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Silicon Valley engineers were indicted for allegedly sending secrets to Iran
- onionisafruit 8mo ago“Company 2” has to be Qualcomm. Or am I misreading this? The only reason I think I’m misreading is because it’s so obviously Qualcomm that it seems silly for the article to call it “company 2”.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mherkender 8mo ago> Company 2, which develops system-on-chip (SoC) platforms such as the Snapdragon series Only a lawyer could write this with a straight face
- akazantsev 8mo ago> On the night before the pair traveled to Iran in December 2023, Samaneh allegedly took about 24 photos of Khosravi’s work computer screen containing Company 2′s trade secrets, including *its* Snapdragon SoCs. Keep reading.
- onionisafruit 8mo agoThat’s the point where I realized how thin the curtain is. Earlier the article talked about “Qualcomm’s Snapdragon” as an example of an SoC, but that could have been just to give the reader an idea of what an SoC is. But this line made it clear it wasn’t just an example.
- rdtsc 8mo agoYup. It’s like saying Company X which develops the iPhone smartphone. It’s either extreme incompetence or cheeky disclosure while also technically not naming the company.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 8mo agoGood morning, class. A certain… agitator—for privacy's sake, let's call her Lisa S. No, that's too obvious. Uh, let's say L. Simpson—has raised questions about certain school policies…
- almog 8mo agoUh oh, two independent thought alarms in one day! The students are overstimulated. Willie! remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms.
- krisoft 8mo ago> so obviously Qualcomm that it seems silly for the article to call it “company 2” Redactions / aliases are sometimes quite transparent. When policy dictates that it must happen they do it even when it is not hard to puzzle out who the redaction / alias hides. There is the famous interview where the NTSB was interviewing an expert in relation to the Oceangate tragedy. The expert's name was redacted, but he was described as "Co-Designer / Pilot of the Deepsea Challenger" which is already quite a specific thing. Not a lot of people can claim that. And then the interview started like this: Q: So how did you get yourself started into submersible operations? <redacted>: Well, I'm sure you are familiar with my film Titanic. I'm leaving the solution as an exercise for the reader. But it is a real world "Lisa S. No, that's too obvious. Uh, let's say L. Simpson." situation.
- onionisafruit 8mo agoIt probably wasn’t Jean Negulesco director of Titanic (1953)
- parliament32 8mo ago> The couple also allegedly photographed hundreds of computer screens containing confidential information from Google and Company 2, in what appeared to be an attempt at circumventing digital monitoring tools. I guess all the MDM and document restrictions in the world can't help you against photos of screens. Is it even possible to protect against this, short of only allowing access to confidential files in secure no-cell-phone zones?
- matthewaveryusa 8mo agoNo you can’t. It’s formally called “the analog hole” when security folks yap about it. Usually it’s used to end DLP discussions after too many what-ifs
- breppp 8mo agoUnless your employer is Google and all those photos are uploaded to its servers
- 1024core 8mo agoWhat if you use a film camera?
- yndoendo 8mo agoDoes Google force all their employees to use and Android phone provided by them? You could use an Apple or an alternative to Android like Fairphone or even load GrapheneOS on that Google Pixel phone. Even better would be a Linux phone that uses an Android VM so it looks like a bare metal installation. Could go old school and just get a digital only camera that is not even part of a smartphone. An hidden camera in a pen or shirt button would work too. Has anyone hacked the Meta glasses so they don't communicate with Meta and allow for communication to your own designated servers?
- gwbas1c 8mo agoJust remember that it's significantly more time consuming to photograph a screen than steal large group of files. Thus, even though it's not preventable, it adds enough friction to be effective.
- codeddesign 8mo ago[flagged]
- codechicago277 8mo agoUnless you’re claiming all immigrants are spies, your logic doesn’t make sense. People loyal to their country tend to stay there.
- AlexandrB 8mo ago> People loyal to their country tend to stay there. Not necessarily true. Source: I have friends and family who came to the US from Russia and are still loyal to Russia. When the topic comes up, they tell me they would fight for Russia in a hypothetical US/Russia war. It's entirely possible to love your country and still seek out a better life elsewhere for practical reasons. Edit: To clarify, this isn't universal. Some folks who came over absolutely hate the country of their birth, some still love it, while others are ambivalent. But you can't make a blanket statement like "people loyal to their country tend to stay there" when there are stark financial and quality of life advantages to moving from one place to another.
- blell 8mo ago>People loyal to their country tend to stay there. You'd be surprised. If I were to emigrate because of economic reasons (which is by far the most popular reason to emigrate) my loyalty would stay with my paychecks. I don’t see how it could be otherwise. What binds me to my new country? My history, my character, my race, my religion…? Guess not.
- booleandilemma 8mo agoSome immigrants are loyal to their country. A company hires immigrants. It's possible the company has hired immigrants loyal to their country. Logically, it works like that.
- sushshs 8mo agoMany modern immigrants to America are purely economic. The rich are fine with this because they profit, but the labor class suffers.
- lenerdenator 8mo ago> If convicted, each defendant faces up to 10 years in prison for each trade secret charge and up to 20 years for obstruction of justice, along with fines of up to $250,000 per count. This is part of why we are where we are as a country. We have this whole web of charging instruments in our legal system that dance around the main thrust of what investigations are about. It makes people who would think of doing these things think that they could get off easy if they were caught. They're handing over sensitive info (we have sanctions and embargoes on Iran) to an enemy power. If you're an anal-retentive lawyer, you call it "stealing trade secrets". If you're a person with any amount of common sense, you call it espionage. One is something that should be applied when a company steals info from its competitor; the other should be applied when people are handing over sensitive info to an enemy power. One would be punishable by a decade in prison, the other punishable by life in prison or worse.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- seanhunter 8mo agoCorporate espionage. Stealing secrets from a company and sanctions-busting are of course bad things to do, but the legal consequences are not the same as stealing confidential information from the government.
- breppp 8mo agoI imagine the receiving party is an Iranian intelligence agency, due to the interest in sigint adjacent technology (Mobile cryptography). That probably makes it espionage, not of the corporate kind
- dijit 8mo ago> Corporate espionage. Stealing secrets from a company and sanctions-busting are of course bad things to do, but the legal consequences are not the same as stealing confidential information from the government. Sort of. But if the government is hosting its email with Joe, and Joe hires an intern who installs a backdoor for Russia: that would be treason. Despite the fact that it's a quaint allegory, it's actually a closer one to the reality of the situation.
- PKop 8mo ago[flagged]
- SoftTalker 8mo ago"Soroor was in the U.S. on a nonimmigrant student visa." At age 32? That's a bit old for a student, though possible I guess. But also working at Google? Student visas severely restrict employment options, as far as I understand it.
- forinti 8mo agoLinkedin says she obtained a Master's between 2020 and 2022 at Santa Clara University.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoOK so she was a student 4 years ago? But still here on a student visa, and employed at Google? Some of that information is either wrong or Google wasn't verifying work eligibility.
- kps 8mo agoThe article describes events that were discovered in 2023.
- farceSpherule 8mo ago[dead]
- Rakshith 8mo ago[dead]