Shades of Samuel Slater and Francis Cabot Lowell stealing the British intellectual property for the power loom and other textile machinery, and starting the American Industrial Revolution.
However, back in the day these spies were smart enough to memorize that which they purloined so as to avoid incriminating themselves with the contents of their hard drives.
From The Register, March 12:
Exec accused of using own work PC to swipe confidential AI and staffing docs for stealth cloud startup
An ex-Meta veep has been sued by his former bosses for "brazenly disloyal and dishonest conduct" – and by that, they mean he allegedly stole confidential documents to help him build and recruit colleagues for an AI cloud startup.
Over the course of his 12-year employment at the Facebook giant, Dipinder Singh Khurana – also known as T.S. Khurana – rose to the rank of vice-president of infrastructure. He left the mega-corp in June 2023 to take a position as senior veep of supply-chain operations at a startup still in stealth mode and not named in the lawsuit against him.
After telling Meta bosses he planned to leave, Khurana allegedly used his remaining time at the corporation to steal "a trove of proprietary, highly sensitive, confidential, and non-public documents about Meta's business and employees," Meta claimed in a complaint filed in a northern California state court.
Those documents included sensitive internal details of Meta's "data centers, suppliers, vendors, and artificial-intelligence programs," the biz alleged at the end of last month. It went on to claim:....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
Age of Invention: "How to Steal Technology"
....Although we have a couple posts on early industrial Intellectual Property thieves including 2013's IP: "Piracy and Fraud Propelled the U.S. Industrial Revolution":
In late December I found myself talking to a gentleman from Pakistan whose mission in life was to get a couple of his nephews into American manufacturing companies so they could memorize some mid-tech manufacturing machines and return to Pakistan to re-build the machines from memory.For some reason we've focused more on stealing food and drink:
He said his hero was Samuel Slater....
