Two professors at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, have been indicted for an alleged plan to steal computer trade secrets from their former employer, a technical services non-profit called the
Water Institute of the Gulf, and to commit computer fraud.
The US Department of Justice on Wednesday
announced the indictment of Ehab Meselhe, 53, and Kelin Hu, 42, based on claims that the two academics, between October 2018 and January 2019, conspired to steal the Basin Wide Model, a collection of data and computer code used to project how the Mississippi Delta will change over time.
The model,
the indictment [PDF] says, helps the Water Institute of the Gulf obtain consulting contracts worth millions of dollars from other organizations concerned with environmental issues like the Environmental Defense Fund. Its loss would thus hinder the organization's ability to compete for those contracts.
The Justice Department release mentions that Hu is a Chinese citizen living in the US, but the indictment offers no indication that the case has anything to do with Chinese trade secret espionage, a subject of intense interest to federal authorities at the moment. Rather, the allegations are that the supposed scheme was pursued for personal gain.
According to the indictment, Meselhe, who left the Water Institute in October last year, told Hu the following month that he would bring him on staff at Tulane, provided he copied the Basin Wide Model before he resigned. The pair agreed, it's said, to communicate via personal accounts rather than work accounts to avoid detection.
But, the indictment says, in January this year Hu was caught in the act of downloading the files to a personal computing device, fired and escorted from the premises of the Water Institute. That's how the incident came to the attention of authorities.
"Theft of proprietary information and intellectual property for personal gain will not be tolerated by this office, especially where the theft is from a research institution whose purpose is to study environmental impacts so that we can best protect our citizens from natural and man-made disasters and other coastal threats," said US Attorney Brandon Fremin in a statement.
"Businesses, universities, and many other organizations like the Water Institute invest tremendous amounts of time, talent and money in creating proprietary information to advance their various missions – they should be protected too."
