POSTED BY Nicole Cocozza

Everyone knows the purpose of a secret.  A secret is something that is meant to be private and not shared with others.  A promise is made between two or more people to keep a secret and not to share it with others.  However, promises to keep a secret are broken everyday.  In the real world, when a trade secret is shared with people who are not part of the pact, criminal consequences will result.

In United States of America v. Jin[1], the defendant was charged with theft of trade secrets and economic espionage, which are both offenses under the Economic Espionage Act.[2]  Jin, the defendant, is a naturalized American citizen of Chinese origin.  Jin worked for Motorola as a software engineer from 1998-2007.  As a software engineer, her primary focus was on a cellular telecommunications system manufactured and sold by Motorola called iDEN, an acronym for Integrated Digital Enhanced Network.

From 2006-2007, Jin took a medical leave from Motorola.  During this period she was living in China, where she acquired a job with Sun Kaisens.  Sun Kaisens develops telecommunications technology for the Chinese armed forces.  After a year, Jin returned to the United States and bought a one-way ticket to China.  Days before her departure to China, she downloaded thousands of internal Motorola documents, which all disclosed details on iDEN. On February 28, 2013, airport personnel stopped Jin, where they discovered the iDEN documents and $31,252 dollars in cash.  Jin’s excuse was that she planned to refresh her knowledge of the work she had done over the years for Motorola in order to prepare herself for continuing to build her career.

The excuse that Jin uses is clearly not believable.  The seventh circuit’s decision in affirming the four-year sentence imposed by a federal jury in Illinois proved that her excuse was flawed.   Anyone who takes a leave of absence from their job and then decides to return to the United States only to purchase a one-way ticket and steal thousands of documents clearly intends to use these top-secret documents as an economic advantage.  In order to find a criminal trade secret misappropriation, one must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual (1) used or intended to use the trade secret for the economic benefit of anyone other than the owner, and (2) knew or intended that use of the trade secret would injure the trade secret’s owner.[3]

By applying 18 U.S.C. 1832(a) to Jin’s excuse, one can conclude that Jen purposefully intended to use the iDEN documents for more than refreshing her knowledge.   These documents would have allowed her to gain an economic advantage in China by introducing the iDEN systems and allowing Chinese companies to create a new iDEN system to compete with Motorola.  Jin had ties to the Chinese military and more likely than not was going to hand over these iDEN documents to the government to hack the system.  The exploitation of Motorola’s iDEN documents would have had a negative impact on the future of the company.  Therefore, Jin clearly committed theft of trade secrets by stealing Motorola’s iDEN documents.  All in all, I can only hope Jin learned a valuable lesson, which is a secret is meant to stay a secret.