Canada police charge Hydro-Quebec employee with China espionage | Hacker News Reader

Canada police charge Hydro-Quebec employee with China espionage

bbc.com

139 pointsboringg23 comments

What an odd case.

> RCMP Inspector David Beaudoin said that Mr Wang used his position at Hydro-Quebec to conduct research for a Chinese university and other researcher centres. He allegedly published scientific articles and submitted patents in "association [with] this foreign actor rather than with Hydro-Quebec", he said.

So the guy very publicly used privileged information to benefit a third party, without his current employer's consent.

Doesn't sound much like state sponsored espionage, to be honest.

This is a pretty common strategy used by China, and I think they leverage the fact that it is so "above board" and transparent in some ways to their advantage... it's easier to recruit scientists and engineers into espionage by doing so in an apparently legitimate way with the sponsorship of an academic institution. I'm not sure if it's directly applicable to this case but the whole thing in general is known as the Thousand Talents Plan and is well-publicized in China... but conflicts with intellectual property and espionage policy in many other countries and was a perennial source of embarrassment for US universities (when their faculty were found to be on the Chinese payroll and publishing their work there) five years ago or so. People are thought to often be recruited into the program while attending academic events in China, which also gives it a degree of normalcy... it's presented as academic collaboration, not espionage.

My point is that "doesn't sound much like state sponsored espionage" is probably exactly why Thousand Talents found so much success for a while. It has a veneer of legitimacy and stays pretty far away from anything that has the "cloak and dagger" appearance people associate with espionage.

There are very few details about the charges yet, but from what's been said so far, this case looks disturbingly similar to recent cases in the US, in which innocent scientists were accused of espionage.

The most prominent person targeted in the US was the head of MIT's mechanical engineering program, Gang Chen. As you can imagine, the head of MIT MechEng is very highly respected in his field, so the FBI's case against him was a shock to people in the field. Unusually for such cases, MIT stuck up for Gang Chen, and the FBI eventually had to drop the case. There was simply nothing there in the end. The whole case was built out of thin air and implausible misreadings of harmless emails.

But before the FBI dropped the case, they made Gang Chen's life hell for a year. They carried out an early morning armed raid on his house, and arrested him at gunpoint in front of his family, as if he were some sort of terrorist or drug lord. They gave a big press conference in which they labeled him a Chinese spy. He wasn't allowed to continue his work, so he had to let his lab go. At the end of the whole ordeal, he said it reminded him of the Cultural Revolution in China, which he had personally experienced.

"Chinese University" is an arm of the Chinese state and potentially also of the CCP. It's not a purely commercial third party.

Right, but why would anyone file a patent on stolen IP? It would both defeat the purpose of stealing the IP in the first place, and put a target on their backs.

This sounds more like a case of an ambitious dummy being prodded into being a stooge that leaks IP rather than purposeful espionage on his part.

If it provides cover for another entity, it could have value.

"Hey, we licensed that patent from $(thief). We thought it was legit! We're innocent. All the liability for our infringement falls on $(thief)."

I just had a conversation with a military police officer.

He said one one of the ways they catch soldiers who go AWOL is to show up when they file for veterans benefits.

Picking flowers, making honey

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/picking-flowers-making-honey

This is painting things with an absurdly broad brush.

The vast majority of academics in China are exactly the same as academics in the US and Europe. They are not arms of the Chinese state.

It's frankly getting very tiresome to see literally everything and everyone in China painted in this conspiratorial, bad-faith manner.

Assuming that the Mr Wang is Yue-Sheng Wang; Their suspect has published 59 articles according to Scopus and 31 are without affiliation to Hydro-Québec. I would hope that publications alone would be a problem, but maybe they point at possible sharing of data etc. in a way that could fall under espionage - who knows.

I work with documenting scientific publications and I have seen a lot of wonky affiliations used. Its surprising who many researchers don't understand their own affiliations correctly, at least as seen by the institutions that pay their wages. That being using co-authors affiliation, imagined or misunderstood affiliations (yeah our informal work-group is definitely a department!), or even something more obscure (A professor publishing his whole career from university X even though he hasn't been affiliated since his postdoc 25 years ago. Due to pride I guess?). Another issue is co-authors not knowing each others True® affiliation, and ending up getting the wrong addresses in the final publication. And so on and so on. Some researchers seem to feel such details are trivial.

Just another example how bureaucratic control butts heads with the actually way scientists work.

I think one important bit of context that may be missing here is that Hydro Quebec is technically also a public research (graduate) university. You can get PhD there when working on these projects (how this is implemented is confusing, but it's a de-facto stand alone university). It's not "just" a power company. It's also one of the larger income/export source for the the government.

The issue with this kind of public enforcement is China quite frankly could care less about the plaintiff. They got the info they required, the chinese way of thinking is that these foreign assets are largely expendable and easily replacible.

Sanctions and other forms of proactive and offensive protection of these assets is the only way to curb this kind of espionage. This kind of counter-intelligence and sabotage was actually one of the only things Reagan got right during his presidency.

Something worth reading is the operation, in which the US realized Russians were attempting to steal information to automate operation of a newly constructed natural gas pipeline through Siberia. Ironically, the US contacted the Canadians and found a willing oil and gas engineering firm to take the bait and provide "functional" code and licensed tech to the soviets. The soviets were smitten with what they thought was genuine information and tech - however, shortly after one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history occurred when the pipeline failed in the middle of Siberia. (take what you will from this in regards to the recent Nordstream explosion) The gist here - is you have to erode trust in data stolen from your country to a deadly extent. As soon as China realizes that 40% of their stolen "intelligence" is useless or something designed to fail... they'll think twice about stealing. Also, just make it harder for people with a clear past linking them to the PLA to you know... run important infrastructure.

Source here - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/02/27/r...

None of us have the context or facts of the case.

There are a myriad of possibilities:

0. Targeting an innocent person for political reasons

1. Person technically broke laws without intent

2. Person broke laws with intent of personal gain and/or foreign gain

Proving no. 2 is difficult/impossible unless they incriminated themselves somehow.

Every time someone from China does something bad or just without thinking it through, it's painted as communist party espionage.

Our western media and governments really want us to see yellow spies everywhere.

But it's not just people randomly doing these things. These people are targeted by official CCP programs which intend to do exactly what they're doing. The targets are often useful idiots, but that doesn't make it not espionage.

how is that different from gov/military backed US companies who steal talents from foreign countries?

by being passive racist, the US unveils to the world what they are doing for ages, and when it's others it's painted as evil

Yes, spying is practiced worldwide by just about everyone. I never claimed otherwise. But that doesn't mean it's tolerated. Every country wants to spy and not be spied on.

Is this a boilerplate response to someone bringing up the Thousand Talents program? Because "steal[ing] talents" doesn't make much sense in an English language context outside of Space Jam.

You'll be surprised if Aliens speak english

You got me there.

What kind of IP can a hydro-electric dam have that isn't "general knowledge" at this point? *Edit: Batteries used for Electric Vehicles*

Also for some context, related to China-Canada relations; there has been rumour that China has operated state run (semi-secretly) policing departments in BC and other areas of Canada and has forced people to return to China that were legally in Canada. AND Canada has recently been engaged in a trade mission specifically with South East Asian countries (bypassing China) for textiles/garment production. (I have no idea what Canada is offering in return for cheaper clothes.) {Probably some kind of natural resource.}

He didn't work on dams...

> A company statement said that Mr Wang worked on batteries for the utility's Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage (CETEES), which develops technology for electric vehicles.

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