Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
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It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company and I think eventually gave up and went back home.
It most likely wasn't a Handler/MSS type espionage.
It was most likely trying to grab IP to found a domestic competitor, and raise a Seed round from local government accelerators like those Beijing and Hangzhou have.
You wouldn't have to be a delusional braggart to want to tell a friend this. Most spies are not going to be as much of a compartmentalized lunatic like Robert Hanssen or someone at that level.
It's similar to the Israeli program in the 90s (who's name I'm blanking out on EDIT: Yozma I before it was privatized) because just like China in the 2000s-early 2010s, there wasn't a notable private sector VC industry yet.
Quite an allegation... any reference to them sponsoring/encouraging stealing IP or am I misreading and you simply meant it's a government sponsored startup accelerator program?
Israel never recognized American software or pharmaceutical patents, and most countries do some form of Industrial Espionage (France is fairly notable in the space as well [4]).
The wildest cases tended to be back in the 1990s, when Israel was trying to build a domestic armament industry, notably by stealing American IP and selling it to the Chinese [0][1][2][3] (most modern Chinese weapons systems today are based on that IP transfer in the 1990s).
This largely ended by the mid-late 2000s when the Israeli tech industry was much more established, and Ehud Barak (edit: Olmert - mixed up his surname and the Barak middle scandal) getting arrested on corruption charges, heralding the end of Israel's Wild West days in the tech industry.
Also, Tiannammen Era sanctions from the 1990s forced Israel defense companies to pivot to India, which doesn't allow vendors to sell SKUs to India which Pakistan and China have access to, and would leverage French and Israeli SKUs based on American designs.
I highly recommend reading this GAO report from the 90s [3]
[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538128
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/israel-selling-chin...
[2] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149008
[3] - https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-osi-92-6.pdf
[4] - https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-p...
Also, not to nitpick, but would appreciate publicly accessible articles… from the abstracts I can only assume these are summaries made in the 90s of pre-90s shenanigans
EDIT: saw now the edits with 3-4, will look at when I have time (thanks!)
Yep. Brainfarted and merged Olmert and the Barak missles corruption case
> summaries made in the 90s of pre-90s shenanigans
Hence why I wrote "the Israeli program in the 90s".
It's significantly less egregious nowadays (imo de facto non-existent due to how integrated the Israeli innovation system is with the American system now and how simplified FDI is in Israel compared to the 80s-90s)
> appreciate publicly accessible articles
Internet based news wasn't really a thing until the post-Netscape era.
All you're stuck with are archives of print news or government articles, especially because this kind of behavior largely ended by the 2000s.
> EDIT: saw now the edits with 3-4, will look at when I have time (thanks!)
No problem! And like I mentioned before, most countries do this in some form to help domestic champions (eg. India and Pharma IP, France and Defense IP, socialist era Israel and Defense IP, 1970s-80s Japan and electronics IP, China and Defense+Software IP).
If a country allows almost 100% FDI, there's no reason for industrial espionage in that specific sector because foreign champions become integrated with domestic ones. Hence why Israeli and Indian companies don't steal hardware designs anymore because most Americans companies have design centers there that are closely integrated with domestic champions.
Few examples just for Airbus every few years you get report of US spying: * https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-fires-16-over-suspected-german-... * https://edition.cnn.com/video/news/2015/05/01/airbus-spying....
The main difference is DGSE would explicitly attempt to steal American IP and then provide it to Thales or Dassault.
If they were, just about every single private sector company globally would be guilty of IP infringement, let alone Public-Private Partnerships like the ones I mentioned.
And if you don't like that, you can sue them in the special intelligence court where the evidence cannot be revealed, the proceedings are secret, and the judges are very unbiased.
Interviewing for a job with the prior stated intent of pilfering their IP is fraudulent.
The IP theft is a private concern. The national security implications are public. What OP describes seems worth criminal investigation.
I mean obviously if the said person did pilfer, or attempted to pilfer, it would be illegal.
