Ex-Intel Researcher Faces Jail For Document Theft

A former Intel employee will be sentenced in August after pleading guilty to stealing confidential documents from the chip maker.

In US District Court in Boston on 6 April, Biswamohan Pani pleaded guilty to five counts of wire fraud, which took place in 2008. Intel officials said the documents were valued at $200 million (£126m) to $400 million, according to a statement from the US Attorney General’s Office in Massachusetts.

High-end design work

The 36-year-old man admitted that while working at Intel’s chip development facility in Hudson, Massachussetts, he started looking for a new job with other processor manufacturers from February to April 2008.

Pani landed a job at rival AMD, but kept the job search and the new job secret from Intel.

Pani, who reportedly had worked on design efforts around Intel’s high-end Itanium processor, on 28 May, 2008, told Intel officials he was leaving, possibly to work for a hedge fund. He said he planned to use up about a week and a half of vacation days, leading up to 11 June, 2008, which would be his last day at work.

However, Pani actually started working for AMD on June 2, 2008, and outside of Intel’s knowledge, had begun downloading secret Intel documents related to Intel’s chip design and manufacturing operations.

The downloading started on 28 May and continued into 29 May. On 8 and 10 June Pani remotely accessed Intel computers multiple times and downloaded what the Attorney General’s Office called “13 of Intel’s most valuable documents, along with other confidential and proprietary information”.

He also downloaded a document outlining how encrypted Intel documents could be reviewed when not connected to the company’s servers, and backed up the downloaded file to an external hard drive.

Theft discovered

He returned to Intel on 11 June for an exit interview and said he had not kept any of Intel’s property, “when in fact he had kept the electronic equivalent of boxes full of downloaded documents and some printed Intel documents at his apartment”, the Attorney General’s Office said.

FBI officials found the downloaded documents and some printed Intel documents in Pani’s apartment a month later.

Because the documents were recovered so quickly, Intel was not harmed by the documents stolen by Pani. Investigators said Intel discovered the theft and reported it quickly to law enforcement, and both Intel and AMD cooperated with the investigation. There was no indication that AMD officials or employees had asked Pani to steal the documents or knew he had them.

“Pani nevertheless took Intel’s documents to advance his career at AMD or elsewhere by drawing on the documents when the opportunity arose, whether with his employer’s knowledge or not,” according to the statement from the Attorney General’s Office.

Pani is scheduled to be sentenced on 8 August. According to the 10-page plea agreement, James Lang, the chief prosecutor for Attorney General Carmen Ortiz’s office, said he will ask for a six-year prison sentence, followed by a year of probation, and an unspecified fine.

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