United States v. Jin, No. 12-3013 (7th Cir. 2013)

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Jin, a naturalized American citizen of Chinese origin, with a bachelor’s degree in physics from a Chinese university and master’s degrees in physics and computer science from American universities, was employed as a Motorola software engineer, 1998-2007. Her duties involved a cellular telecommunications system: Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (IDEN). While on medical leave in China, 2006-2007, she sought a job with a Chinese company, Sun Kaisens, which develops telecommunications technology for the Chinese armed forces. She returned to the U.S., bought a one‐way ticket to China on a plane scheduled to leave Chicago days later, then downloaded thousands of internal Motorola documents, stamped proprietary, disclosing details of IDEN, which she was carrying with $31,000 when stopped by Customs agents. She stated she intended to live in China and work for Sun Kaisens. She was convicted of theft of trade secrets, but acquitted of economic espionage, under the Economic Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 1831, 1832, and sentenced to 48 months in prison. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, rejecting arguments that what she stole was not a trade secret and that she neither intended nor knew that the theft would harm Motorola. The court characterized the sentence as lenient, given Jin’s egregious conduct, which included repeatedly lying to federal agents.p

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In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 12 3013 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff Appellee, v. HANJUAN JIN, Defendant Appellant. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 08 CR 192 RubÃ©n Castillo, Chief Judge. ____________________ ARGUED SEPTEMBER 9, 2013 DECIDED SEPTEMBER 26, 2013 ____________________ Before POSNER, ROVNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges. POSNER, Circuit Judge. The defendant was charged with theft of trade secrets and economic espionage, both being offenses under the Economic Espionage Act. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1831, 1832. A bench trial resulted in her conviction of theft of trade secrets but acquittal of economic espionage. The judge imposed a 48 month prison sentence. Her appeal chal lenges both her conviction and her sentence. 2 No. 12 3013 The defendant, a naturalized American citizen of Chinese origin who has a bachelor s degree in physics from a Chi nese university and master s degrees in both physics and computer science from American universities, was em ployed by Motorola as a software engineer from 1998 to 2007 at the company s global headquarters in a Chicago suburb. Her duties primarily involved a cellular telecommunications system manufactured and sold by Motorola called iDEN, an acronym for Integrated Digital Enhanced Network. She spent a protracted period in China in 2006 and 2007 while on a year long medical leave from Motorola, and while there sought a job with a Chinese company called Sun Kaisens, which develops telecommunications technology for the Chinese armed forces. Shortly after returning to the United States in February 2007 she bought a one way ticket to China on a plane scheduled to leave Chicago a few days later. In the interval before her scheduled departure she downloaded thousands of internal Motorola documents, all stamped proprietary, disclosing details of the iDEN technol ogy. The government based its prosecution on three of these documents. As her purchase of a one way ticket to China indicated, along with the large amount of currency ($31,000) that she was carrying when stopped by Customs agents at the air port, she intended to live in China and work there for Sun Kaisens. Asked by Customs and later the FBI what she was doing with thousands of Motorola documents relating to the iDEN system, she said she needed them in order to refresh her knowledge of it. The documents contained trade secrets in the ordinary sense. But the statute that she was convicted of violating de No. 12 3013 3 fines the term trade secret elaborately, and one of the ele ments in the definition an element she challenges is that the information [claimed to be a trade secret] derives inde pendent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to ¦ the public. 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3)(B). The statute also defines theft of trade secret elaborately: the defendant must (so far as relates to this case) steal the trade secret for the purpose of conferring an economic benefit [on] anyone other than the owner thereof, ¦ intend ing or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of that trade secret. 18 U.S.C. § 1832(a). The defendant argues that her conduct satisfied neither requirement that what she stole was not a trade secret and she neither intended nor knew that the theft would harm Motorola. iDEN is a mobile telecommunications system developed by Motorola in the early 1990s. It is on its way out, sup planted by more advanced systems. But in 2007, when the theft occurred, Motorola still had many customers for iDEN indeed about 20 million, spread over 22 countries including China. iDEN s most notable feature is push to talk, which al lows handsets to operate as walkie talkies but provides con ventional cellular phone capabilities as well, such as texting and Internet access. Push to talk made iDEN systems attrac tive to law enforcement, emergency responders, taxicab dis patchers, and the like; the Israeli and South Korean armed forces were among iDEN s customers. Other manufacturers besides Motorola offered push to talk capability, but iDEN was a complete end to end system that one witness testified had the fastest push to talk capability. Because the technol ogy was treated by Motorola as a trade secret, iDEN could 4 No. 12 3013 be bought from and serviced only by Motorola or its licen sees. The defendant argues that because iDEN was rapidly los ing its commercial cachet, the theft could not have harmed Motorola; no one would have tried to sell copies of iDEN, as keeping the iDEN technology secret conferred no economic benefit on Motorola. But as an engineer intimately familiar with iDEN, the defendant had to know that had she been able to fly to China with the iDEN documents in her lug gage, Motorola, as soon as it discovered the theft, would have had to warn its customers of the risk that privacy of communications over the iDEN network had been or would be compromised. And it would have had to take counter measures at some expense to itself. Moreover, once it learned that the defendant was going to work