The criminal trial of Huawei Technologies on racketeering charges shifted this week into a slower, more laborious pace in what is expected to be a weeks-long trial as the US Government sought to establish on Wednesday that Huawei was intent on learning about a proprietary robot developed by US telecommunications carrier T-Mobile.
Matthew Skurnik, assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, spent hours running FBI Special Agent James Diclemis through a series of emails that appeared to show keen interest by US and China-based Huawei officials in the technical specifications of the robot, dubbed Tappy.
Developed in 2006 at the company’s State of Washington engineering lab, Tappy was used to automate quality-assurance testing on smartphones before they were approved for sale.
The main advantage of the then-innovative technology was that its mechanical robotic arm and rubberised tip allowed it to replicate a human’s tapping, swiping and typing on smartphone touchscreens.
This allowed T-Mobile to simulate weeks or months of customer use in a few hours, saving time and money and, presumably, reducing boredom while discovering software bugs, latency issues, touch-latency delays and mechanical screen defects before a phone went to market.
The Shenzhen-based company has pleaded not guilty to all 14 federal counts in Brooklyn, New York, including bank fraud, wire fraud, trade secret theft and racketeering tied to alleged criminal activity dating back to 1999. Huawei has termed the allegations “demonstrably false” and argued that innovation, not intellectual property theft, has driven its global success.
Emails presented to the jury on Wednesday appeared to show Huawei colleagues instructing Prachi Kathale, a Huawei engineer, in October 2012 to elicit technical specifications from T-Mobile during an upcoming demo the US company was giving her.
These included robot stroke/range, position accuracy and repeatability accuracy, according to an attachment included with the email.
Kathale reportedly responded that the questions were extremely detailed, leaving her unsure whether T-Mobile would disclose the specs, but that she would try her best.
In another email exchange presented in court, Richard Yao, then a Huawei technical representative, reported back to headquarters after meeting with T-Mobile engineer Joseph Mantz in September 2012. “Joe told me that TMO won’t like to share the details of the robot tech/doc,” he reportedly wrote, using TMO as shorthand for T-Mobile.
Skurnik spent hours establishing the identities of some dozen Huawei employees on the various email chains, including Cui Jiangao, then chief executive of Huawei Device USA, a subsidiary of Huawei Technologies USA.
Drawing on immigration, Huawei payroll and internal company documents, Skurnik linked the various Huawei officials before asking Diclemis to attach each of their photos to a divided whiteboard marked with Chinese and American flags, depending on which side of the Pacific they worked.
“Since he’s in Texas, we’ll put him on the US side,” Skurnik said of one such employee, engineer Dong Yongjian.
The jury and jury alternates were roughly equally balanced between men and women of varied races, including two who appeared to be of Asian descent.
T-Mobile sued Huawei in a civil suit in 2014, alleging that Huawei employees – who had received lab access to test their own handsets – secretly took photos and measured components. It also alleged that Huawei employees physically removed a robotic arm piece from Tappy to build their own testing system. T-Mobile won a US$4.8 million breach-of-contract judgment in 2017.
A key piece of government evidence is a video allegedly showing the Huawei employee spiriting away part of the Tappy technology.
While cutting edge at the time, Tappy’s skills have been far outdistanced by software and AI-driven commercial robots that can now routinely do multi-finger gestures, pinch-to-zoom, dynamic pressure sensing and continuous swiping. Tools tapping into a phone’s operating system directly now work millions of times faster than a physical arm, allowing companies to run stress tests across thousands of virtual or physical devices at the same time.
Racketeering requires the government to prove a pattern rather than a series of incidents, which legal experts say suggests why the government has widened the trial’s scope to two decades. Huawei is also charged with violating US sanctions on Iran and deceiving major banks about its Iran ties, all of which the company denies.
If convicted, Huawei faces fines and forfeiture of proceeds gained during the alleged criminal activity, potentially one of the biggest US corporate fines ever.
China has accused the US of “economic bullying” and framed the Huawei case as a false pretext for “oppressing Chinese companies”. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
