11 ms·

This doesn't surprise me. I knew someone that intentionally graduated with a specific major, so they could get a job in that industry and send trade secrets/IP

This doesn't surprise me. I knew someone that intentionally graduated with a specific major, so they could get a job in that industry and send trade secrets/IP back to China. The purpose was to create a competing company. It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company and I think eventually gave up and went back home.

scrubs 3y ago
Slightly different: I worked with a guy who took a job at a finance firm I worked to understand trading. His stated goal? Arabic states and individuals have stupid amounts of money he can play with. That is, he wanted parlay learning and connections to start his own firm.
mupuff1234 3y ago
Did that person just go around disclosing their plan?
- reaperman 3y ago
  I think if someone actually had government handlers asking them to do this, most of those people wouldn't blab about it to their school chums. But there's a subset of people with grandiose delusions / general behavior problems who feel a compulsion to tell everyone about their grand plans/machinations to become rich and powerful.
  - ecoquant 3y ago
    I think you are underestimating how tough it would be to be playing James Bond and not tell anyone. You wouldn't have to be a delusional braggart to want to tell a friend this. Most spies are not going to be as much of a compartmentalized lunatic like Robert Hanssen or someone at that level.
  - djtango 3y ago
    Reminds me of that scene from Silicon Valley where Jian Yang has a bunch of new startup ideas on his whiteboard
    - popcalc 3y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > someone actually had government handlers It most likely wasn't a Handler/MSS type espionage. It was most likely trying to grab IP to found a domestic competitor, and raise a Seed round from local government accelerators like those Beijing and Hangzhou have.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Having seen something like this happen once, what probably happened was the person OP is referring to was trying to get IP in order to start their own private sector startup, and probably get some seed funding from a regional government (eg. Beijing and Hangzhou did this in the 2000s to jumpstart their tech industry) It's similar to the Israeli program in the 90s (who's name I'm blanking out on EDIT: Yozma I before it was privatized) because just like China in the 2000s-early 2010s, there wasn't a notable private sector VC industry yet.
  - maayank 3y ago
    > It's similar to the Israeli program in the 90s (who's name I'm blanking out on EDIT: Yozma) because just like China in the 2000s-early 2010s, there wasn't a notable private sector VC industry yet. Quite an allegation... any reference to them sponsoring/encouraging stealing IP or am I misreading and you simply meant it's a government sponsored startup accelerator program?
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      It's not really that damaging. Israel never recognized American software or pharmaceutical patents, and most countries do some form of Industrial Espionage (France is fairly notable in the space as well [4]). The wildest cases tended to be back in the 1990s, when Israel was trying to build a domestic armament industry, notably by stealing American IP and selling it to the Chinese [0][1][2][3] (most modern Chinese weapons systems today are based on that IP transfer in the 1990s). This largely ended by the mid-late 2000s when the Israeli tech industry was much more established, and Ehud Barak (edit: Olmert - mixed up his surname and the Barak middle scandal) getting arrested on corruption charges, heralding the end of Israel's Wild West days in the tech industry. Also, Tiannammen Era sanctions from the 1990s forced Israel defense companies to pivot to India, which doesn't allow vendors to sell SKUs to India which Pakistan and China have access to, and would leverage French and Israeli SKUs based on American designs. I highly recommend reading this GAO report from the 90s [3] [0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538128 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538128 [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/israel-selling-china-military-technology-cia-chief-asserts.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/israel-selling-chin... [2] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149008 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149008 [3] - https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-osi-92-6.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-osi-92-6.pdf [4] - https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-property-theft-107020 https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-p...
atonse 3y ago
Hmmm that seems like a clear cut case to report to the FBI. Yeah, assuming that they were walking around telling people about it.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The FBI gets more credible reports than it has the labor to investigate. Not to mention in this example no crime even yet occurred.
  - nova22033 3y ago
    Not to mention in this example no crime even yet occurred. OP...you should definitely report this to the FBI. If you try to hire a hitman, the FBI will definitely investigate even though no crime has been committed.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > in this example no crime even yet occurred Interviewing for a job with the prior stated intent of pilfering their IP is fraudulent.
    - snotrockets 3y ago
      Let the employer file civil case then.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Let the employer file civil case then The IP theft is a private concern. The national security implications are public. What OP describes seems worth criminal investigation.
    - powersnail 3y ago
