A reader passed this bit of news along to us that happened earlier in November – 24-year-old Ben Pu, a recent Cornell graduate is facing criminal charges that he tried to steal trading codes from a Chicago-based hedge fund, Citadel Investments:
Pu is charged with attempting to steal Citadel’s secret alpha codes by bypassing the company’s intricate security protocols, then transferring files to external devices. He was arrested after an associate of his told the company and federal agents some of the evidence had been dumped into a sanitary canal near Wilmette Harbor. Divers discovered computer equipment in the water that contained Citadel’s alphas.
What is troubling to me is not that Pu may have stolen proprietary information from his employer (though that is troubling), but this was also reported in conjunction with the release in conjunction with a report being released entitled “Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace.”
From the news report, we have no idea if Pu is a foreigner, a U.S. or naturalized U.S. citizen, and from the article and reporting, leads the public to believe that Pu is a foreigner, even though his parents – who live in Massachusetts – put up their home as collateral for his bond release. Since Pu grew up in Massachusetts and got his undergraduate degree from Cornell, I’m guessing he’s probably an American citizen by birth or naturalization, and not your stereotypical Chinese graduate student.
I have nothing against Chinese graduate students, but I do have a problem with the media portraying Asian Americans as foreigners, especially in the case of corporate or intelligence espionage. That would be like the news media reporting that the if the Jersey Shore crew happened to steal from MTV, that they were working for the Italian government. Yet again, Asian Americans being portrayed as the perpetual foreigners.
