U.S. Charges Ex-Apple Self-Driving-Car Engineer with Tech Theft as Part of Crackdown on China and Russia

The Justice Department unveiled criminal charges against an ex-Apple engineer who stole company secrets, including the entire source code for a self-driving-vehicle project, while secretly working for a Chinese competitor.

Federal prosecutors unveiled that case yesterday, one of five cases that are part of a broader barrage unleashed this week by the department against Russian and Chinese tech-transfer operations. These cases were coordinated by the Disruptive Technology Strike Force, a joint effort by Justice and the Commerce Department. Four people were arrested, while several others remain at large abroad.

“These charges demonstrate the Justices Department’s commitment to preventing sensitive technology from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran,” said Matthew Olsen, the DOJ’s top national-security prosecutor, in a statement.

The new task force comes amid Washington’s growing focus on countering Chinese economic espionage. Last month, FBI director Christopher Wray said that his bureau is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every ten hours, repeating a figure that he’s cited publicly for over three years to highlight the urgency of the threat.

The Justice Department said in an indictment revealed today that Weibo Wang, a former engineer for Apple, where he worked on a team developing self-driving-car technology, secretly signed up to join one of the tech firm’s Chinese competitors four months before resigning from Apple in 2018.

Apple reviewed Wang’s access logs after his resignation, finding that he accessed “large amounts of sensitive project information” in the days before his resignation from the company, the indictment says. Then, in June of that year, federal agents searched his home in California, finding proprietary information he took from Apple — including “the entire project source code.” Later that evening, Wang departed from San Francisco on a one-way flight to Guangzhou, China.

While the court documents don’t name the Chinese competitor that Wang worked for, Reuters and other sources have identified him as an executive at an electric-vehicle car venture led by Baidu, the Chinese Internet-search service, called Jidu. Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of California charged Wang with six counts related to the theft of trade secrets.

The other four cases unveiled today address similar instances of economic espionage and tech-transfer issues.

Two of the cases involved schemes to illicitly transfer technology to Russia, including a Greek man’s efforts to supply Russian nuclear and quantum research entities with restricted military information.

One of the cases involved a Chinese firm’s role in facilitating the Iranian government’s acquisition of materials needed the produce warheads for weapons of mass destruction.

Prosecutors also indicted Xiangjiang Qiao over his role in a scheme to transfer materials used in the production of nose tips of intercontinental ballistic missiles to Iran. Qiao works for China’s Sinotech Dalian, a company in China subject to U.S. sanctions. The Justice Department alleges that Qiao used a fraudulent bank account to illegally receive payment for the shipments of the material, called isostatic graphite.

While Qiao remains in China, the indictment revealed today states that other people were involved in the plot and that one of them is soon expected to be arrested and prosecuted in New York.