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The simplest answer to you question is the guy has absolutely no understand of how the US legal system works. In China, when you are in any "legal" trouble, whether you actually are at fault or not, if you want to get out of it, all you have to do is "confess". The dude probably thought he could have done the same in the US. This is naivety, but not entirely beyond belief given how backward the Chinese are when it comes to legal matters.

Oh yeah, that kinda makes sense.

In China you can't run away after you got on the radar of a serious investigation. Maybe he thought the same happens here? Like he thought Apple security is equivalent to FBI or CIA or something.

And then eventually someone told him he can just leave, but by then FBI was already interested?

It could be that it simply never occured to him that he would get caught. When you work somewhere for years you don't think "This security cameras on the entrance could technically be used to track my activity". As the article says, the repositories that he accessed are restricted to THOUSANDS of people. So really the guy was probably right - if he hadn't been a dumbass and said that he was going to work for a chinese competitor then his boss likely wouldn't have thought to ask questions, no one would've noticed.

I don't understand how you can blame him and call someone a "dumbass" for being honest.

It looks like the dumbasses are Apple project managers, or Apple lawyers, or Apple security admins or whoever write Apple's policies

It is naive/lacking common sense to think always being honest is smart.

It depends of your believes. You can't prove that always being honest is not smart.

Are you a dumbass if you are honest? No. Are you a dumbass if you steal and then honestly tell that you did it? Yes. Now don’t get me wrong, all criminals are bad. But you have to admit that there is a difference between smart criminals and dumb ones. This person was a dumb criminal. Likely due to him not even contemplating that what he was doing was criminal, in-line with shoplifters who will tell you: “No it’s ok to eat the fruit inside the store, as long as it’s gone before you get to the counter you don’t have to pay”

Following your argument, Apple could be a very smart criminal organization that doesn't get caught.

Should we investigate further on Apple to make sure?

Edit : by the way, that guy could have been blackmailed. Someone may have said "If you don't do it, we will harm your family". We shouldn't be judging someone without investigating all the elements, especially when an individual takes the risk of facing a gigantic organization. It should rings bells to everyone.

Children and fools always speak the truth.

It's hard to believe an Apple employee could have no common sense. But your explanation is still the least unbelievable. So I think you're right.

Then the story is like this. The guy knew it's wrong to take stuff, but hoped nobody would notice. Told his former boss about the new job because why not.

Then Apple security team called, he got scared enough to tell them everything, but not scared enough to leave for China or at least get a lawyer. He even voluntarily gave his wife's computer to them. Maybe he thought it would ok if he was cooperating with them?

Then later, the FBI got involved at the end of June. He finally got seriously scared, bought tickets to China, but by then FBI was already monitoring his movements.

It would be interesting to see his side of the story.

And perhaps he also got some assurance from the Chinese intelligence services and thought he could just run to the embassy. Just speculating. But it wouldn't be the first time China (or any other country) uses their nationals to ex-filtrate IP.

While it certainly happened in the past, I don't think it's the case there - the guy tried to cooperate with Apple. I also don't think that he's so morally corrupt that he'd cooperate with Chinese intelligence services and still keep thinking he's doing nothing wrong (as was suggested as reasoning of his behavior in another thread).

I mean he already made like 1000 mistakes, but he really should've driven to mexico and flown out of there.

Omg it's just too funny because it's so irrelevant to the main story and yet you're absolutely right.

Even after the poor sod fought so hard to win the techie version of the Darwin award, he still could have made it to safety. If only he stopped for a moment to think about what he did wrong and learned from his mistakes.

It's like watching a movie with a horrible plot.

People make mistake when they are under pressure, how do you know that guy wasn't being blackmailed, and someone or something threatened to harm his family if he didn't do it?

any company that values its IP/client lists/etc will (should) run an "activity log" over any employee who hands in their notice, typically for the 3-6 months preceeding the date of handing in notice.

Some poor sap then gets to scroll through it and see if anything looks odd. If it does, they ask someone with more context to have a look.

There is no excuse for expecting this kind of thing would go unnoticed, beyond simply assuming your employer is an idiot.

> It could be that it simply never occured to him that he would get caught

It never occurred to him that copy company data is wrong.

As harsh as this sounds, it's a cultural thing. The Chinese generally don't believe in respecting IP, this is coming from someone who has lived with Chinese for many many years. To them, it's like a shopping basket, you just pick what you like. Unfortunately, for this guy, it seemed like he didn't understand how copyrights work in the US.