But is there any law against interviewing for a job, while having a prior statement of intending to pilfer? Or in a more general sense, interviewing for a position while previously saying that they intend to breach the contract?
I'd imagine that there could only be ground for a lawsuit if 1) a contract has been signed, and 2) the stated activity has at least been attempted.
This would be like someone specifically (not vaguely) stating their intent to commit a violent crime and then spend months preparing for it. Yeah, law enforcement, please definitely follow up on that one.
Your average web dev probably isn’t familiar but navigating this is a routine consideration in deep tech.
ofc, like in any security-related field, many are LARPing instead of practicing, and that's a different issue.
A "real" national security background check requires support and sponsorship from a national government, and governments don't provide that casually to anyone that asks. If a startup finds themselves with national security customers, there is no requirement for the startup to go full-on Secret Squirrel but governments will calibrate their trust in the startup by how seriously the startup takes security and how diligent they are when vetting employees. It does not involve everyone getting a security clearance, which would not be possible anyway if the startup works with multiple national governments.
I find the opposite situation is more common in practice: startups that find themselves in the national security space are often naive about what constitutes a baseline level of security, vetting their employees, and the pervasiveness and character of espionage programs.
It is important to recognize that national security considerations are starting to affect startups that never go anywhere near national security customers due to escalating concerns and increased rigor around software supply chains. You may not have an interest in national security but national security may take an interest in you. This has ramifications for many software business models.
https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/deemed-exp...
OP...you should definitely report this to the FBI.
If you try to hire a hitman, the FBI will definitely investigate even though no crime has been committed.
so, is there a clear line between: steal trade secret, and applied learned experience in new company the way everyone does?
some call that a positive initiative. cross training between departments or some such corp speak is used so people can "fill in" or just have a better understanding of the other departments so you can possibly work better with each other or come up with novel solutions for someone else.
companies that silo everyone off and prevent open discussion between groups are horrible places to work. ask Oppenheimer.
There may be some grey, but copying information in writing is pretty clearly over the line.
I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP? In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one, but even in other industries I guess what you don’t have access to after 6 months you won’t have access to realistically ever.
> eventually gave up and went back home
But according to what you said that was their plan all along. So in what sense did it not “work out for them”?
Some repositories needed to do your work, sure. Not necessarily all, and the more interesting work may not be available to just anyone who joins.
If it's a company like Google, you may not even end up at the group you interviewed for.
You need some level of intelligence and knowledge to know what is worth stealing and what to do with it.
Getting a major with the sole purpose of industrial espionage and then telling people about it indicates a lot about the person in question.
I've been at my company for almost 20 years. I have a lot of access, but if I was told, "go find some trade secrets." LOL, not a chance. The haystack is far too big and I don't even know what I'm looking for. Someone who has been at the company 6 months barely knows where the bathrooms are.
I was more like, giving the direct competitor the code would more be like industrial sabotage for their sake. What could they possibly do with it. They would waste fte years dechiffering it instead of doing something useful.
But nah, rather keep your own engineers in the dark about secret plans and road maps.
I worked out quite well though, since the engineers did their thing withoit knowing what the higher ups wanted.
Because it is not your intention to do so. Think about how one can live a whole life locking and unlocking locks without ever accidentally lock-picking one. Yet they can be picked, and often quite easily if that is your goal.
If you are serious about it you don’t just bumble around randomly until a trade secret hits you on the head. You can ask yourself: what can that company do nobody else can? You can even ask this question before joining a company and thus selecting the right target and the right position to get access to it.
Did you ever consider doing raising a red flag? If so, why did or didn't you?
I airquote naturally because it’s obvious that foreign interference is at play, based on the laissez-faire attitude towards this sort of thing by some groups.
Yet, the vast majority of both camps still think of themselves as american. Neither group will take kindly for others to present themselves as american, to then proceed steal from other americans for the benefit of non-americans.
We are all part of the same macro-tribe after all.
The capitalists running the companies are the common enemy. Nationalism is a tool, not something to be into once the nation is strong. Sad that people still care about being patriots or whatever when the companies are only paying you a wage while they make profit and keep all control of all the work and means of production.
