Silicon Valley Prosecutor Targets Foreign Corporate Spying
(Bloomberg) — Silicon Valley’s top federal prosecutor says his top priorities include trade secret theft and economic espionage cases involving foreign adversaries like China.
“There is no longer a significant national security issue,” U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Craig Missakian said at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday night. Missakian’s office oversees criminal investigations in the Bay Area, home to some of the largest technology companies in the United States.
Missakian said that the United States has long had global superiority in the technology used by the defense industry. “Countries around the world are working hard to close this gap, and one of the ways they’re doing that is by trying to steal our technology,” he said.
When investigating trade secret theft, Missakian said he would prioritize conduct involving enemies of the United States, including China and Iran, and that that was a “plus factor” in deciding whether to prosecute. “Wars will be won or lost” based on the power of our technology, said the prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump a year ago.
Trump is currently in China this week to meet with President Xi Jinping on a variety of issues including trade, technology and intellectual property.
In January, a federal jury in San Francisco found a former engineer at Alphabet Inc.’s Google guilty of economic espionage and trade secret theft for obtaining hundreds of confidential documents related to artificial intelligence chip technology to launch a startup in China. In February, two former Google engineers and one of their spouses, all Iranian citizens, were indicted for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to the company’s Tensor processor for Pixel phones. They pleaded not guilty.
Google previously said it was cooperating with law enforcement in investigations and strengthening trade secret protections.
To be sure, some federal judges have expressed concern in recent years that some U.S. espionage allegations are not supported by facts in court, where defendants are charged with lesser crimes such as visa violations.
During the first Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a China Initiative aimed at combating “intentional, systematic, and calculated threats” from Chinese government-directed intellectual property theft. Amid concerns about ethnic profiling and criminalization of scientific collaboration, the Biden administration shut down the China Initiative but promised to continue pursuing cases involving the country.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, who moderated last night’s event with Missakian, asked him about the risk of discrimination in cases against foreign nationals. Missakian said his office would never target anyone based on their nationality or ethnicity. But they will also “be clear-eyed about the world we live in,” he said.
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