Also as a matter of personal experience, I've had a couple of my photographs stolen by popular Chinese newspapers who refused to attribute it to me.

P.S - I am not commenting on the morality of his action here, I'm simply suggesting the way their culture works is probably a big reason to him getting charged.

>>>But the guy is intelligent, he was hired to an important project at Apple.

No data, but I believe that you can be extremely bright in a lot of things and dumb as a rock on other very basic things. Maybe arrogance plays a part too.

It's safe to assume that x% of Russian and Chinese employees do talk to, and plan to go back to the mothership. Must be the greatest ROI for the Chinese, tens of billion dollars worth of R&D in a hard-drive. (granted it's not the same since while researching you learn a lot of other things, but presumably the Chinese want those few things that they haven't figured them out already.)

>No data, but I believe that you can be extremely bright in a lot of things and dumb as a rock on other very basic things. Maybe arrogance plays a part too.

If there's any highly political threads on the front page the comment section would be a perfectly illustrative example of this.

>Anyone has better explanations?

Important to note: there were no charge for him for all that time. That means they had very weak case. They might be specifically waiting for him to do at least that: just look how they accent that he "bought red flag last minute ticket" as if he knew he did something wrong. This also supports the idea that they had no proof of him doing what amounts to criminal industrial espionage (passing data to another company.)

Another standing out fact is that he was arrested minutes before boarding (he passed the border.) If he would be on exit control list, he would never be allowed pass the border. It means he was not nor on exit control list (people on it include convicts on probation, tax debitors, persons against whom a restraining order was issued i.e. people under investigation of a crime,) nor on the on-the-run list of criminals (he would've been detained immediately)

Third, how FBI ever knew of him buying a ticket? US is not East Germany where all ticket sales are wired to STASI in real time.

My explanation: they did not have anything qualifying for a charge on him till that "last minute ticket purchase" which added more substance to allegations of criminal conduct.

This is supported by the fact that he was detained "minutes before boarding." Probably, it was only the fact of him passing the border control that was visible to FBI, the moment they saw it, they came with a rushed arrest warrant.

> Third, how FBI ever knew of him buying a ticket? US is not East Germany where all ticket sales are wired to STASI in real time

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/44909 see (c).

He should have jumped a China shipping cargo ship like they threw Jack Bauer on at the one of that one season.

I would safely assume the government does collect all ticket purchase data in real time.

They at least see it near the time of travel. See https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/apis_facts...

> Third, how FBI ever knew of him buying a ticket? US is not East Germany where all ticket sales are wired to STASI in real time.

The TSA has exactly this system in place.

> This is supported by the fact that he was detained "minutes before boarding." Probably, it was only the fact of him passing the border control that was visible to FBI, the moment they saw it, they came with a rushed arrest warrant.

Or they were waiting for incontrovertible evidence of attempted flight from the country.

As far as I know, nobody at FBI have permission to read an arbitrary PNR, they can only obtain an order to get data from CBP for a specific person through a court order.

They don’t need to do that, all they have to do is tell CBP they want a warning if “Person X” attempts travel. The Advanced Passenger Information System requires airlines send CBP passenger info for all departing and arriving flights.

The USA doesn’t really have exit control at its borders. Anything less than a felony warrant isn’t going to get the police to take the effort to intercept you at the gate.

They can confiscate your passport to prevent you from leaving the country, and they have ways of knowing when you try to leave (via the airline, not TSA), but besides the TSA check (which is usually shared with domestic flights), there isn’t any persistent choke point and definitely no border control.

You would likely not enjoy being a criminal defense attorney.

In my opinion, This is just free PR for XMotors. Either they deliberately planned it and this guy has nothing or they took the chance and hoped to get away with it. Either way it is win-win for them.

> So I'm down to my final two guesses. Either the guy thought he didn't do anything wrong (really? taking confidential documents and hardware??). Or the article heavily distorts the facts.

Probably a bit of both. And also many other facts we don't know. Anyway, Apple only should be blamed, imho. If people efforts and project momentum are the real plus value, then data alone won't be sufficient to steal a technology.

It shows that international cooperation about global-impacting technologies should be the norm, rather than a race to monopolize a market.

