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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

> It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company

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”?

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I have a strong distrust for authority, but even I would report espionage and IP theft of this sort. Downloading a movie doesn't bother me. Running a site for others to download movies doesn't bother me. But 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. Do your own R&D.

Did you ever consider doing raising a red flag? If so, why did or didn't you?

If anything is going to unite two groups of people who are “naturally” on opposite sides of a political spectrum, it’s going to be stopping treasonous activities.

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.

Correct. The left and the right may be at loggerheads about the best way to manage america.

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.

Leftism is about both heirarchies and specifically capitalism and colonialism exploiting people and workers.

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.

> Running a site for others to download movies doesn't bother me.

> 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?

You give it away for free instead.

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> In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one

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.

I would be very careful doing that at Google. Even if just about anything is accessible, I imagine most access is logged. If you are downloading everything not related to your job it could raise some alarms!

Didn't stop Anthony Levandowski

Presidential pardon is the one weird trick that employers hate, when you steal IP and get caught

Yeah, yeah. I’m not saying it is easy business. What I am saying is that “bouncing around many companies in a quick succession and then leaving for their home country” is exactly the pattern one would exhibit with that plan. If one would want to show that their plan didn’t work out then one would be talking about other things. For example that they only got junior jobs with no access to the code/secrets, or that they were only hired in fields outside of their interest, etc etc.

I think the subtext here is that the “spy” in question was not the sharpest tool in the shed.

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.

Short of downloading literally everything and sending it back to a team, it's possible he didn't know enough after 6 months (while also trying to maintain his actual job) to get anything of value.

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.

My prior employer was really worried about source code leaks.

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.

> 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.

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.

If you are an agent of a rival company or govt there may alreay be a "best practices" rulebook for stealing IP, a set of established procedures.

If you're going to steal secrets, do it slowly, don't pull a Levandowski and copy everything in a noticable way so that security gets alerted, at which point it may take you forever to exfiltrate data.

> I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP?

Presumably the more valuable the IP, the harder it is to access.

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