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Comment by esaym | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure plenty of people will declare his innocence in this current age of "love your neighbor" and "nothing is secret". But really, this kind of stuff is not right.

I briefly worked for Boeing once and they were working on a new fuel boom for the KC-135 Fuel tanker. Spent millions in research and then some idiot takes a bunch of photos of the blueprints and physical hardware and then sells it to someone in China. Thankfully he was busted. A company just trying to make a profit on what they spent millions developing is not inherently evil.

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current age of what now? sounds like you have created a caricature so you can make fun of it.

I don't know what straw man you're building, and what other set of values you're trying to attach it to, but no.

> this current age of "love your neighbor"

God, I wish that was true.

We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA does economic espionage, and given their capabilities and budget they are probably one of the biggest and best at it.

As Musk says, patents aren't going to help you.

I don't think patents have anything to do with this case. In fact, patents are designed to remove industrial espionage out of the equation.

Only counts if patent law is applied. If you patent it you make it public knowledge, then Chinese firms can copy it at no cost because legal action does little to stop them and certainly doesn't compensate for the economic loss.

I generally agree with what you're saying, and I came here to post my opinion, but then I wondered, is the concept of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" something new or not?

Pre industrial times, I would assume that people were more private in general, and a desire for privacy was more acceptable. But I really don't know...my impression is that this force openness popped up especially around WWII when propaganda and espionage were immediately deadly things.

> I briefly worked for Boeing once and they were working on a new fuel boom for the KC-135 Fuel tanker. Spent millions in research and then some idiot takes a bunch of photos of the blueprints and physical hardware and then sells it to someone in China. Thankfully he was busted. A company just trying to make a profit on what they spent millions developing is not inherently evil.

I'm struggling to understand how the stolen design could be turned into money. China's booms and refueling ports aren't compatible with the US versions, and no way DoD is going to buy direct from China. Best case China modifies the boom for compatibility with the Russian ports they use and then produces it in-house, more likely they see if there's anything useful to to learn from it and incorporate that into future designs.

Frankly ounds more like someone who saw a way to make a quick buck got found by Chinese intelligence, rather than actual industrial espionage - which is a fairly common story in intelligence gathering operations.

And I'm certain that if Boeing were offered similar information from a defector within a Chinese firm, they'd turn it down and report the spy to the proper authorities.

Industrial espionage is as old as industry. It got porcelain and tea out of China and is, in fact, the reason the UK was able to grow tea as early as it was.

It isn't nice, but business isn't nice.

Well, we know that AMD at one point did in fact turn someone in to the authorities for attempting to sell them industrial espionage from Intel. I don't think it's as gloomy a picture as you are trying to paint.

Gloomy depends on the context. The US got its textile industry due to Samuel Slater stealing the design of the shuttle loom from the UK:

http://www.brahmsmount.com/blog/american-textile-history/

I'm not defending industrial espionage, I'm merely pointing out that treating it as a grave and horrible thing is at odds with how important it's been historically.

So the benchmark for modern business ethics is a man who made his fortune off the back of slaves in the 1700s?

Huh. I wasn't aware industrial espionage caused slavery.

Are you being sarcastic? Boeing is a huge defense contractor. They know the rules, spend a fortune on compliance, and wouldn't risk getting tangled up in something illegal for a minor temporary advantage. It's not like they could learn much of value from any Chinese aerospace company anyway. What they would do is confidentially report the offer to the FBI and/or Defense Department and then cooperate with however the federal government told them to handle it. The feds would probably try to flip the defector and turn him into a useful intelligence asset.

Pepsi did this when somebody tried to sell them Coke's formula.

As others have noted, there are already extant examples of US companies turning in such people who attempt to sell them obviously stolen info.

There are some interesting jurisdictional issues here regarding outright legality of such info and if there is a duty to act by a US corporate officer who is offered such info that is known or suspected to be stolen. If the info theft takes place in the US then all sorts of laws apply (as, for example, Uber is likely to experience in the near future) but if the theft took place outside the US I wonder if the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes such a purchase illegal and failure to report a potential crime? I think the Economic Espionage Act only covers theft that goes from US to some other country, but I am curious if the FCPA covers things coming in the opposite direction?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/30/airbus_us_german_int...

Also HP did.

I'm certain that Boeing has a team of people who are certain that your certainty is irrelevant.

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