
Chinese battery expert is charged with stealing trade secrets from US employer - hkai
https://beta.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2179192/chinese-battery-expert-hongjin-tan-charged-stealing
======
logicchains
Found the actual complaint: [https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/Ho...](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/HongjinTan.pdf)

~~~
dguido
Thank you! I wish more articles would at least link to the complaint. Here are
the important bits:

> On 12/12/2018 at approximately 10:30 a.m., Tan contacted his supervisor,
> advised he was resigning from Company A, and gave his two weeks' notice. Tan
> told his supervisor that he was returning to China to be with his family as
> he is the only child to aging parents. Tan told his supervisor that he did
> not currently have a job offer, but was negotiating with a few battery
> companies in China.

> Tan's resignation prompted Company A to revoke his access to company
> systems, and conduct a Systems Access review of Tan's computer activity.

> That review confirmed that Tan had accessed hundreds of files, including
> research reports. The reports included not only how to make Product A,
> which, according to Company A, is a complicated and technically difficult
> process, but also Company A's plans for marketing Product A in China and in
> cell phone and lithium-based battery systems. These files included
> information that Company A considers to be trade secrets and outside the
> scope of Tan's employment with Company A. The review revealed Tan downloaded
> restricted files to a personal thumb drive. In the course of his regular
> duties and responsibilities, Tan should have used his company issued laptop.
> Tan did not have authorization to use a thumb drive to download Company A
> files. Tan's supervisor confirmed that nothing in the downloaded files was
> within Tan's area of responsibility. Further Company A confirmed, through
> Tan's supervisor, Tan did not have a work related need to access or download
> the restricted files.

------
yerich
> The agent said Tan handed the flash drive over to the US company, and the
> firm found that the deleted files would have allowed his new employers to
> recreate the product in question. The files had been deleted from the flash
> drive the day before Tan resigned, the affidavit said.

Call me confused, but I don't really see a crime here? The defendant turned
over the data before his resignation and is not accused of actually making an
attempt to transfer or sell the data to another party, or conspiring to do so.
The only accusation is that he had some files that weren't part of his job to
have, apparently. But presumably the internal corporate system allowed him
access to it and thus he obtained it without breaching any computer system.
Perhaps his workplace policy barred him from downloading files onto a USB
drive. But is that considered theft?

~~~
pointillistic
I sometimes feel that people who comment here of the Chinese spying stories
are the Chinese agents. First comment is always dismissing the story. Is
anyone at HN looking where the comments originate?

~~~
mistrial9
raise your hand if your un-advertised Linux server is attacked daily from
China

~~~
mroche
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Every. Damn. Day.

Particularly at the university, I was setting up a GitLab box that wasn’t
supposed to be externalized (didn’t realize at the time that LAN utilizes the
public addresses instead of NAT). 90K ssh attacks in 3 days, vast majority
from the east Asia area. Luckily none made it through. Learned my lesson (and
firewalld) from that experience. Nearly had a panic attack from that (first
time setting something up like that).

The above was from my naive days before I started getting more deeply involved
in sysadmin and networking work. It’s still incredibly annoying to log in to
systems with “There have been 173 failed login attempts since the last
successful login.”

~~~
Teknoman117
When I set up my first gateway/router server for the first time, I was truly
shocked to see how much traffic comes in searching for vulnerabilities. I knew
it happened, but the frequency was wholly unexpected. SSH requests for root,
SMB traffic, etc. every second or so.

------
peter303
US travelers to China should beware. Three caucasian Canadians are languishing
in Chinese jails due to the Huawei executive. Chinese practice allows six
months confinement while the prosecutor conducts an investigation. Meng has
relatives and friends in high places while this guy may or may not.

~~~
weconserve
"Canadian held in China questioned daily, no lawyer, can't turn off light:
sources"

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-canada/canadian-
hel...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-canada/canadian-held-in-
china-questioned-daily-no-lawyer-cant-turn-off-light-sources-idUSKCN1OK07Q)

Canada, US call for 'immediate release' of two Canadians held by China

[https://www.nst.com.my/world/2018/12/442866/canada-us-
call-i...](https://www.nst.com.my/world/2018/12/442866/canada-us-call-
immediate-release-two-canadians-held-china)

------
zwaps
At this point, its best to assume CCP it talking, promising, manipulating and
strongarming everyone with ties to China.