>Anyway, Apple only should be blamed, imho. If people efforts and project momentum are the real plus value, then data alone won't be sufficient to steal a technology.

That's a weird argument. No one said it's sufficient, but "stealing" data certainly helps.

Also, what do you mean by "people efforts"? The only way to prevent every single employee with access to trade secrets from leaving is to make workers corporate property and lock them up on a remote island. Surely, that's not what you're suggesting, is it?

> That's a weird argument. No one said it's sufficient, but "stealing" data certainly helps.

IF the employee wasn't aware that he/she was stealing, maybe he was being told internally what he/she was doing was OK. Maybe someone suggested him to do so, only then to be accused after.

Anyways, the ability for an individual to transfer so much knowledge should remind you the MP3 and p2p era. The patents and secrecy of big corporations makes NO SENSE in a world where communication is instant and easy. Not better than China censorship.

So what does make sense if the problem is how to protect the value of investments into the acquisition/generation of knowledge?

It makes sense to replicate and sharing knowledge among as many people and organizations as possible. Replication is the best way to protect knowledge.

The old model is to see knowledge as words written down on a piece of paper, and only knew by a few people. It does not work in a modern world where knowledge can be shared easily, sent at speed of light and replicated on many support.

I don't know about you, but I don't have millions of dollars sitting in my bank account, I prolly don't care about previous investments and decisions made in a world I didn't exist, but I care about living a good life and living as long as possible. The investments should change direction.

Let me rephrase my question: How do you suggest a profit driven company can justify employing people to create new knowledge if that knowledge and all its derivatives and representations are immediately available to everyone else without any restrictions?

I am very skeptical of patents as a matter of principle, because banning people from using their own original ideas just because someone else happened to have a similar idea seems extremely unfair and prone to misuse.

I am also skeptical of putting copyright interests above all else (although I'm not against copyrights in principle), going as far as building a global surveillance state and imposing draconian penalties in order to enforce extremist copyright laws without fail.

I am also skeptical of very restrictive no-compete clauses in employment contracts or any sort of anti-poaching activity by corporations.

And it's exactly _because_ I am skeptical of all the above approaches to protecting investment into knowledge generation that I'm very hesitant to also oppose keeping trade secrets.

Creating new knowledge has to have some direct economic benefit above and beyond the general benefits of human progress (which is also important of course).

> Let me rephrase my question: How do you suggest a profit driven company can justify employing people to create new knowledge if that knowledge and all its derivatives and representations are immediately available to everyone else without any restrictions?

I have two arguments :

1) The process of creating new knowledge alone won't be valuable once we have enough processing power to evaluate scenarii faster than a coordinated human effort. With vulgar words : AI will make the creation of knowledge a commodity, and my personal opinion is that it will happen before the next human generation, unless some people actively work against that idea to make sure it doesn't happen (because they try to defend previous investments for example.)

2) Knowledge alone is not enough to accomplish or execute anything in the real world. Actually building car requires factories, materials and logistics. Of course, if we have an AI solving all sort of problems, we may ask it to find an efficient way to build car. If we continue the reasoning, we enter a world where the meaning of an human life is completely different than today, with completely different forces acting on it. We may don't even need the cars anymore.

Edit : I mean, the argument of "it gives job to people" won't stand forever. We will have to seriously re-think the system at some point.

>Knowledge alone is not enough to accomplish or execute anything in the real world.

That's true, but if companies compete only on execution and not on innovation, I fear that the result will be less innovation.

Also, some of the digital artifacts that can easily be copied are largely on the execution side. Software being a prime example of that.

>AI will make the creation of knowledge a commodity

If and when AIs are that advanced they're going to have to sort out their own problems and fight over their own ideologies. But how will we even get there if everyone is busy executing and no one has an incentive to innovate?

That said, profit is certainly not the only incentive to innovate. It's one of the incentives though, particularly where it's closely intertwined with execution and product development.

That’s a completely ridiculous line of reasoning. How can you honestly write that it’s no better than censorship. Have you been spent any significant time living behind the great firewall?

Blocking incoming information or outgoing information requires a firewall either way. Here the firewall is the patent system, or any cultural belief that trade secrets create more value than open systems.

That's not what I asked.

If you can't read it between the lines : Yes, we are all living behind some sort of firewalls, either technical, legal or cultural.

You said "Not better than China censorship."

That's ridiculous. There are degrees, shades of grey.