US Disruptive Technology Strike Force has struck The US Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced charges against four people, including a former Apple engineer, in five cases related to technology theft for the benefit of adversarial nations China, Russia and Iran. According to the DoJ, the former Apple engineer – a 2016-era employee who is also a PRC citizen – stole …
It's a facepalm, sure; but we have plenty of stories of criminals with terrible OPSEC. At some point even taking obvious precautions becomes too much of a cognitive load for many people, I think, especially with the stress of espionage.
Or people get away with it for a while and get an inflated sense of security. I have a friend who worked for a towing company that shared the police contract for a small city, and I'd often ride with him. We were forever towing cars for the police where someone was speeding or ran a stoplight or committed some other minor infraction, and when stopped turned out to have outstanding warrants. You might think that if you were on the lam, or were carrying stolen property, or were otherwise of interest to the authorities you'd drive more carefully, but often the reverse is true. Many criminals get away with one thing and then seem to believe they can get away with anything.
If you look at the family tree of technology companies you'll find that they tend to be related. It used to be accepted practice for the founders of a new company to be employed at an older, established one. It wasn't usually about outright stealing of ideas and technologies -- it happened, of course -- but typically someone would see an unrealized opportunity and take advantage of it.
Things tightened up considerably starting about 20 years ago as 'corporate' realized that unrealized opportunity was still value and tried to corral and so monetize that opportunity. I had mixed feelings about this -- on the one hand, stealing is stealing but on the other hand it significantly slowed the pace of innovation.
China is full of wannabe entrepreneurs so its still somewhat like a WildWest out there. I don't know what someone was expecting to do with the material from what is essentially a failed self-driving car project -- that's nuts, there might be some valuable algorithms buried in there but finding them is likely to take more effort than developing it from scratch. The metrology code may be more relevant, but once again unless there's some really special secret sauce in there its not going to do much for someone. (This might explain why there's been no sudden appearance of self-driving cars from China....) But now the Cold Warriors are in on the act they won't see this as dumb, unethical and ultimately pointless, it will be all part of the Great Game, 21st Century Edition.
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