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A second Apple employee was charged with stealing self-driving car project secrets
The Federal Bureau of Investigation accused an Apple employee, who is a Chinese citizen, of attempting to steal trade secrets related to the company's autonomous car project, according to a charging document that was unsealed on Wednesday. It's the second time the FBI has charged an Apple employee for trying to steal intellectual property related to the project in the last seven months. The news was first reported by NBC's Bay Area affiliate.
The new charge comes at a time of high tension between the United States and China. The two countries are locked in a trade war, and various US government agencies have accused China of engaging in multiple schemes — some dating back decades — to steal intellectual property from leading technology companies.
Jizhong Chen, a Chinese national, was charged with theft of trade secrets based on actions that allegedly date back to when he was hired last summer as a hardware developer. He was one of 5,000 Apple employees who was looped in on the company's self-driving car effort, known as "Project Titan," which has been operating in secret for years. (The company also recently laid off about 200 employees from the project.) Furthermore, he was also one of 1,200 "core" employees who directly work on the project. Chen was on the electrical engineering team, according to the charging document.
Previously: Apple Engineer Accused of Downloading Driverless Car Trade Secrets for Chinese Company
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:38PM (2 children)
In most cases, companies are prohibited by law from discriminating based on national origin. WTF, that is exactly backwards.
I'm at a similar large defense contractor. We get to do slightly better at my local office, because of clearances. We can state that citizenship is a job requirement. Oddly, we are prohibited from asking if a person is a citizen!!! See, that would be discriminatory.
A proper law would prohibit people with foreign connections (including family members, home ownership, hostile religious affiliation, etc.) from having access to any non-public information about a traded company or having access to any technological trade secrets. That included being unescorted in a room with an Ethernet port on the corporate LAN.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:58PM (1 child)
You misread me. I was stating that they'll give native-born American patriots shit for smoking a joint, during the background investigation, in the past year. Meanwhile, Mister Ching-Chong Chang who has lived all his life in China, maintains extensive contacts in China, and is a card-carrying member of the communist party leaves out all those facts on his E-QIP, lays low for 5 years or marries himself into citizenship, and then gets cleared and works for Lockheed-Martin. Everytime you hear about somebody being caught trying to steal our silent propulsion drive or airborne stealth secrets, it is always one of those.
Now your third paragraph makes complete sense.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @02:25AM
Yeap. And not because of smoking a joint, but just because they are native-born American (patriots or otherwise).
Would they drop their superiority complexes and lower their wage expectations, they will receive a guaranteed-shit-level of a wage and not even a shit** otherwise.
Patriotism be damned, huge profits must flow - that's the American Way (the dream is something totally different). And one doesn't get huge profits paying high wages.
** YMMV - whatever your supervising manager feels like.