espionage

Second China-Bound Apple Car Worker Charged With Data Theft →

January 31, 2019 · 09:03

Kartikay Mehrotra and Mark Gurman, for Bloomberg:

An Apple Inc. hardware engineer was charged by the U.S. with stealing the iPhone maker’s driverless car secrets for a China-based company, the second such case since July […]

Jizhong Chen was seen by a fellow Apple employee taking photographs Jan. 11 with a wide-angle lens inside a secure work space that houses the company’s autonomous car project, about six months after he signed a strict confidentiality oath when he was hired, according to a criminal complaint in federal court in San Jose, California.

Prosecutors said Chen admitted to taking the photos and backing up some 2,000 files to his personal hard drive, including manuals and schematics for the project, but didn’t tell Apple he had applied for a job with a China-based autonomous vehicle company.

Will the James Bonds of the world adapt to this new reality, in which stealing code for autonomous cars is more important than trying to steal nuclear launch codes?

Former Apple Employee Charged With Theft of Trade Secrets Related to Autonomous Car Project →

July 11, 2018 · 11:17

Juli Clover, for Macrumors:

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation this week charged former Apple employee Xiaolang Zhang with theft of trade secrets, according to documents filed with the Northern District Court of California.

Zhang was hired at Apple in December of 2015 to work on Project Titan, developing software and hardware for use in autonomous vehicles. Zhang specifically worked on Apple’s Compute Team, designing and testing circuit boards to analyze sensor data […]

Zhang was interviewed by the FBI in late June, where he admitted to stealing the information, and he was later arrested attempting to leave to China on July 7.

Add a martini — shaken, not stirred — a few guns, and perhaps a new Aston Martin DBS Superleggera, and you’ve got yourself a Bond movie.