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: Indiana Civil & Business Lawyer

Trade Secrets: Do You Know Where Your Secrets Are?

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Yesterday, I made a point about trade secrets applying to more than high tech cases. From Information Week comes Random Search Stops $600 Million In Trade Secrets Bound For China and a high tech case.

A former software engineer for a telecommunications company based near Chicago was indicted for allegedly stealing trade secrets worth an estimated $600 million and trying to take the documents to China.
The FBI said Wednesday that Hanjuan Jin of Schaumburg, Ill., a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in China, was stopped at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on Feb. 28, 2007, in a random search.
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According to Diekmann, this prompted officers to further inspect Jin's luggage, whereupon they found several technical documents labeled "[Company A] Confidential Property," Chinese documents, a European company's product catalog of military technology written in English, a personal laptop computer, a thumb drive, four external hard drives, 29 recordable compact discs, and one videotape.
A search of the thumb drive and hard drives, conducted with Jin's consent, revealed numerous documents marked "[Company A] Confidential Property." Initially, Jin told customs officers she worked for Company A. In a subsequent interview with law enforcement agents, Jin said she was on medical leave from Company A. She later said she worked for Company A and Company B at the same time. Company B is a Chicago-area company that competes with Company A.

No one should think of thumb drives and external hard drives as exotica. Office Depot has them for sale at very reasonable prices.

What ought to raise eyebrows - even for a business employing a software engineer - is that no one noticed this employee moving data to a thumb drive and external drives. This hardware is probably commonplace for a software engineer but that does mean it ought not have been examined by the business.

Now - what are you doing to make sure your business' trade secrets do not leave the building via thumb drive?

Full post as published by Indiana Civil & Business Lawyer on April 09, 2008 (boomark / email).