Immigrant spies in Silicon Valley
Birgitta Forsberg:
When Shin-Guo Tsai gave notice of resignation from his job as a design engineer at the Fremont semiconductor company Volterra on Feb. 15, he allegedly told his manager that he was returning to Taiwan to get married and that he didn't have a job lined up.
The story was a smoke screen, according to the FBI. Tsai, the agency alleges, had downloaded information on Volterra products. The FBI accuses him of using a private e-mail account to send some of the information to a Taiwanese startup company that was recruiting him for a job.
When Tsai announced his resignation, several co-workers told a manager that he had been downloading company information.
On Feb. 25, Volterra's vice president of design engineering, David Lidsky, and the FBI confronted Tsai, who allegedly admitted he had sent proprietary information to the Taiwanese firm. Two days later, FBI agents turned up at Tsai's home in San Jose late at night and arrested him. He is out on bail.
Tsai's lawyer, John Robertson of Los Angeles, said his client's actions did not involve industrial espionage.
"Our intention is to plead not guilty," Robertson said. "We plan to contest certain of the allegations."
Cases like this are far from unusual. Experts say U.S. companies are losing billions of dollars as a result of domestic and international espionage.
When it comes to cross-border theft of trade secrets, there are more foreigners spying on U.S. corporations than ever, according to Todd Davis, an FBI supervisor in Sacramento.
"Corporate America ought to be darned worried," Davis said. "If you are a major corporation with very sensitive technology, you have been targeted. Somebody is spying on you right now."
When corporate spies come to America, they tend to flock to Silicon Valley.
"We have prosecuted more theft of trade secret cases than any other district in the country," said Christopher Sonderby, chief of the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Unit of the U.S. attorney's office in San Jose.
His computer hacking unit was founded as the country's first such entity in February 2000. There are now 18 such units in U.S. attorneys' offices nationwide.
In the news:
China's Secret War
posted by Adam Lawson @ 2:04 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
As this blog is called the "moderntribalist", the Chinese gentleman was merely doing what loyal race-conscious tribesmen (ie definitely not Whites), do the World over, and have done for millenia ie to build up their own nation states and kinsfolk by using all means at their disposal.
Is this really so reprehensible from a purely rational genetic point of view?
"so reprehensible"
Well, perhaps only because it's occuring in the US within the wider context of what's going on with immigration.
Anyway, as someone once said... It's deja vu all over again.
Back at the beginning of March, I (xxx) had an email exchange (sort of -- the reporter didn't have much to say, which is typical) with another SFBA reporter (yyy) who had written a story about this same case, which not too surprisingly omitted any discussion of what the motive of the accused might have been:
From: yyy
To: xxx
Subject: RE: "Engineer accused of sending stolen information to Taiwanese company"
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 08:21:52
Thanks for your thoughts...
-----Original Message-----
From: xxx
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 4:36
To: yyy
Subject: "Engineer accused of sending stolen information to Taiwanese company"
[URL of story]
I read this on-line.
It seems this guy is a not just an engineer, but a Chinese engineer. Right? I mean, regarding
news coverage in your newspaper, sometimes a person's ethnicity is important, and sometimes it isn't.
And it does seem that when they are accused of a crime, suddenly their ethnicity becomes
unimportant. Which I find odd.
[The criminal information didn't go into Tsai's alleged motive, Sonderby said, and he declined
to speculate on it.]
Well, I will then. It could be he did it because he's Chinese. But then this would not fit in
all that well with the usual preening over "diversity" we see here at your newspaper (the importance of someone's ethnicity I mention above).
Or it could be he simply did it for the money?
[The value of the information was at least $100,000,...]
But then in today's world this is not exactly an awful lot, or perhaps even a tempting amount, of
money, is it? Of course I guess this means nothing one way or another about how much he
might have been offered or paid for the information. Not to mention that a 'data sheet' can
be, and commonly is, something given to customers, and so does not normally contain confidential
information.
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