> being a snake to go defraud a company to steal the hard work of others so your own illicit company can turn a profit off said labor by others irks me.
I'm sorry, I really don't understand this. What part of the second statement doesn't apply to the first?
Presumably the more valuable the IP, the harder it is to access.
Sure, some algorithms there might save you some time, but its often the design and the data where the money lies (what this guy focused on).
Clone google's repo and you'll likely struggle forever to get anything of substance running on a rando vm/docker/etc. not to mention about spinning the entire stack with interconnected services, certificates, shitty code, and layers upon layers of hacking that can only be resolved by relying on the tribal knowledge on whomever built the darn thing.
Compared to that - detailed design docs, a team of motivated Chinese dudes/ettes with some monetary support from the local party, and you can have a close-enough copy running natively on the Alibaba cloud in a few months.
Or maybe useful for security exploits.
The design from a design doc can be replicated at almost any company. The actual code is specific to the company and their exact stack.
The company's business position is similarly hard to duplicate. You can understand a company's current capital, customers and money flows. Your new company has to either outcompete for those same flows or create or capture alternative flows, and do this with different capital. Having, say, the entire source code for FedEx doesn't make it easy to launch a competitor. It's practically irrelevant compared to the network of capital investments, corporate goodwill and contracts, etc.
The guy copied source code via copy paste... And it seems, also regular Google documents.
He was already caught uploading secret stuff, quit Google and bought a ticket to go to China, and was arrested only because he delayed the trip by a few weeks which was enough time for Google to discover more violations and contact the FBI.
Google didn't contact the FBI until they learned of older violations. Which begs the question: what triggered that: the fact that the earlier documents were more secret, more numerous, or the fact that the guy lied about destroying all previously downloaded data?
Guess this guy didn't get the memo.
Being the direct manager in these situations is a hell of a ride no matter what your involvement is.
All charges were eventually dropped.
I wonder what will happen with this case.
Without any context it implies that the US is going on nationality motivated witch hunts, which might be true, particularly in the Trump era, but I also would be astonished if China did not have significant penetration into academia and American companies.
We know based on China's cyber operations that they are particularly interested in industrial secrets.
Given the existence of Chinese police operating on US soil, I doubt the characterization of witch hunts. I've read more than one compelling case of Chinese operatives courting IP theft too, including hearing one on NPR, which isn't exactly a conservative mouthpiece. China openly used organized crime to attempt to put down protests in Hong Kong in 2019. China has a history of arbitrarily arresting foreigners.
> We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. -- FBI director Christopher Wray, July 2020
This is not something Google would talk about publicly, but it’s standard practice in any company that is a serious target for sophisticated cyberespionage to spend a great deal on specialized equipment that can log all network traffic at scale.
You could use the data to identify activity levels or behavior patterns of the people using the device but it would cost a ton more money and a larger team to do that plus the other responsibilities we had simultaneously.
My experience is also not with employee owned devices so in my mind there’s nothing wrong with doing it’s agreed to and is imperative to their function as an employees especially with HIPPA concerned.
I think there was some BYOD stuff that was starting at one point and we had to run an emulator on their personal devices so the programs we run to collect logs were sandboxed from their regular phones.
No data egress for 6 months, then 20GBs of outbound traffic? Someone's getting notified to take a look and see what that was and where you sent it. You only authenticate against one host on the network, and suddenly you're hitting thousands of hosts? Someone's getting notified to investigate, &c.
Data from employee devices all being captured and stored? That seems plausible. All data on the corporate network? Less so to my naive mind. I'd love to hear exactly how that works and what kind of retention exists for it.
What seems far more likely is that there's a rules engine that can see all the traffic and makes a decision about if it trips an event to be logged or looks strange enough to be captured (along with some amount of surrounding context, if possible).
Capturing all network traffic is absurd and I doubt that's even a thing. You'd need a department the size of the existing company to be able to manage and do anything meaningful with it. Maybe if you had a super secure jump box you could consider monitoring all the traffic on that, but there are much much easier ways to audit behavior than network traffic. Monitor the devices instead.
