U.S. federal prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against Haizhou Hu, a visiting scholar from China at the University of Virginia. Hu was arrested on August 25 at Chicago’s O’Hara International Airport as he prepared to fly to China, where he was accused of stealing trade secrets. The prosecution dropped all charges after the university admitted that the researcher had authorized access to some of their contents.
The prosecution filed a motion to dismiss the charges on Sunday (Sept. 20). A judge granted the motion to dismiss on Monday (Sept. 21), according to documents filed in federal court in the Western District of Virginia.
Hu, who was a visiting research scholar at the University of Virginia and also worked for a military-funded lab at Beihang University in China on underwater robots, is accused of stealing proprietary software code that had been studied for 20 years by his UVA supervising professor, who managed a collaborative project funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, according to an FBI affidavit at the time of his arrest.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on Wednesday (Sept. 23) that the Hu Haizhou case had been dropped and to reveal some details.
The Journal said that during a court hearing in Chicago last Friday, prosecutors said that after further investigation, they found that some of the relevant proprietary information found on Hu Haizhou’s computer was in fact located in a shared space to which he had access authorization, and that in light of this, the prosecution moved to dismiss all charges against him.
Federal prosecutors did not comment to The Wall Street Journal. A spokesman for the University of Virginia told the Journal on Tuesday that the university was continuing to investigate “the circumstances surrounding the former research scholar’s unauthorized possession of university documents when he attempted to leave the United States. The statement said the university determined that one of the computer systems to which Hu Haizhou was granted access included insufficient login settings to establish a violation of the law, and it is reconsidering its data access standards.
Haibo Dong, Hu’s supervising professor at the University of Virginia, reiterated to the Wall Street Journal what he told the FBI, namely that he believed Hu had improperly taken his software code. He told the newspaper, “It’s unethical, it’s inappropriate, and I’m not sure it’s criminal enough.
Hu’s attorney in Chicago, James D. Tunick, has posted the Wall Street Journal article on his attorney’s web page as a success story. Tunick told the Journal that he had been given access to all of the content on Haizhou Hu’s computer, much of it without even realizing it, because it was part of a larger file that he had to log in and copy to do some of his research. He said that his client “definitely felt betrayed by Professor Dong.
To prove the theft of trade secrets, the prosecution had to prove not only that the defendant did not have access to the information, but also that the owner of the information took “reasonable measures” to keep it secret.
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