An engineer who used to work in Apple Inc. has been arrested on the grounds of supplying classified information to China. The name of the culprit is Jizhong Chen and was caught when another employee reported that he saw the engineer take photographs of a sensitive work space. Chen was found recently to have applied for a job at a China-based autonomous vehicle company. After he was caught, he was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and was charged with a fine of $2,50,000.
The US has reportedly accused China earlier for encouraging trade secret theft in order to build its own industry. NBC Bay Area reported, “Apple Global Security found thousands of files containing Apple’s intellectual property, including manuals, schematics, and diagrams, photographs taken inside an Apple building and an assembly drawing of an Apple-designed wiring harness for an autonomous vehicle.” The report also quoted Apple which said, “Apple takes confidentiality and the protection of our IP very seriously and we are working with authorities on this matter and are referring all questions to the FBI.”
To recall, during July, 2018 another Apple employee, Xiaolang Zhang was accused of trying to leak trade secrets to China-based XMotors and was arrested by federal agents. Also, Apple rusticated over 200 employees in different parts of the company—from its electric car project code titled “Titan”. More news is centred around Apple. The Cupertino based tech giant is going to get rid of its Lightning ports and incorporate USB-Type C in the devices which are going to launch soon. It has already incorporated the USB-C port for iPads and laptops. Now, it is only left to launch it for iPhones.
Though this news has just been announced, it might take some time for Apple to establish the new port in its upcoming iPhones. One strong reason is that it has made a lot of money from selling devices with Lightning ports. So, it won’t harm to keep selling and earn more of the same and wait for a longer duration before it releases the USB-Type C port. Coming back to the scam, this is the second time an Apple employee is being arrested in 6 months, where the first one was Xiaolang Zhang who, as mentioned, was arrested in July, 2018.
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