Not a Google employee BTW, but work for a company that I am reasonably sure does monitor their network.
But if you're on work equipment, they likely have corp spyware looking at all your browsing even if you're not on vpn. Shop for fans or whatever you need to do on personal equipment.
If he’s installed something like mullvad on his work laptop and he’s able to tunnel out from the corporate network, he’s probably safe from the content but has broken policy on unauthorized software, the intent of which can be malicious.
They won’t care in general. But if they want to get rid of him they’ll have the info ready.
The twist of the story though is they were duped themselves. They were setup to get caught as a decoy while the real crime took place.
Rather than say, some tor IP address which would stick out.
By definition....
Yes
>In total, DING uploaded more than 500 unique files containing Google Confidential Information, including the trade secrets alleged in Counts One through Four. DING exfiltrated these files by copying data from the Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his Google-issued MacBook laptop. DING then converted the Apple Notes into PDF files and uploaded them from the Google network into DING Account 1. This method helped DING evade immediate detection.
Evidently not. It just shows that the guy is not a foreign intelligence operative - a professional could easily operate there for years undetected with fairly basic opsec. That said, aside from things like hardware designs and perhaps certain model weights, I struggle to think of anything at Google that anyone would want that’s not already on GitHub.
It was this person's ploy to pretend there is extremely valuable IPs in the docs he illegally obtained.
It just shows that this person indeed was clueless about large-scale engineering. I.e., stealing all of the code wont give any org the capability to do large-scale engineering. It most likely would cripple the org, as the foreign objects act as poison.
The ideal trick is to pretend that he possess the secret.
> Officials also reviewed surveillance footage showing that another employee had scanned Ding’s access badge at the Google building in the U.S. where he worked to make it look like Ding was there during times when he was actually in China, the indictment says.
Crime doesn't pay. That's a pretty lackluster bribe for a mid-career AI expert. I wonder if there's more behind it.
Also, pretty sure there are no DEI quotas for Asian men.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832
What a trade secret lacks in protection is the monopoly granted by a patent.
Maybe someone can make a horrible start-up that does this as a service.
you’re right, the big names probably can’t handle that on their own.
If a colleague new about it and reported it then that should lead to action 100% of the time. The question is if that happened or not.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
> He also separately founded and served as chief executive of a China-based startup company that aspired to train “large AI models powered by supercomputing chips,” the indictment said.
These events happened after the person was hired.
This would suggest performing background checks with some frequency - presumably at least once a month - in order to catch the events promptly.
... and not just of high profile or senior developers, but all of the junior developers too.
Um, yes? That’s among the least invasive and cheapest due diligence they could do.
Instances of people sharing the same name are far more common in china than elsewhere. For example there are more than 30 thousand people called "Wang Wei".
The fact is complicated by the fact that the writing systems are different and transliteration errors are commonplace.
Google could even automate this with an email, opting into which would be a requirement for any senior employee handling the kind of information the US government cares about.
"A person sharing your name has registered a company in China, as of 2024-03-07. To affirm that you are not related to this person, please click this link. If you were this person, please reply to this email for next steps."
Edit: obviously, criminals don't mark the "yes I'm a criminal box" on forms. That's not the purpose it's there to serve.
phew
According to the article, he was a junior employee.
>Edit: obviously, criminals don't mark the "yes I'm a criminal box" on forms. That's not the purpose it's there to serve.
What purpose would it serve? Would it have prevented this case?
> Disclosure: I work at Google.
It's Google. Not a mom and pop shop, not a startup, not even a large bank. It's a massive conglomerate who's entire business model revolves around data.
So yes. And same-name conflicts can be handled case by case.
How? Several times I've had to contact someone within Google whose name I know, but when I go to look up the person's email, there are multiple employees with that name. This is just within Google. Think of within an entire country.
...unless they're Chinese.
Google can’t secure itself. That’s been true for years. It’s an enterprise held together by monopoly power, lobbying and low interest rates.
