This sounds like a script from a cheap action movie, but it really happened, in the very center of Silicon Valley. Linwei Ding, until recently a respected Google engineer, has just been sentenced. Reason? For two years, almost under the supervision of his bosses, he revealed the company’s most closely guarded secrets regarding artificial intelligence. And we’re not talking about a few notes here, but about over 500 confidential files that regularly ended up in China.
Today, a federal jury conviction former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information containing Google’s trade secrets
The “notebook” method, or how to cheat the system
How is it possible that one of the most powerful security systems in the world allowed itself to be approached like this? Ding didn’t dabble in complex hacking. He used an almost prosaic method: he copied content from Google documents to the Apple Notebook system, and then converted them into PDFs. This simple trick allowed him to bypass filters that should have flashed a red light when trying to download data.
What actually leaked? First of all, the “heart” of the operation – data about proprietary processors and infrastructure that Google has been working on for years. These are the foundations without which modern AI models simply do not exist.
Mountain View double play
What is most striking about this story, however, is the audacity with which Ding (also known as Leon) acted. While he was listed in Google’s system logs as an employee diligently performing his duties in the US office, he was… physically in China.
He wasn’t there on vacation. According to the lawsuit, during this time the guy managed to become the technology director of a Chinese startup and start his own machine learning company. What’s more, he showed up without embarrassment at meetings with investors in Asia when his teammates thought he was sitting two desks away.
A bill for treason
American prosecutors do not hide their irritation. For them, this is not only theft of intellectual property, but a brutal shortcut for Chinese technology, which thanks to this data was able to leapfrog years of expensive research.
The price for this “shortcut” will be high for Ding:
- 40 years – this is how much time he can spend behind bars.
- One million dollars in fines – this is an amount intended to cool down the enthusiasm of his possible successors.
This whole scandal is a bucket of cold water for the technology industry. It shows that even with valuations reaching historic highs and technologies from the future, the weakest link is still humans. Will corporations now start watching our hands even more carefully? This is to be expected. Trust in the world of big code has just become a scarce commodity.
