Federal prosecutors just charged six Chinese nationals with allegedly stealing trade secrets from US companies and sharing them with China.
Three Chinese professors are among those accused of economic espionage for sharing secret details of a research project aimed at improving cellphone reception.
The Department of Justice alleges that while working at Avago Technologies and Skyworks Solutions, two of the professors relayed information about the devices to state-sponsored universities in China, USA Today reports. The DOJ claims those universities soon began replicating the technology.
According to the DOJ, Tianjin University professor Hao Zhang was arrested Saturday at Los Angeles International Airport. The five others facing charges are believed to still be in China.
DOJ is increasingly concerned about the theft of tech secrets by foreign governments.
"Complex foreign-government sponsored schemes, such as the activity identified here, inflict irreversible damage to the economy of the United States and undercut our national security,'' FBI special agent David Johnson said in a release issued by the bureau.
"As today's case demonstrates, sensitive technology developed by US companies in Silicon Valley and throughout California continues to be vulnerable to coordinated and complex efforts sponsored by foreign governments to steal that technology," said Melinda Haag, a US attorney in northern California.
According to the indictment, Wei Pang and Hao Zhang conducted research funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in 2005 on a thin-film bulk acoustic resonator technology (FBAR), which is used in mobile devices to transmit selected frequencies. The two then went to work at Avago and Skyworks respectively, where they worked on FBAR projects.
The DOJ alleges that in 2006, Pang and Zhang began secretly shopping the technology around with Chinese universities, eventually reaching an agreement with Tianjin. According to the indictment, Pang and Zhang resigned from their jobs and went to work at Tianjin in 2009.
This is not the first time the FBI has accused China of snooping on sensitive American tech projects. As The New Yorker reported, in 2009, former Boeing engineer Greg Chung became the first person convicted in a jury trial of economic espionage for providing unclassified documents to China.
