Officials at GE Healthcare (NYSE:GE) filed a lawsuit against one of their Waukesha, Wisc., engineers after finding out that he copied millions of sensitive files that the company says were not necessary for his role.
Jun Xie joined GE in 2008, writing software for magnetic resonance systems. According to court documents, he began copying proprietary information from around March 2014 to June, and the FBI was on his doorstep by July. Xie admitted to federal officials that he planned to move back to China with his family and that he had copied information that he thought might be personally useful to him later, but maintained that he never planned to share the documents with anyone.
An initial lawsuit closed with an injunction barring Xie from sharing the documents and a mandate that he return the sensitive files and cooperate with the ongoing conversation. GE was apparently unsatisfied with that outcome, and the company took to a federal court to charge Xie with criminal theft.
Xie allegedly stole around 2.4 million files, including engineering designs, product testing data, business and product strategy information and source code for MR operating systems, according to the affidavit. Xie admitted to copying the files to his computer and a handful of external storage devices and sending them to family members in China, including his wife. Xie had already lined up a job at another MR company in China, which he was supposed to start mid-July.
Xie claimed that he copied documents en masse off of a keyword search without fully understanding what was contained in them, but that he understood never to share the information with another company.
GE is suing Xie for claims of state and federal computer fraud, trade secrets violations, breach of contract and conversion, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.