Huawei Accused of Technology Theft
Wall Street Journal has recently published an article [1] detailing some of the most high profile technology thefts and espionage related to Huawei.<p>According to the article, here&#x27;s a list of thefts and espionage attributed to Huawei, employees of Huawei, or people related to Huawei.<p>1. Stealing tech at tradeshows:<p>On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there.<p>A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&amp;T Corp. , and a list of six companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.<p>2. Secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices :<p>Alarm bells included the discovery around 2012 of secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices, akin to facilities in intelligence stations around the world, American security officials say.<p>3. Former staff admits stealing :<p>“They spent all their resources stealing technology,” said Robert Read, a former contract engineer from 2002 to 2003 in Huawei’s Sweden office. “You’d steal a motherboard and bring it back and they’d reverse-engineer it.”<p>4. Stealing tech from Cisco :<p>Eighteen months before the Supercomm imbroglio erupted, Cisco accused Huawei in January 2003 of copying its software and manuals—the first time Huawei had to fight a major international allegation of its theft.<p>“They have made verbatim copies of whole portions of Cisco’s user manuals,” Cisco said in its lawsuit. Cisco manuals accompany its routers, and its software is visible during the router’s operation; both are easily copied, Cisco said.<p>The copying was so extensive that Huawei inadvertently copied bugs in Cisco’s software, according to the lawsuit.<p>5. Stealing tech from Motorola :<p>Email fragments recovered from Mr. Pan’s laptop and included in Motorola’s complaint show Mr. Pan wrote to Mr. Ren after the meeting, “Attached please find those document [sic] about SC300 specification you asked.” Huawei later made a similarly small device, weighing half the SC300, which it marketed to rural communities in developing markets.<p>5. 5G related tech theft:<p>Mr. Barker had never heard of “user specific tilt,” which could multiply the number of signals from an antenna and tilt them to provide greater accuracy in communicating with mobile phones.<p>Mr. Barker had, however, heard of a conceptually identical technology, ”per user tilt.&quot; He coined it seven years earlier, according to a Quintel lawsuit alleging misappropriation of trade secrets by Huawei. Quintel said it had shared the technology with Huawei in September 2009 after Huawei proposed a business partnership.<p>The partnership never came through. Huawei filed papers to secure a patent for the concept a month after their first meeting, using a document still emblazoned with Quintel’s name and the words “commercial in confidence.”<p>6. Camera theft :<p>Rui Oliveira, a 45-year-old Portuguese multimedia producer, told the Journal he flew to Huawei’s Plano offices in May 2014 to meet Huawei executives, who were interested in his patents for a camera attachment to smartphones.<p>In a conference room, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs, Mr. Oliveira recalls, two Huawei executives listened as he shared data on his product which he hoped to license manufacturing to Huawei. He recommended pricing it at $99.95.<p>“We’ll talk later,” he says Huawei told him.<p>Three years later, a friend in Portugal asked him why Huawei was selling “his camera.”<p>“Huawei? That’s impossible! What?” he remembers saying.<p>7. Stealing songs :<p>Paul Cheever, a bespectacled preschool teacher who records music as The Cheebacabra, said his life has become overrun with paperwork and costs since he sued Huawei in California last year for taking his song “A Casual Encounter” and pre-loading it on Huawei smartphones and tablets for free distribution to its customers.<p>Mr. Cheever said in his court filing that he discovered the alleged theft after noticing user comments on YouTube that associated Huawei devices with his song.<p>8. Stealing Tappy, the mobile phone testing robot, from T-Mobile :<p>In the U.S., Huawei engineer Xiong Xinfu had endured a nine-month fusillade of demands from Huawei’s China-based engineers for information on how to replicate a robot called Tappy developed by T-Mobile to mimic an ultra-fast human finger and test a smartphone’s responsiveness. In May 2013, Mr. Xiong eventually stole part of Tappy at Huawei’s behest, U.S. prosecutors say.<p>9. Stealing Solid State Drive technology from Silicon Valley :<p>In October last year, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a longtime Silicon Valley engineer and co-founder of San Jose’s CNEX Labs Inc., accused Huawei in a lawsuit of stealing his firm’s solid-state disk storage technology, used for managing data generated by artificial intelligence. CNEX said at a hearing in April that Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu issued a directive that led to a Huawei engineer in June 2016 posing as a customer to steal CNEX secrets; Huawei denied wrongdoing. The suit is ongoing.<p>10. finally, forcing employees to be dishonest :<p>Jesse Hong, a software architect at Huawei’s California unit, said in a lawsuit that his bosses ordered him in November 2017 to use fake company names to register himself for an industry conference organized by Facebook Inc. The social-media giant had invited other companies to a Telecom Infra Project meeting, a collaboration on network design, but excluded Huawei. The suit was confidentially settled in April.<p>Mr. Hong said he refused to carry out the directive, leading his supervisor to unleash a stream of abuse and a threat: “If you don’t agree on this, then you quit right now.”<p>After Mr. Hong declined, Huawei fired him. The company says it acted in good faith.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-littered-with-accusations-of-theft-and-dubious-ethics-11558756858" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...</a>