
U.S. Says Accused Apple Secrets Thief Had Patriot Missile File - protomyth
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-09/u-s-says-accused-apple-secrets-thief-had-patriot-missile-file
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philip1209
> They also note that the federal office that supervises defendants on
> probation has concluded monitoring is no longer necessary because Chen has
> complied with all the conditions of his release and found full-time
> employment.

Wow, a company hired him? That surprises me.

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tomatotomato37
What I'm wondering is that will the inevitable military espionage charge going
to be added to the apple case or pursued in a separate case?

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madengr
The article doesn’t mention if he had a security clearance when working for
the defense contractor.

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openasocket
I'd be shocked if he managed to get a clearance, since he apparently has
Chinese citizenship.

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hangonhn
I don't know how the US would know this when doing his clearance check. It's
not as if the US can call up China and ask to verify. And if they do provide
that answer, should the US trust it?

The whole national origin thing, though, seems to be a red herring because
there are plenty of Americans of Chinese birth who do not spy for China and
there have been cases of non-Chinese born Americans who've sold the US out to
various different countries, including China.

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openasocket
> I don't know how the US would know this when doing his clearance check. It's
> not as if the US can call up China and ask to verify. And if they do provide
> that answer, should the US trust it?

Presumably when he entered the US he did so with a Chinese passport, and
applied for his visa from China. It wouldn't be difficult to determine that he
was a Chinese citizen, unless he used false papers and a fake identity from a
third country, which didn't happen in this case.

> The whole national origin thing, though, seems to be a red herring because
> there are plenty of Americans of Chinese birth who do not spy for China

Well, that's the standard for security clearance. There's a variety of reasons
why you wouldn't want to give clearance to someone foreign-born. When you
evaluate someone for a clearance one of the biggest things you look for is
potential weaknesses. For instance, someone with a gambling problem and lots
of gambling debts shouldn't be trusted because they would be vulnerable to
bribery. If someone has family or friends living in another country, then that
country's government could extort that person by threatening their family and
friends with arrest.

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nsporillo
Why innovate if you can wait for someone else to and simply steal the result
of expensive research and development?

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tqkxzugoaupvwqr
This would mean China is always a step behind. China wants to become the
leading country. To achieve that in the shortest time span possible, they copy
whatever they can, learn from it and build upon it. In short, China copies,
then innovates.

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CharlesColeman
> This would mean China is always a step behind. China wants to become the
> leading country. To achieve that in the shortest time span possible, they
> copy whatever they can, learn from it and build upon on it. In short, China
> copies, then innovates.

They don't necessarily have to innovate to become a leading country. They
could do that by achieving mere technological parity, but producing it at a
larger scale.

For instance, if China slavishly copied all US weapons designs and went to war
with the US, China would win. It has more population and a larger industrial
base, which means more soldiers in uniform and more equipment on the
battlefield. The slavish copying would neutralize the US "quality" advantage,
turning the conflict into one about "quantity."

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zer0faith
Can someone explain why China is hell bent on stealing IP from nations and
companies?

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freehunter
Because it's easier and cheaper than developing it yourself. You can outsource
the cost of R&D to another company/country and reap all the rewards for
yourself. This is how many popular Chinese brands got to be competitive with
more established companies so quickly. Alibaba is filled with devices that
look like a Galaxy S10 and have the same chassis and screen and battery and
processor and software as a Galaxy S10 but have the name of some fly-by-night
company on the back... because if Samsung orders 100,000 phones and you
already have the factory running, who will care if you actually produce
150,000 and sell the extras under your own brand? It's pure profit with no R&D
costs.

The only thing their dictator cares about is China's economic success.
International relations don't matter because... well, what are you going to do
about it? Stop making stuff in China? Good luck.

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antpls
Not trying to defend any side but :

> Because it's easier and cheaper than developing it yourself.

Why should the humanity invest resources twice to figure out how to make the
same product or the same service on another place on Earth? That would be a
bad allocation of our time, as a global specie. In the era of internet,
sharing knowledge is instant, why not make use of it?

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iguy
Well one argument is the same as for patents -- the prospect of having sole
use of something for a while is an incentive for its creation.

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CharlesColeman
paywall bypass: [https://outline.com/EMvchc](https://outline.com/EMvchc)

~~~
superkuh
javascript bypass:
[https://write.as/inadr35mwpqoz.md](https://write.as/inadr35mwpqoz.md)

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djohnston
The fact that Raytheon is hiring mainland-born engineers to work anywhere near
the Patriot missile system is basically malicious incompetence

EDIT I take it all back. There is nothing wrong with this.

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saagarjha
Discriminating solely on country of origin is illegal, I'm pretty sure.

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sillysaurusx
It's the other way around. For example, Elon once mentioned that since SpaceX
is basically working on the same tech as missile systems, there are lots of
restrictions on who SpaceX is allowed to hire. One of those restrictions
involved country of origin, but I can't remember the details.

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freehunter
I worked on a government project once and they had the requirement that anyone
working on the project had to be an American citizen. You could be
naturalized, but you had to be a citizen. And this was a pretty unimportant
project for a state government.

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kingkawn
Often that has more to do with not wanting bad press about hiring foreigners
with tax money than a security thing

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IAmEveryone
Show me one article criticising a US government for employing a foreigner with
your line of nationalistic reasoning and I'll belief you.

It sometimes happens with procurement ("buy American"), or for security
concerns as in the linked article. But not for employment. Heck, even Trump
employed dozens of Ukrainian/Greece/British people as we've learnt.

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kingkawn
I wasn’t talking about the private sector.

I was talking about government work contracts, like the state work the parent
comment was referring to.

My family members work in politics. These kinds of things are considered when
making all decisions because they don’t want to attract any negative press or
give potential narratives to future opponents. That’s how politics works from
the inside, at least for Democrats in America.

Everyone on here so prickly lately

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ConcernedCoder
TLDR: [https://imgur.com/gallery/zgrscWq](https://imgur.com/gallery/zgrscWq)

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dang
Please don't do this here.

