(Bloomberg) — Silicon Valley’s top federal prosecutor said his top priorities include cases of trade-secret theft and economic espionage involving foreign adversaries such as China.
“There is no more important national security issue,” Craig Missakian, the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, said at an event Tuesday night in San Francisco. Missakian’s office oversees criminal prosecutions for the Bay Area, which is home to some of the biggest US technology companies.
The US has long had global superiority in technology used by the defense industry, Missakian said. “Countries around the world are working very hard to close that gap, and one of the ways they do it is by trying to steal our technology,” he said.
When investigating trade-secret theft, Missakian said he will prioritize conduct involving US adversaries including China and Iran, calling it a “plus factor” in deciding whether to file charges. “Wars will be won or lost” based on the strength of our technology, said the prosecutor, who was appointed by President Donald Trump a year ago.
Trump is currently in China for meetings this week with President Xi Jinping on a variety of issues that include trade, technology and intellectual property.
In January, a federal jury in San Francisco convicted a former engineer at Alphabet Inc.’s Google of economic espionage and trade-secrets theft for taking hundreds of confidential documents on AI chip technology to build a startup in China. In February, two former Google engineers and one of their husbands — all Iranian nationals — were indicted for allegedly stealing trade secrets relating to the company’s Tensor processor for Pixel phones. They’ve pleaded not guilty.
Google previously said it cooperated with law enforcement in the investigations and has strengthened its trade-secret protections.
To be sure, some federal judges have expressed concern in recent years that some US espionage claims haven’t been supported by the facts in court, where defendants were charged with lesser crimes like visa violations.
During the first Trump administration, the US Justice Department launched a China Initiative, intended to combat “the deliberate, systematic, and calculated threats” from Chinese government-directed intellectual-property theft. Amid concerns about ethnic profiling and the criminalization of scientific collaboration, the Biden administration shut down the China Initiative, though it vowed to continue pursuing cases involving the country.
US District Judge Rita Lin, who moderated last night’s event with Missakian, asked him about the risk of discrimination in pursuing cases against foreign nationals. Missakian said his office will never target anyone based on their nationality or ethnicity. However, they also “will be clear eyed about the world we live in,” he said.
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