for a company that provides telecommunications services to the Chinese armed forces, it would have had to assume that there was a good chance that the defendant would show the stolen doc uments to the company, which in turn might use them to help the Chinese government hack into iDEN networks. The danger might be illusory, but Motorola could not assume that. The defendant must also have known that Sun Kaisens or some other Chinese company would discover in those thou sands of documents that she had stolen information that would make it easier to duplicate the iDEN system and thus create new iDEN networks, to compete with Motorola s network. Competitors could peel off some of those 20 mil lion Motorola customers by offering a usable substitute at a lower price, being able to offer a lower price, yet still make a No. 12 3013 5 profit, by virtue of not having incurred costs of research and development. Motorola had taken elaborate precautions, albeit skill fully circumvented by the defendant, to keep the iDEN tech nology secret. It wouldn t have incurred the cost of those precautions had it not feared adverse consequences if the technology became public. The secrecy of the technology gave Motorola a monopoly. Maybe not a terribly valuable monopoly, in view of technological advances that would soon make iDEN obsolete, but a temporary monopoly gen erating supracompetitive profits that competition, enabled by the loss of secrecy, would erode. The defendant denies any intention of showing any of the thousands of documents about iDEN that she stole to anyone in China (or elsewhere); they were just study aids. And the judge made no contrary finding. But what she was studying what she was refreshing her knowledge of was iDEN. In China she would be a walking repository of knowledge about iDEN that she could communicate to any company or government agency interested in hacking or duplicating iDEN. Could and would, because it would en hance her career prospects; what other motive could she have had for refreshing her knowledge of iDEN? So had she not been stopped from boarding the plane to China, she would have succeeded in conferring an economic benefit on herself and Sun Kaisens, and quite possibly on the Chinese military as well. The government doesn t have to prove that the owner of the secret actually lost money as a result of the theft. For re member that the independent economic value attributable to the information s remaining secret need only be poten 6 No. 12 3013 tial, as distinct from actual. 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3)(B). We held in United States v. Lange, 312 F.3d 263 (7th Cir. 2002), that information about the composition of aircraft brake as semblies was a trade secret even though that information might have been obtained (entirely lawfully) by reverse en gineering of the brakes. For completed assemblies must be exhaustively tested to demonstrate, to the FAAÊ¹s satisfaction, that all requirements have been met; only then does the FAA certify the part for sale ¦ . It takes RAPCO [the victim of the theft of trade secrets] a year or two to design, and obtain ap proval for, a complex part ¦ . But the process of experiment ing and testing can be avoided if the manufacturer demon strates that its parts are identical (in composition and manu facturing processes) to parts that have already been certified. What Lange, a disgruntled former employee, offered for sale was all the information required to obtain certification of several components as identical to parts for which RAPCO held certification. Id. at 265. United States v. Chung, 659 F.3d 815, 827 (9th Cir. 2011), is similar. It involved the theft of Boeing documents that de scribed a phased array antenna system for the space shuttle. Boeing had no competitors for the project and thus would not have experienced an immediate loss of profits from the disclosure of information in those documents. But the court found a theft of trade secrets nonetheless, because the infor mation revealed how Boeing solves problems, something that competitors in other markets in which Boeing operates might want to know. Coming closer to home, suppose a company in New Or leans had stolen the iDEN technology and was about to sell its first subscription to its brand new iDEN network when No. 12 3013 7 Hurricane Katrina destroyed the company. Would that mean that the company had stolen something that had no eco nomic value? No; for what it stole had economic value though for extraneous reasons the value couldn t be monetized. The theft in the present case, as in our hypotheti cal case, might have injured Motorola by revealing that it couldn t keep secrets or prevent rivals from stealing its tech nology. So there was adequate evidence of the defendant s guilt, and we turn to her challenge to the sentence. The district judge acquitted her of the other crime that she was charged with economic espionage, which required the government to prove that she had stolen the trade secrets intending to, or knowing that the theft would, benefit a for eign government, instrumentality, or agent. 18 U.S.C. § 1831(a). He thought her guilty of the offense, but not that it had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless at sentencing he added two levels to her base offense level, pursuant to section 2B1.1(b)(5) of the sentencing guidelines, which requires such an increase if the offense involved misappropriation of a trade secret and the defendant knew or intended that the offense would benefit a foreign gov ernment, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent. A judge need determine guilt of an offense only by a preponderance of the evidence in order to be allowed to factor that determi nation into his decision regarding the appropriate sentence for the offense of which the defendant has been convicted. United States v. O Brien, 130 S. Ct. 2169, 2174 (2010); United States v. Horne, 474 F.3d 1004, 1006 07 (7th Cir. 2007). The addition of the two levels brought the defendant s total offense level to 28, making her guidelines sentencing 8 No. 12 3013 range 78 to 97 months. The sentence the judge gave her 48 months was much lower. Given her egregious conduct, which included repeatedly lying to federal agents (for which she could have been prosecuted but was not), she was fortu nate to be the recipient of discretionary sentencing lenity based on her ill health and inability to join her family, now in China. The judge gave her a further, surprising break by reducing her offense level (by two levels) for acceptance of responsibility, U.S.S.G. § 3E1.1(a), despite her having pleaded not guilty and gone to trial. AFFIRMED.

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