Silicon Valley engineers were indicted for allegedly sending secrets to Iran

> 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?

“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”.

"Soroor was in the U.S. on a nonimmigrant student visa."

At age 32? That's a bit old for a student, though possible I guess. But also working at Google? Student visas severely restrict employment options, as far as I understand it.

> 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.

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