      Is it? I mean obviously if the said person did pilfer, or attempted to pilfer, it would be illegal. But is there any law against interviewing for a job, while having a prior statement of intending to pilfer? Or in a more general sense, interviewing for a position while previously saying that they intend to breach the contract? I'd imagine that there could only be ground for a lawsuit if 1) a contract has been signed, and 2) the stated activity has at least been attempted.
riku_iki 3y ago
> get a job in that industry and send trade secrets so, is there a clear line between: steal trade secret, and applied learned experience in new company the way everyone does?
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  If they are intentionally finding information that is outside the scope of their own role and then exporting the information itself as opposed to actually learning it then that would be clearly stealing trade secrets. Of course there are some lesser actions that would be in a gray area.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    > intentionally finding information that is outside the scope of their own role some call that a positive initiative. cross training between departments or some such corp speak is used so people can "fill in" or just have a better understanding of the other departments so you can possibly work better with each other or come up with novel solutions for someone else. companies that silo everyone off and prevent open discussion between groups are horrible places to work. ask Oppenheimer.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      > intentionally finding information that is outside the scope of their own role AND THEN exporting the information itself
- lmm 3y ago
  No. Ultimately courts have to make judgements.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > so, is there a clear line between: steal trade secret, and applied learned experience in new company the way everyone does? There may be some grey, but copying information in writing is pretty clearly over the line.
krisoft 3y ago
> It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP? In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one, but even in other industries I guess what you don’t have access to after 6 months you won’t have access to realistically ever. > eventually gave up and went back home But according to what you said that was their plan all along. So in what sense did it not “work out for them”?
- outworlder 3y ago
  > In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one Some repositories needed to do your work, sure. Not necessarily all, and the more interesting work may not be available to just anyone who joins. If it's a company like Google, you may not even end up at the group you interviewed for.
  - roland35 3y ago
    I would be very careful doing that at Google. Even if just about anything is accessible, I imagine most access is logged. If you are downloading everything not related to your job it could raise some alarms!
    - htrp 3y ago
      Didn't stop Anthony Levandowski
      - kirubakaran 3y ago
        Presidential pardon is the one weird trick that employers hate, when you steal IP and get caught
  - krisoft 3y ago
    Yeah, yeah. I’m not saying it is easy business. What I am saying is that “bouncing around many companies in a quick succession and then leaving for their home country” is exactly the pattern one would exhibit with that plan. If one would want to show that their plan didn’t work out then one would be talking about other things. For example that they only got junior jobs with no access to the code/secrets, or that they were only hired in fields outside of their interest, etc etc.
advisedwang 3y ago
Did they tell you that, did you hear it second hand, or figure it out yourself?
baka367 3y ago
Repositories are rarely worth much. Sure, some algorithms there might save you some time, but its often the design and the data where the money lies (what this guy focused on). Clone google's repo and you'll likely struggle forever to get anything of substance running on a rando vm/docker/etc. not to mention about spinning the entire stack with interconnected services, certificates, shitty code, and layers upon layers of hacking that can only be resolved by relying on the tribal knowledge on whomever built the darn thing. Compared to that - detailed design docs, a team of motivated Chinese dudes/ettes with some monetary support from the local party, and you can have a close-enough copy running natively on the Alibaba cloud in a few months.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  There's probably some deep science AI-type stuff. Or maybe useful for security exploits.
- xyzzyz 3y ago
  Source code repo is like a very extremely detailed doc. You might not be able to actually easily run it due to all of the dependencies etc, but with couple of weeks of reading, you should be able to tease back out the high level design.
  - avidiax 3y ago
    I've done enough code archaeology to say that looking at the code to understand the design is a good way to understand that the two halves of the bridge didn't mate up, but there was a deadline, so... The design from a design doc can be replicated at almost any company. The actual code is specific to the company and their exact stack. The company's business position is similarly hard to duplicate. You can understand a company's current capital, customers and money flows. Your new company has to either outcompete for those same flows or create or capture alternative flows, and do this with different capital. Having, say, the entire source code for FedEx doesn't make it easy to launch a competitor. It's practically irrelevant compared to the network of capital investments, corporate goodwill and contracts, etc.
- 3y ago

scrubs 3y ago

Slightly different: I worked with a guy who took a job at a finance firm I worked to understand trading. His stated goal? Arabic states and individuals have stupid amounts of money he can play with. That is, he wanted parlay learning and connections to start his own firm.

