The US announced five criminal cases, including one against a former Apple Inc. software engineer, in a sweep to stop strategic adversaries such as Russia and China from acquiring sensitive technologies.
(Bloomberg) — The US announced five criminal cases, including one against a former Apple Inc. software engineer, in a sweep to stop strategic adversaries such as Russia and China from acquiring sensitive technologies.
The cases include claims about the use of procurement networks to help Russia acquire military technology, the theft of code from US companies including Apple for self-driving cars, and a Chinese national trying to sell technology used to procure weapons of mass destruction for Iran, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen said at a press conference Tuesday.
The charges and arrests in the cases are the first to be announced under the Justice and Commerce departments’ Disruptive Technology Strike Force, launched in February to combat rivals’ theft of advanced technology and efforts to hack for financial gain or use new tools to collect intelligence.
Read More: US Forges ‘Strike Force’ to Combat Tech Theft, Hacking
In the Apple case, prosecutors announced charges filed last month against Weibao Wang. They allege Wang stole a trove of data on self-driving cars from 2016 to 2018 to provide the technology to a Chinese autonomous car company and then fled to China when the theft was discovered. He is charged in federal court in San Francisco with six counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets.
The case marks at least the third public instance of an engineer on Apple’s self-driving car project accused of stealing technology to bring back to a Chinese competitor.
Read the indictment against the former Apple coder here
Apple kicked off its project around 2014, seeking to build a vehicle to take on Tesla Inc. The project remains in the works, with Apple focused on developing a self-driving system for a future vehicle. In 2022, another former engineer was accused of stealing related information for Chinese car company Xpeng. Three years earlier, similar charges were filed in another case.
As part of the sweep announced Tuesday, prosecutors in New York charged Xiangjiang Qiao, also known as Joe Hansen, with sanctions evasion, money laundering and bank fraud. They claim Qiao took part in a scheme to provide Iran with isostatic graphite, a high-tech material used in the nose tips of intercontinental ballistic missiles, through a Chinese company that has been sanctioned by the US. Qiao, who is in China, allegedly received payments that were made through the US financial system, Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams said at the press conference.
The US initiative, which includes officials in a dozen metropolitan areas across the country, comes as government officials grapple with new threats such as the balloon they allege China sent to collect intelligence that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina after flying across the US.
Read About Some of the Cases Here
- Alleged theft of trade secrets to benefit China
- Alleged sanctions evasion to give Iran weapons materials
- Alleged conspiracy to export aircraft parts to Russia
The strike force, led by the Justice Department’s National Security Division and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, uses intelligence and data to help identify early threats to trade secrets and protect critical supply chains, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a speech in London in February.
“Today, autocrats seek tactical advantage through the acquisition, use, and abuse of America’s most innovative technology,” Monaco said in announcing the task force. “They use it to enhance their military capabilities, support mass surveillance programs that enable human rights abuses and all together undermine our values.”
The effort taps the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security officials and more than a dozen US attorney offices to deal with emerging technological threats and tumultuous geopolitical events, from spying to the exploitation of capital investments and the theft of secret software algorithms. Besides China and Russia, the US has cited the governments of Iran and North Korea as examples of such threats.
The task force covers metro areas including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Washington.
–With assistance from Jef Feeley and Mark Gurman.
(Adds details and context of case against former Apple engineer in fourth through sixth paragraphs, as well as a link to the indictment and, lower, links to some of the other cases.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.