying to maintain geopolitical dominance, and at the end of the day it is up to them to protect their own tech (their real enemy is AMD and ARM anyway). Imbuing certain technologies with vague and in practice largely imaginary export control laws does very little to prevent this kind of behavior, and it is in my mind a misappropriation of resources and mental energy to go out of our way to try to enforce them on a national scale. Shouldn't we, as a society, instead reserve this level of moral and legal outrage for CEOs who price-fix, bribe, and make 100x more than their average employee while people are starving in rural backwaters and dying in the streets and in hospital hallways thanks to COVID?
  - mc32 5y ago
    Oh I agree companies should have greater interest in the well being of their communities and we should effect change that makes them beholden to the communities that allowed them to prosper and not sell the communities out to the lowest bidder overseas. But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over.

matthewdgreen 5y ago

I am a professor in the field of cryptography and there are export restrictions here as well. Under no circumstances would I allow the US government to block publication of my papers or talks based on the theory that my speech is “a technology export.” It’s not even clear that this would be allowed under the First Amendment. The government could obviously try to advance that theory, but I strongly suspect they would run into a hailstorm of First Amendment litigation and public blowback. To me it feels like these prosecutions are an attempt to do exactly that — place restrictions on academic speech and collaboration — but to do it through the “backdoor” of funding agencies and fraud accusations. In other words, if the US said “we are prosecuting you for sharing your open research publications with Chinese scientists,” this would be politically and maybe constitutionally infeasible. So instead they’re trying to achieve effectively the same chilling effect by accusing these scientists of criminal fraud in their funding applications. It is also noteworthy that these cases keep falling apart, which makes me think that they’re exactly as weak as I'm making them out to be. At the end of the day we need to be very careful about this. We are a country that values free speech, has a constitution that guarantees it, and also needs open speech to make science work. “The government passed some laws restricting technology export” does not actually mean the government can and should be able to restrict scientific speech, and it definitely shouldn’t let them do it through weird indirect means like this. ETA: It is important to draw a distinction between proprietary or classified IP (and physical equipment) where espionage or theft of trade secret accusations might make sense vs. open scientific research where it sure doesn’t. These cases keep trying to blur the distinction. I suspect if they were clear examples of the former then the cases wouldn’t keep collapsing. ETA2: I have NSF funding and I just want to add that NSF regulation is byzantine. There are too many regulations surrounding NSF applications and reporting for a human (with an actual job) to be 100% certain that they haven't misstated something or omitted a critical detail. I would guess every US scientist is vulnerable to this sort of (selective, politically-motivated) prosecution.

kragen 5y ago
As you are of course aware, but perhaps some people reading this are not, the government did consistently advance the theory that publication of speech about cryptography was "a technology export" subject to export control --- specifically, cryptographic source code --- until Bernstein v. United States, which required a several-years-long court battle. You were a country that values free speech. Now you are a country that values "content moderation" to suppress "misinformation".

namelessoracle 5y ago

We (as in a company i have worked for) have caught employed chinese nationals try to install malware / provided internal account credentials to chinese ip addresses in simple retail big box industries. (I saw this happen personally and was shown what he was trying to install, and how a service account assigned to our group was trying to slurp up and probe the data from an IP address backtraced from China) If that can happen in something relatively trivial you dont think a high stakes industry has it worse?

jason-phillips 5y ago
> If that can happen in something relatively trivial you dont think a high stakes industry has it worse? I don't disclose my work for the federal government anymore on public profiles because I became tired of the constant hacking attempts directed at me. Once I scrubbed my profiles they stopped.

justinpombrio 5y ago

> Any researcher's talk, paper, research, materials, etc. must undergo an export controls review first before it leaves the United States or is shown to a foreign national. Are you saying that if a professor in the US doing semiconductor research gave a talk in their university, that talk would have to undergo an "export controls review" before being given (since students could attend the talk, and many students are foreign nationals)? I'm having a very hard time picturing that. Do you have first hand experience, or is this just how you imagine this works?