Although he lived in Silicon Valley, Linwei Ding spent months in his native China, according to court documents.
Nothing unusual about that—except that he was supposed to be working full-time as a software engineer at Google’s San Francisco-area offices.
Court records say he was warned by others about entering Google buildings, making it look like he was coming to work. In fact, prosecutors say, he marketed himself to Chinese companies as an artificial intelligence expert — while stealing 500 files containing some of Google’s most important AI secrets.
Ding, whose home was searched by the FBI days before prosecutors said he was scheduled to board a one-way flight to China, was arrested in March and now faces federal felony charges. He pleaded not guilty. His case illustrates what U.S. officials say is an ongoing U.S. economic and national security nightmare: Some of America’s most prominent technology companies have been looted into the virtual pockets of China’s corporate spies and intelligence agencies.
Days after the Ding case was announced, prosecutors accused the Chinese company’s owners of conspiring to steal battery secrets from Tesla. This week, the government’s cybersecurity committee accused Microsoft of an “inadequate security culture” and a “cascade of … avoidable mistakes” that allowed Chinese intelligence hackers to compromise email software and gain access to the accounts of the US Commerce Secretary.
In February, the Justice Department charged a Chinese engineer with stealing missile tracking technology from a company owned by aerospace giant Boeing. Last year, prosecutors charged a Chinese national with stealing Apple’s self-driving car technology and fleeing to China.
“China’s multifaceted assault on our national and economic security makes it the leading threat of our generation,” FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told Congress. “Today, and literally every day, they are actively attacking our economic security – engaging in grand theft of our innovation and our personal and corporate data.”
This has been happening for years, but experts say neither the government nor American corporations have been able to come up with a consistent response.
China denies stealing intellectual property. In a statement, Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said: “The Chinese government has never participated or supported anyone in any form in the theft of commercial secrets. We ask the US side to handle the case impartially and in accordance with the law and protect the legitimate rights and interests of the Chinese citizens.”
Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, was among the first to publicize state-sponsored Chinese corporate espionage back in 2011. Top US intelligence officials soon called it “the largest transfer of wealth in history.”
“For decades, China has been systematically stealing America’s economic and national security treasures,” Alperovitch, author of “The World on the Edge: How America Can Beat China in the Race to the 21st Century,” told NBC News. “Looting has undermined our nation’s economic growth and destroyed entire industries.”
Alperovitch and other experts say China’s campaign has been extremely successful in bolstering the country’s economic and military might even as it has cost jobs and decimated entire business sectors in the US and Europe, including the solar panel industry. The Chinese Communist Party’s House of Representatives Select Committee estimated the cost of China’s intellectual property theft at $600 billion a year.
The Google case illustrates why the public does not understand the harm of trade secret theft. It wasn’t front-page news when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced it last month, and Google initially played down its impact.
“We have strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we discovered that this employee had stolen numerous documents and we quickly forwarded the case to the police,” company spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement. “We are grateful to the FBI for helping us protect our data and will continue to work closely with them.”
Ding now faces up to 10 years in prison on the theft charges. But a person familiar with the case said it was not known whether Ding distributed the stolen material to his partners in China — in other words, it was not clear the information was protected.
Cornell computer science professor Bart Selman, an expert in artificial intelligence, said the stolen technology, as described in the indictment, is extremely significant and represents 10 to 15 years of work by Google scientists.
The technology Ding allegedly stole includes the building blocks of Google’s advanced supercomputing data centers that fuel the incredibly human-like responses users see when they ask ChatGPT questions.
“It’s a very significant loss, and really, it’s very troubling,” Selman said. “And I don’t think it’s just a concern for one company. AI software and AI training have very large national security components. So it’s even important for national security.”
Selman said the stolen secrets covered both software and hardware, including information about advanced computer chips that the U.S. government has worked hard to keep out of Chinese hands.
“That’s one of the most troubling aspects — that this somehow undermines US efforts to [prevent] China can develop this technology,” he said. “This will give them new capabilities and insights that Google has developed over at least 10 years to develop these very advanced chips for training AI models.”
The indictment alleges that Google has strong network security, including a system designed to monitor large data outflows. But Ding got around this by allegedly copying data from Google’s source files into the Apple Notes app on his Google-issued MacBook laptop, converting the Apple Notes into PDF files and uploading them from Google’s network to a separate account.
Google did not have systems in place to track the travel of employees working on sensitive technology, a person familiar with the matter said.
That’s the problem, said Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence and now a contributor to NBC News. He said tech companies need to beef up their security against so-called insider threats.
“There’s no question the ball was dropped here,” he said. “But it’s something I see a lot in security lapses in all segments. Number one, companies need to get a lot better at identifying what is truly the crown jewel in their company. Number two, identify the employees in your company who have access to these gems. Number three, monitor those employees and gem data to make sure bad things don’t happen. So when that crown jewel employee who has access is traveling overseas, you need to know that.”
Although the indictment does not allege any ties between Ding and the Chinese government, Figliuzzi said that doesn’t really matter, given the Chinese government’s policy.
“There is indeed a real strategy, a five-year plan that China is putting out, warning its citizens that we need the following items this year and the next five years, and we will do everything we can to get our hands on it,” he said. The challenge for an American company is to protect against that threat, Figliuzzi added, saying that “it’s illegal for a Chinese citizen to refuse to cooperate with their intelligence services.” And if a Chinese citizen were to take protected information on their own, patent it in China and start their own company with it, “good luck in challenging it in court in China,” he said. “It rarely, if ever, succeeds.”
Last October, Wray and representatives from the other four countries in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence partnership – Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – met in Silicon Valley to draw attention to China’s theft of trade secrets.
“The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained, large-scale and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” said Mike Burgess, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
More needs to be done, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC News.
“We must use every tool at our disposal to protect American business and innovation so that China cannot exploit the openness of our society and our economy to its advantage,” Warner said, “and we must do more to increase the cost of this behavior to China.” “