Be as careful as you can

~~~
scruffyherder
They just get your family.

------
altvali
I have a question about trading secrets and working in machine learning. How
should a ML company go about hiring people and protecting its tech? I once
interviewed for a company that claimed above state of the art results on some
datasets (they actually weren't), and they wanted me to sign a contract where
I was forbidden to ever work for their current and future clients (that's not
enforceable). In ML you usually don't need a flash drive, you learn enough
about what makes your team achieve great results that you can go to another
company and use what you learned and it seems impossible to prove that you
"stole trade secrets" from the previous company.

~~~
sometimesijust
Project the data, not the model. You need to do it anyway and has the side
benefit of making overfitting more difficult. Protecting the model is
impossible anyway since most advancements terms to be trying lots of publicly
known techniques and discovering that a particular combination works best for
your data. Once one knows which techniques those are these nothing stopping a
competent engineer from reimplementing them at another company.

~~~
GuiA
Indeed. For commercially useful applications, collecting the data, labeling
it, etc, costs orders of magnitude more than a team of PhDs building the
models.

~~~
trott
> For commercially useful applications, collecting the data, labeling it, etc,
> costs orders of magnitude more than a team of PhDs building the models.

I don't think it's typical. For example, JFT has 350e6 images, and it probably
cost ~$35M to hand-label, but Google has paid people far in excess of that to
work on image classification.

~~~
wil421
Google doesn’t even have to pay people. Anyone who has picked out cars or fire
hydrants from their recapatchya’s is helping Label their dataset.

~~~
trott
JFT has 17K classes. I'm assuming that they used specialized experts to tell
them apart (dog breeds, plant and animal species, etc.)

~~~
wil421
Thanks.

From Google:

>Of course, the elephant in the room is where can we obtain a dataset that is
300x larger than ImageNet? At Google, we have been continuously working on
building such datasets automatically to improve computer vision algorithms.
Specifically, we have built an internal dataset of 300M images that are
labeled with 18291 categories, which we call JFT-300M. The images are labeled
using an algorithm that uses complex mixture of raw web signals, connections
between web-pages and user feedback. This results in over one billion labels
for the 300M images (a single image can have multiple labels). Of the billion
image labels, approximately 375M are selected via an algorithm that aims to
maximize label precision of selected images. However, there is still
considerable noise in the labels: approximately 20% of the labels for selected
images are noisy. Since there is no exhaustive annotation, we have no way to
estimate the recall of the labels.

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/revisiting-unreasonable-
ef...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/revisiting-unreasonable-
effectiveness.html?m=1)

~~~
sangnoir
That doesn't sound like recaptcha: it's more likely that they label the
pictures _N_ (or _n%_ ) people click after searching for "Golden Retriever" in
image search (as the "raw web signal")

------
blinko12
SCMP has a decidedly pro-China slant ever since it was bought by Alibaba owner
Jack Ma. I'd be a little careful about trusting this article

------
origami777
Normally I'm all for hiring the best and brightest from all over the world.
But with the mission that China seems to be on, I think US startups should be
wary of hiring Chinese nationals. Of course they are not all spies. But, it
only takes one to fuck your company.

I don't know what the solution is. I don't think companies should flat out
stop hiring Chinese nationals, because that's punishes the ones with good
intent. But it's clear there is enough danger that you need some plan to take
on the risk.

~~~
lvs
"They" ... "the ones" ... "it only takes one" ...

It takes only one bigoted executive to screw up your company fairly well too,
but I think we all know what to do about that one.

Edit: Fine, "bigoted" for the guy having a pedantic problem with the word
"racism." Prejudice is prejudice.

~~~
permatech
nationalism isn’t racism.....

------
zachguo
He spent more than a decade in Caltech, his brain probably stores more
knowledge than the USB drive.

------
simonhamp
Headline should have stopped at: Chinese battery expert charged

------
Babiker
I'm gonna assume in this case he was negatively charged ...

~~~
Scoundreller
Are you sure?

~~~
evancox100
Missed opportunity: "Are you positive?"

~~~
Scoundreller
I was hoping for “I’m _positive_ ”

------
zachguo
In the past year, there were several charges from DOJ against Chinese
companies, employees and scientists related to IP theft. Those charges made a
lot of noises, but what are the case outcomes?

~~~
ardy42
> In the past year, there were several charges from DOJ against Chinese
> companies, employees and scientists related to IP theft. Those charges made
> a lot of noises, but what are the case outcomes?

The wheels of justice move slowly. In the US, felony cases can take more than
a year to resolve:

[https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-criminal-
cases-t...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-criminal-cases-
take.html):

> The amount of time that passes between an arrest and the filing of charges
> on the one hand, and trial or entry of a guilty or “no contest” plea on the
> other, varies widely from case to case.... Felony trials can linger without
> resolution for over a year—and that’s without accounting for any delay
> between arrest and the filing of charges.