> Article seven says in part that “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.
And that's just a nice wording to make it official, russians don't have anything similar yet they keep bribing small and big people all around the world to often perform literal treason of their home country, and quite a few do so for petty sums. Your Chinese relatives can also be just sentenced ie for made up drug trafficking to execution and subsequent organ harvest if say sending them to 're-education' camp won't convince you.
Anybody having Chinese citizenship and any position of power or access to secret stuff should be treated as potential threat and evaluated continuously. Or just not hired. If they are actually serious about such a work they should give up their nationality, if they can't then they are risky. Its a serious stuff by no means, but this is how China plays so literally everybody around the globe has to adjust or suffer subsequent consequences.
Totally under appreciated point. It’s not “over there” anymore, the CCP have a strong and growing presence in the Bay Area now. Penetration into the FBI will take longer than google or local law enforcement but it is inevitable.
You can, but it's a fucking pain in the ass, and when Zero COVID kicked in, the Chinese Embassies and Consulates stopped processing anything.
Imo there's no reason to poke that bear anymore - a lot of bad practices that were common 10 years ago are not tolerated anymore (though sadly, a lot of good practices have also started getting cracked down, like domestic criticism)
Edit: you're talking about Gui Minhai. Ok yea that's fair.
It has been downhill since Xi took charge, but yet, he was able to use accusations of corruption to purge his competition. The things that have improved are mostly public order (like prostitution being much less visible than it was).
A lot of the crackdown was performative, but silver lining is that at least some bastards got punished as they deserve (albeit by equally reprehensible bastards).
Sort of a broken clock is right twice kinda situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai
Who, after being kidnapped, conveniently and totes voluntarily applied to have his Chinese citizenship reinstated.
> “We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement.
> Ding [..] began uploading hundreds of files into a personal Google Cloud account two years ago.
> He resigned from Google last Dec. 26. Three days later, Google officials learned that he had presented as CEO of one of the Chinese companies at an investor conference in Beijing.
This is just something companies have to say to keep their certifications / audits valid and not get sued by shareholders. In the end any system is leakable if workers really want to.
China understands there is a real risk of the US gaining an absolute advantage in A[G]I development. It shouldn't surprise anyone that they will use all kinds of 'greyzone methods' to bridge this gap.
- No homegrown semiconductor industry: isn’t the recent hand-wringing over the new Huawei chips proof of the opposite?
- No interest in training LLMs? Is that true? I thought Baidu was already on it?
In fact at every major AI conferences, Chinese R&D groups like Baidu and Ant group are major participants (and sponsors). I am talking about conferences like NeurIPS and AAAI, which both happened in the past few months.
EDIT: the comments of that article are also confused by that article, lol. Is there a joke that is going over our collective heads?
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1765533899873288642?t=yUGy...
The Chinese probably have secrets worth stealing about solar panel production. They've pretty much driven everyone else out of business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/business/economy/china-fo... https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/27/customs-d...
Someone hires me. I build a steaming service. But this time I'm much more polished and faster.
Is this stealing too?
If you want to learn more, there is a thing called clean-room development which is a process used to reduce the legal risk of copyright and intellectual property violations.
I’ve had a security clearance in the past and there’s no way a foreign national passes. I got questioned significantly about a family member who was a citizen of another country.
I wonder if it’s just a matter of time.
For jobs in the US, yes.
In my example, the US won’t grant security clearance to a foreign national. Even if you are a permanent resident, you don’t get clearance without citizenship.
> He also separately founded and served as chief executive of a China-based startup company that aspired to train “large AI models powered by supercomputing chips,” the indictment said.
> Prosecutors say Ding did not disclose either affiliation to Google, which described him Wednesday as a junior employee.
---
They likely did... he did these things after joining Google as a junior employee.
https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination
Discriminating against a national origin is illegal as it is a protected class.
Unless the material is classified under ITAR ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_... ) there is no reason to do a security clearance review of a junior developer with a valid work visa.