mupuff1234 3y ago

Did that person just go around disclosing their plan?

reaperman 3y ago
I think if someone actually had government handlers asking them to do this, most of those people wouldn't blab about it to their school chums. But there's a subset of people with grandiose delusions / general behavior problems who feel a compulsion to tell everyone about their grand plans/machinations to become rich and powerful.
- ecoquant 3y ago
  I think you are underestimating how tough it would be to be playing James Bond and not tell anyone. You wouldn't have to be a delusional braggart to want to tell a friend this. Most spies are not going to be as much of a compartmentalized lunatic like Robert Hanssen or someone at that level.
- djtango 3y ago
  Reminds me of that scene from Silicon Valley where Jian Yang has a bunch of new startup ideas on his whiteboard
  - popcalc 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > someone actually had government handlers It most likely wasn't a Handler/MSS type espionage. It was most likely trying to grab IP to found a domestic competitor, and raise a Seed round from local government accelerators like those Beijing and Hangzhou have.
alephnerd 3y ago
Having seen something like this happen once, what probably happened was the person OP is referring to was trying to get IP in order to start their own private sector startup, and probably get some seed funding from a regional government (eg. Beijing and Hangzhou did this in the 2000s to jumpstart their tech industry) It's similar to the Israeli program in the 90s (who's name I'm blanking out on EDIT: Yozma I before it was privatized) because just like China in the 2000s-early 2010s, there wasn't a notable private sector VC industry yet.
- maayank 3y ago
  > It's similar to the Israeli program in the 90s (who's name I'm blanking out on EDIT: Yozma) because just like China in the 2000s-early 2010s, there wasn't a notable private sector VC industry yet. Quite an allegation... any reference to them sponsoring/encouraging stealing IP or am I misreading and you simply meant it's a government sponsored startup accelerator program?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    It's not really that damaging. Israel never recognized American software or pharmaceutical patents, and most countries do some form of Industrial Espionage (France is fairly notable in the space as well [4]). The wildest cases tended to be back in the 1990s, when Israel was trying to build a domestic armament industry, notably by stealing American IP and selling it to the Chinese [0][1][2][3] (most modern Chinese weapons systems today are based on that IP transfer in the 1990s). This largely ended by the mid-late 2000s when the Israeli tech industry was much more established, and Ehud Barak (edit: Olmert - mixed up his surname and the Barak middle scandal) getting arrested on corruption charges, heralding the end of Israel's Wild West days in the tech industry. Also, Tiannammen Era sanctions from the 1990s forced Israel defense companies to pivot to India, which doesn't allow vendors to sell SKUs to India which Pakistan and China have access to, and would leverage French and Israeli SKUs based on American designs. I highly recommend reading this GAO report from the 90s [3] [0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538128 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538128 [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/israel-selling-china-military-technology-cia-chief-asserts.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/israel-selling-chin... [2] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149008 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149008 [3] - https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-osi-92-6.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-osi-92-6.pdf [4] - https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-property-theft-107020 https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-p...

atonse 3y ago

Hmmm that seems like a clear cut case to report to the FBI. Yeah, assuming that they were walking around telling people about it.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
The FBI gets more credible reports than it has the labor to investigate. Not to mention in this example no crime even yet occurred.
- nova22033 3y ago
  Not to mention in this example no crime even yet occurred. OP...you should definitely report this to the FBI. If you try to hire a hitman, the FBI will definitely investigate even though no crime has been committed.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > in this example no crime even yet occurred Interviewing for a job with the prior stated intent of pilfering their IP is fraudulent.
  - snotrockets 3y ago
    Let the employer file civil case then.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Let the employer file civil case then The IP theft is a private concern. The national security implications are public. What OP describes seems worth criminal investigation.
  - powersnail 3y ago
    Is it? I mean obviously if the said person did pilfer, or attempted to pilfer, it would be illegal. But is there any law against interviewing for a job, while having a prior statement of intending to pilfer? Or in a more general sense, interviewing for a position while previously saying that they intend to breach the contract? I'd imagine that there could only be ground for a lawsuit if 1) a contract has been signed, and 2) the stated activity has at least been attempted.

