This sounds to me like entrapment. If he knew the technology was banned from export by ITAR why did he offer it to Huawei to begin with?
Also it is not unknown for someone to destructively test a sample for the purposes described here.
A couple years ago Apple bankrupted a small company which manufactured sapphire glass. They promised to buy huge amounts of the material if the company increased their production. For this they granted them a loan. The company made massive investments in production capacity, but, just because they could not deliver quite the (ludicrous) amounts Apple demanded, Apple then not only wanted them to pay back the loan but also damages in effect bankrupting the company.
What I am hearing in this case though seems like a normal business transaction unlike Apple's.
That article was a pure hack piece.
Akhan’s chief operations officer, Carl Shurboff was a former prosecutor. So he knew full well how to push the FBI’s buttons to get them involved.
He mentioned that diamond coating was an ITAR-regulated material with defense applications and raised the possibility that the sample had been in the wrong hands.
Good example above. Also, notice how the journo didn’t do any critical analysis on the above BS. If this diamond glass was ITAR regulated, then wtf are they doing trying to market it to mobile phone firms in the first place?
Of the top 3 mobile makes, both Samsung and Huawei are foreign companies, and Apple builds its phones in China. Indeed, there are no major mobile phone companies that make their phones in the US. Even if they set up production facilities in the US, the finished phones cannot be exported either because of ITAR so it would be a complete nonstarter for this glass to be ITAR rugulated.
At most the manufacturing process might be ITAR regulated, meaning the core manufacturing tech is not allowed to be exported, but ITAR cannot apply to finished goods or the glass would be worthless to mobile phone makers.
This distinction is critical, because the ITAR is a cornerstone of the justification of the FBI and Justice Department’s involvement.
Without ITAR, it’s just a small claims damages civil case that neither the FBI or justice department have any business wasting so much taxpayer money investigating.
Now Shurboff could spin things however he wants, but the FBI are not idiots. They must also know the ITAR angle was pure BS, so why did they play along? Well there are little gems sprinkled around the piece.
FBI, which had been cultivating relationships with even the smallest American tech companies as part of a crackdown on Chinese theft of intellectual property...
The FBI specifically was trying to gather intelligence on Chinese efforts to obtain U.S. technology...
Akhan executives found themselves on regular conference calls with officials from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice. Taking the lead on several of these calls was David Kessler, the assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn who, it turned out later, would prosecute Huawei’s CFO...
Specifically note David Kessler‘s instrumental involvement. I mean it is completely inconceivable that he is on some personal crusade against Huawei, or is looking for any excluse to raid Huawei properties and seize documents to try and bulster his crown jewel case against Meng.
But what did this journo hack conclude?
It’s possible that the government will conclude there aren’t grounds for an indictmentagainst Huawei. Prosecutors also could decide that what happened to Akhan isn’t serious enough to seek charges. If that’s so, it raises a question about the broader U.S. crackdown on Huawei: Is it based on hard evidence of wrongdoing or driven by a desperation to catch the Chinese company doing something—anything—bad?
On the other hand, if the government does conclude that Akhan was attacked, that a Chinese multinational really did target a tiny Chicago company with no revenue and no customers (as of yet), it would showjust how far and wide Huawei is willing to go to steal American trade secrets.
See how he neatly placed ridiculous preconditions and completely bypassed due process to try and steer the conclusions his readers will draw.
It’s only a fishing expedition if the US government doesn’t bring charges, otherwise it ‘proves’ how evil Huawei is. Forget what the courts decide, charges being brought is enough.
Also never mind that US prosecutors are notorious for bring highly questionable charges against foreign firms in thinly veiled extortion rackets to get them to cough up huge sums of money in settlements because they would loose more in share prices to fight the charges even if they were innocent.
This is also a classic propaganda and jury tainting technique.
First, you bring up the obvious counter arguments, but frame them such as to subconsciously condition the reader to reject them. That is like a form of mental inoculation against proscribed thoughts. Get your readers to make up their minds before anyone else can properly build the counter arguments so they subconsciously dismiss the counter argument before ever giving it a fair hearing.
Just look at the near instinctive levels of resistance and even hate displayed by otherwise rational thinking people when logical counter arguments against key subjects are brought up (climate change, US partisan politics, abortion, vaccination, brexit, gun control etc) and you can see the results of such mental inoculations at work first hand.
Also, by making all this information public before any charges are brought, the journo is effectively helping to fulfil his own preconditions by maximising the chances that anyone who is called up on jury duty to hear any said charges are already highly biased and predisposed to find Huawei guilty irrespective of what evidence is presented in court.
