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Silicon Valley engineers were indicted for allegedly sending secrets to Iran

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/three-engineers-charged-stealing-google-trade-secrets-data-iran-soc-snapdragon.html
53•giuliomagnifico•4h ago

Comments

onionisafruit•1h ago
“Company 2” has to be Qualcomm. Or am I misreading this? The only reason I think I’m misreading is because it’s so obviously Qualcomm that it seems silly for the article to call it “company 2”.
mherkender•1h ago
> Company 2, which develops system-on-chip (SoC) platforms such as the Snapdragon series

Only a lawyer could write this with a straight face

akazantsev•1h ago
> On the night before the pair traveled to Iran in December 2023, Samaneh allegedly took about 24 photos of Khosravi’s work computer screen containing Company 2′s trade secrets, including *its* Snapdragon SoCs.

Keep reading.

onionisafruit•47m ago
That’s the point where I realized how thin the curtain is. Earlier the article talked about “Qualcomm’s Snapdragon” as an example of an SoC, but that could have been just to give the reader an idea of what an SoC is. But this line made it clear it wasn’t just an example.
rdtsc•1h ago
Yup. It’s like saying Company X which develops the iPhone smartphone.

It’s either extreme incompetence or cheeky disclosure while also technically not naming the company.

parliament32•37m ago
> The couple also allegedly photographed hundreds of computer screens containing confidential information from Google and Company 2, in what appeared to be an attempt at circumventing digital monitoring tools.

I guess all the MDM and document restrictions in the world can't help you against photos of screens. Is it even possible to protect against this, short of only allowing access to confidential files in secure no-cell-phone zones?

matthewaveryusa•23m ago
No you can’t. It’s formally called “the analog hole” when security folks yap about it. Usually it’s used to end DLP discussions after too many what-ifs
breppp•6m ago
Unless your employer is Google and all those photos are uploaded to its servers
gwbas1c•5m ago
Just remember that it's significantly more time consuming to photograph a screen than steal large group of files. Thus, even though it's not preventable, it adds enough friction to be effective.
seanhunter•3m ago
Especially when you consider that a phone can record hd video, so you can make a player that scrolls through pages and pages of pdfs very fast for example, you record the screen in hd video on a phone and then write a decoder that takes video back to a pdf of the images. Literally the only thing you lose is the ability to cut and paste the text of the pdf and you can even get that back if you trouble yourself to put the images through ocr.

Similarly you could hypothetically exfil binary data by visually encoding it (think like a qr code) and video recording it in the same way.

jihadjihad•2m ago
There's not much you can do about it, as sibling comment mentions it's a known gap. There is some work [0] in this space on the investigative side to trace the leak's source, but again the only way it would work is if you can obtain a leaked copy post hoc (leaked to press, discovered through some other means, etc.).

0: https://www.echomark.com/post/goodbye-to-analog-how-to-use-a...

codeddesign•31m ago
Scenario: company hires immigrants, and then are surprised and upset immigrants are loyal to their country.

Shocking.

On the other hand, it’s corporate espionage which is actually fairly common. However, due to the influx of immigration around the world you are going to see this occur a lot more often.

codechicago277•19m ago
Unless you’re claiming all immigrants are spies, your logic doesn’t make sense. People loyal to their country tend to stay there.
AlexandrB•9m ago
> People loyal to their country tend to stay there.

Not necessarily true. Source: I have friends and family who came to the US from Russia and are still loyal to Russia. When the topic comes up, they tell me they would fight for Russia in a hypothetical US/Russia war.

It's entirely possible to love your country and still seek out a better life elsewhere for practical reasons.

Edit: To clarify, this isn't universal. Some folks who came over absolutely hate the country of their birth, some still love it, while others are ambivalent. But you can't make a blanket statement like "people loyal to their country tend to stay there" when there are stark financial and quality of life advantages to moving from one place to another.

lenerdenator•18m ago
> If convicted, each defendant faces up to 10 years in prison for each trade secret charge and up to 20 years for obstruction of justice, along with fines of up to $250,000 per count.

This is part of why we are where we are as a country. We have this whole web of charging instruments in our legal system that dance around the main thrust of what investigations are about. It makes people who would think of doing these things think that they could get off easy if they were caught.

They're handing over sensitive info (we have sanctions and embargoes on Iran) to an enemy power. If you're an anal-retentive lawyer, you call it "stealing trade secrets". If you're a person with any amount of common sense, you call it espionage. One is something that should be applied when a company steals info from its competitor; the other should be applied when people are handing over sensitive info to an enemy power. One would be punishable by a decade in prison, the other punishable by life in prison or worse.

barbazoo•3m ago
This seems to be a civil (as opposed to criminal) matter?! Maybe don’t stick people in prison for decades or even kill them for that if the only damage done was to a company, not even a real person.

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