riku_iki 3y ago

> get a job in that industry and send trade secrets so, is there a clear line between: steal trade secret, and applied learned experience in new company the way everyone does?

pfannkuchen 3y ago
If they are intentionally finding information that is outside the scope of their own role and then exporting the information itself as opposed to actually learning it then that would be clearly stealing trade secrets. Of course there are some lesser actions that would be in a gray area.
- dylan604 3y ago
  > intentionally finding information that is outside the scope of their own role some call that a positive initiative. cross training between departments or some such corp speak is used so people can "fill in" or just have a better understanding of the other departments so you can possibly work better with each other or come up with novel solutions for someone else. companies that silo everyone off and prevent open discussion between groups are horrible places to work. ask Oppenheimer.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    > intentionally finding information that is outside the scope of their own role AND THEN exporting the information itself
lmm 3y ago
No. Ultimately courts have to make judgements.
paulddraper 3y ago
> so, is there a clear line between: steal trade secret, and applied learned experience in new company the way everyone does? There may be some grey, but copying information in writing is pretty clearly over the line.

krisoft 3y ago

> It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP? In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one, but even in other industries I guess what you don’t have access to after 6 months you won’t have access to realistically ever. > eventually gave up and went back home But according to what you said that was their plan all along. So in what sense did it not “work out for them”?

outworlder 3y ago
> In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one Some repositories needed to do your work, sure. Not necessarily all, and the more interesting work may not be available to just anyone who joins. If it's a company like Google, you may not even end up at the group you interviewed for.
- roland35 3y ago
  I would be very careful doing that at Google. Even if just about anything is accessible, I imagine most access is logged. If you are downloading everything not related to your job it could raise some alarms!
  - htrp 3y ago
    Didn't stop Anthony Levandowski
    - kirubakaran 3y ago
      Presidential pardon is the one weird trick that employers hate, when you steal IP and get caught
- krisoft 3y ago
  Yeah, yeah. I’m not saying it is easy business. What I am saying is that “bouncing around many companies in a quick succession and then leaving for their home country” is exactly the pattern one would exhibit with that plan. If one would want to show that their plan didn’t work out then one would be talking about other things. For example that they only got junior jobs with no access to the code/secrets, or that they were only hired in fields outside of their interest, etc etc.

advisedwang 3y ago

Did they tell you that, did you hear it second hand, or figure it out yourself?

baka367 3y ago

Repositories are rarely worth much. Sure, some algorithms there might save you some time, but its often the design and the data where the money lies (what this guy focused on). Clone google's repo and you'll likely struggle forever to get anything of substance running on a rando vm/docker/etc. not to mention about spinning the entire stack with interconnected services, certificates, shitty code, and layers upon layers of hacking that can only be resolved by relying on the tribal knowledge on whomever built the darn thing. Compared to that - detailed design docs, a team of motivated Chinese dudes/ettes with some monetary support from the local party, and you can have a close-enough copy running natively on the Alibaba cloud in a few months.

paulddraper 3y ago
There's probably some deep science AI-type stuff. Or maybe useful for security exploits.
xyzzyz 3y ago
Source code repo is like a very extremely detailed doc. You might not be able to actually easily run it due to all of the dependencies etc, but with couple of weeks of reading, you should be able to tease back out the high level design.
- avidiax 3y ago
  I've done enough code archaeology to say that looking at the code to understand the design is a good way to understand that the two halves of the bridge didn't mate up, but there was a deadline, so... The design from a design doc can be replicated at almost any company. The actual code is specific to the company and their exact stack. The company's business position is similarly hard to duplicate. You can understand a company's current capital, customers and money flows. Your new company has to either outcompete for those same flows or create or capture alternative flows, and do this with different capital. Having, say, the entire source code for FedEx doesn't make it easy to launch a competitor. It's practically irrelevant compared to the network of capital investments, corporate goodwill and contracts, etc.
3y ago