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The US is charging Huawei with racketeering
Ratcheting up its pressure campaign against Huawei and its affiliates, the Department of Justice and the FBI announced today that it has brought 16 charges against Huawei in a sprawling case with major geopolitical implications (you can read the full 56-page indictment here).
Huawei is being charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute. The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei's business.
An example of this activity is provided in the indictment. Described as "Company 1," Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1's routers, which it then used in its own products.
[...] Huawei is also alleged to have engaged in more simple forms of industrial espionage. While at a trade show in Chicago, a Huawei-affiliated engineer "... was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company ... removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as 'Weihua,'
[...] Together, the indictment lists multiple examples of Huawei's alleged conspiracy to pilfer U.S. intellectual property.
It's a good thing that the United States would never do 'bad things' or act in a manner like this.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday February 16 2020, @06:18PM
I disagree with most of what you said with one exception: giving China the opportunity to copy American tech can in many cases deflect them from trying to leapfrog US R&D. One of the main problems with this approach is that with the end of Moore’s Law, the US technological lead in consumer and industrial electronic technology has narrowed considerably.
I personally witnessed the “let them copy” approach at a company that made high speed O/E transducers in the telecom sector. The product line mainly consisted of pluggable modules with a proprietary DSP ASIC inside. When the next generation was deployed, the old ASIC was sold to Chinese competitors in the module space. Management was betting that they could make some extra money on ASICs without the competition catching up in the module market. This probably did boost the bottom line at the expense of giving up old IP.