------
oh_sigh
How much is the expected upside for crimes like this for the individual?

Basically, even if you make this alleged crime punishable by life in prison,
will people still attempt it because the upside is so much?

~~~
fipple
You’re thinking about this the wrong way. These people are on a mission for
Mother China. It’s patriotism and loyalty. It’s why militaries everywhere get
people signing up for a “glorious death” protecting the assets of
billionaires.

~~~
whatshisface
Now that we have multiple hypotheses (patriotic motivation and materialistic
motivation) we should think about how we could tell which one it was. I can't
think of any way that we could ever know the difference.

~~~
fipple
Spying isn’t new. There’s always a combination of the two.

------
deevolution
If only more trade secrets were shared, stolen, distributed whatever you want
to call it, we'd all be progressing at a much nicer pace.

Cheers to all the software pirates out there making the world a better place.

~~~
jgowdy
Yes, as long as every corporation continued to invest at the same rate despite
the fact that their trade secrets would be worthless and they'd be undercut by
cheaper competition.

This fantasy of "if only all commercially valued knowledge were free" ignores
the realities of economics, which pays for the development of technology. Even
open source software development exists largely on the corporate dollar with a
few companies funding most development.

If more secrets were shared, stolen, distributed, whatever, that will change
the equation for companies deciding to invest. You're better off optimizing
for time to market and making a half ass product than trying to achieve
technical differentiation/superiority only to have the results of your
research and development stolen outright.

~~~
deevolution
Fair points, but a quicker to market half assed product also means it'll
likely be cheaper and more widely available which translates to more product
iteration cycles because more data, more users, more tests and more
competition.

~~~
notacoward
> a quicker to market half assed product

That's not the alternative _at all_. If companies have insufficient incentive
to do certain kinds of R&D, they just won't do it. Entire _categories_ of
products wouldn't exist. Do you think any part of the computer you typed that
on would be as nice - or exist at all - if the people who invented better
screens and batteries and storage media hadn't expected to gain first/most
from the basic physics and chemistry and process engineering involved? No,
there would have been _zero_ product iteration cycles without the basic
innovations on which those depend.

~~~
zozbot123
Incentives can take many forms. You could have prizes, funded e.g. by
governments, consumer organizations, charities and the like, for opening up
the sort of research that is often "protected" by trade secrets. Open source
software has worked very well for a number of corporations, bringing all sorts
of benefits in marketing, recruiting, cost-sharing etc. There's no reason why
the same couldn't apply to many formerly "secret" techniques.

~~~
notacoward
Open source is great. I'm a maintainer for a pretty large open-source project,
so I'm clearly not opposed to the idea, but it not a solution for something
like basic electrical engineering or materials science research. Prizes just
don't seem to work that well either. As you say, incentives take many forms.
Every form that they take adds to the amount of R&D that gets done, and "we're
gonna make a ton of money off this" is responsible for the largest single
slice of that pie. When you take away protection for inventors, you
practically guarantee that the fruits of their labor will go to the people who
already own the big production lines and supply chains. That's a really
terrible way to run an innovation economy.

------
rhegart
I don’t agree that much with the Trump administration, but their overall
policy and effort on China is commendable. It might be that the news is just
focused on China lately making it seem like we’re doing more to combat the IP
theft and other abuses, but I don’t think so. I’m glad we are finally getting
tough. I know one case isn’t indicative of this but the overall trend is
clearly in the right direction. Appeasement over a decade has yielded
literally nothing.

------
shanghaikid
Just

------
buboard
all charged batteries discharge, expert or not

------
devoply
Steal brains from a country and no one bats an eye, steal ideas from a country
and everyone loses their minds.

~~~
krtkush
> Steal brains

They did not force anyone to migrate to the country.

~~~
paganel
They kind of did when the best universities in the West have depended at some
stage of their life on the host countries doing some bad things to countries
like China (think the opium war in the mid-1800s). The reason that countries
like China or India don't have their Harvards and Oxbridges is not because the
people in there were more stupid and didn't know how to run a higher place of
learning, it's because the adversarial socio-economic conditions of that time
(many of them imposed by the host countries of the Harvards and the Oxbridges)
forbade them to.

------
maxerickson
Information wants to be free (except for trade secrets of US corporations).

Note that this is sarcasm about the incongruity in attitudes, not support of
this sort of theft.

~~~
nopetrain
If that information damaged your livelihood, would you still want it to be
free? Not advocating for anything here, just pointing out.

