Global Courant 2023-05-16 22:09:59
The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had identified a former Apple Inc. engineer. has been charged with attempting to steal the company’s technology related to autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China.
The case was one of five announced Tuesday aimed at countering attempts to illegally acquire US technology by countries such as Russia and China. The actions were the first announced by a “strike force” formed in February, in part to keep sensitive technologies away from foreign adversaries.
The former Apple engineer, identified as Weibao Wang, 35, formerly lived in Mountain View, California, and was hired by Apple in 2016, according to an April indictment unsealed Tuesday.
In 2017, he accepted a job in the US at a Chinese company developing self-driving cars before resigning from Apple, but the indictment says he waited about four months before notifying Apple of his new job.
After his last day at Apple, the company discovered that he had been given access to large amounts of proprietary data in the days before his departure, according to the US Justice Department.
Federal agents searched his home in June 2018 and found “large amounts” of Apple data, it said. On the same night the search was conducted, Wang was able to take a one-way ticket from San Francisco International Airport to Guangzhou, China.
The Justice Department said in a statement that Wang is suspected of stealing or attempting to steal six categories of trade secrets. Each carries a maximum legal penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The department has not identified the company that offered the job to Wang. Since leaving the US, media reports have identified him as head of automated driving at Jidu, an EV company controlled by Baidu and co-funded by Chinese automaker Geely.
Project Titan long in the making
Apple’s automotive effort, known as Project Titan, has been uneven since 2014, when the company first started designing a vehicle from scratch. A December report said Apple had delayed the car’s planned launch. Reports filed with the state of California show Apple testing vehicles on the state’s roads.
Apple declined to comment on the matter.
“We are vigilant in enforcing U.S. laws to stop the flow of sensitive technologies to our foreign adversaries,” Matt Olsen, the chief of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said at a news conference. “We are determined to do everything we can to prevent these advanced tools from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries.”
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the department’s second official, said in February that the “strike force” was a joint effort with the US Department of Commerce to protect US technology from foreign adversaries and other threats to national security. Monaco said at the time that the United States would “hit back against adversaries who seek to siphon our most advanced technology and attack today the national security threats of tomorrow.”
Two of the cases announced on Tuesday involved the dismantling of alleged procurement networks set up to help Russia’s military and intelligence services obtain sensitive technology. Two cases, including Wang’s, related to former software engineers who allegedly stole source code from US tech companies to sell to Chinese competitors.
The fifth case involved a Chinese network set up to supply Iran with materials used in weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
The Commerce Department last year imposed new export controls on advanced computer and semiconductor components in a maneuver designed to prevent China from acquiring certain chips.
