NEWS: FBI Educates Faculty Senate On Intellectual Property Theft Prevention

(Seal of The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Source: FBI.gov.)

Two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents met with faculty senate on January 19 in an effort to prevent intellectual property (IP) theft of U.S. government-funded research.

The two agents, Mr. Donald Lichay of FBI’s Dallas office and Mr. Paul Zukas of FBI’s Houston office, told the senate that FBI wants to secure federally-funded research against theft by adversarial nations.

“You should never hear from the FBI that we do not 100 percent support international collaboration because we do,” Lichay said. “We understand that it is the key to success to curing diseases and developing new technologies. We promote that and we just want to make sure that it is done in a safe and fair playing field.” 

The New FBI  

The agents said that rather than rely on arresting criminals as it did in days of old, today's FBI fights IP crime through information-sharing and collaboration.

Lichay said, “There will never be a day when the FBI did something behind the back of UT-Tyler, where we show up in rain jackets or we do something without total transparency. That may of happened decades ago, but in this now FBI, we are all about openness and transparency.”

"It is far-better to help prevent crimes and to work with academic partners on the understanding of these threats as opposed to in secret to try to arrest someone," Lichay said.

The agents said that the threat of foreign interference from adversarial nations is real and that foreign actors do seek to take advantage of the openness of U.S. society.   

To protect against this, FBI offers free services it can provide to UT-Tyler, from cyber security help to classified briefings, Lichay said. 

According to Lichay, The Bureau has already given security clearances to UT-Tyler employees so that  university partners can receive classified briefings and FBI and its university partners can share information regularly. He also The Bureau is "fully behind" extending these clearances to other interested faculty and staff to support regular communication.

“We have a lot of information that remains at a classified level. Holding onto that does us no good. So we are absolutely 100 percent behind the idea of sharing that information” when it involves matters that involve the University,  he said

A Real-Life Example

Zukas, the counter-intelligence taskforce coordinator in from the Houston office and a former academic research scientist from UT-Southwestern Medical Center, shared a real-life example to illustrate FBI's work with research institutions. 

He told a real-life story of a professor at a Texas university who Zukas said worked directly with The Chinese Communist Party.

According to Zukas, who immigrated with his family from Communist Lithuania as a boy, the professor used his research position to divert to China discoveries he made from grants from The National Institutes for Health (NIH) and The National Science Foundation (NSF), federal research sponsors. 

“All of this was done for years right under the nose of at the parent institution in Texas,” he said.

Rather than arrest the professor, Zukas said FBI shared information with the university about the professor’s activity. The institution then worked in partnership with FBI and “neutralized” the professor, he said. (I assume this means probably terminated his employment, rather than had him ‘whacked’ [killed] like the mafia do!) The point is, he was no longer funnelling research to the CCP.

However, in this case "all of the research was funded by NIH, NSF and all--all--of the IP was diverted to China.” In other words, authorities recovered none of the U.S.-funded research.  

Cooperation As Deterrent

Zukas said that cooperation between law enforcement and the parent research institutions (the university) can provide a powerful deterrent to bad actors who want to commit intellectual property theft against the U.S.

“We have the upper hand against these nation-state actors that are working against us, if we decided to do it,” Zukas said. 

Red Flag Examples

Zukas said "conflicts of interest" some of the red flags to look for. 

For example: 

-a research professor whose foreign joint-venture partnet pays his salary or who does business with a joint-venture based in a foreign country, such as China or Russia; or 

-a researcher who spends a lot of time in a foreign country.

-when a researcher stores his findings on a foreign entity’s computer servers (such as those of a Chinese or Russian company, which may be operating as a front for the adversarial government).

-when graduate student research assistants are on the foreign company’s payroll.

These are red flag examples.

“We want the collaboration, but it has to be done responsibly,” he said. “It has to be done in a way where you are protecting the brand of the university, but also that you are protecting the money, because that money is being given in the form of a grant by The National Institutes of Health.”  

On-going Collaboration

The agents said they hope their conversation with UT-Tyler will not just be a one-time interaction, but an ongoing kind of dialogue with the university as a whole.

Lukas said FBI Dallas already has "great buy-in" from UT-System and Texas Tech for FBI's planned quarterly collaboration meetings with academia soon to be launched in March. It will be a time to meet virtually and in-person in the Dallas office to share best prictices and collaborate across academic institutions towards these security priorities.

Commentary

I thought it was interesting to see The U.S. government’s law enforcement arm in Tyler. These agents’ (and their colleagues’) work in a very real way provide much of the safety and order we citizens need to live in political freedom. I hope the University cooperates with these agents and helps protect the U.S. intellectual property from bad actors.

As Zukas pointed out in his presentation, if after years of painstaking work Thomas Edison discovered the light bulb only to then have someone come along and just steal his life’s work, this would be totally wrong.

Zukas is right. Not only is responsible use of NIH grant money important, but intellectual property theft is just wrong. I hope UT-Tyler and its community can assist FBI in its 1protective work in an ethical and helpful way.

A representative from the FBI’s Tyler office also attended the meeting. 

You can watch the agents’ full presentation on YouTube here. 

 

Twitter: @jhescock12

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Feature image: FBI Seal via FBI.gov.