Second China-Bound Apple Car Worker Charged With Data Theft

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?