DoJ alleges seven individuals part of Hytera DMR conspiracy against Motorola

Hytera Communications used DMR trade secrets stolen from Motorola Solutions that allegedly were obtain via a conspiracy involving seven individuals who were identified publicly for the first time in a U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) criminal complaint that was unsealed this week.

All seven individuals cited in the criminal complaint are part of a broader 21-count criminal indictment that the DoJ announced in February. At that time, the indictment only publicly identified Hytera Communications—the China-based LMR manufacturer—as the names of the individuals involved in the alleged conspiracy were not released. The criminal complaint was written by an FBI special agent and filed on Sept. 30, 2020, with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Easter Division.

Three of the individuals cited in the criminal complaint—Gee Siong Kok (G.S. Kok), Yih Tzye Kok (Y.T. Kok) and Samuel Chia Han Siong (Samuel Chia)—are familiar to those who have followed the Hytera-Motorola Solutions litigation, because they were identified in the federal civil case between the companies. However, the criminal complaint includes four other alleged conspirators: Wong Kiat Hoe, Yu Kok Hoong, Chua Siew Wei and Phaik Ee Ooi.

Dubbed the “recruited employees” in the criminal complaint, these seven individuals all worked for Motorola—the name for Motorola Solutions at the time—in Malaysia in 2007, but each was employed by Hytera by February 2009 after being offered hefty salary increases and lucrative stock options.

Most relevant to the criminal complaint, all seven individuals allegedly copied Motorola DMR documents—totaling tens of thousands between them—and gave the trade secrets and software code to Hytera. These documents served as the foundation of successful digital DMR products for Hytera, which struggled to develop a working solution on its own until the February 2008 arrival of G.S. Kok, the first alleged conspirator to leave Motorola for Hytera.

G.S. Kok noted this in a 2008 e-mail to the Hytera CEO, stating that he was “surprise[d] to find out that we do not have a proto-type radio after 3 years” of DMR development by the Hytera prior to the arrival of former Motorola employees and the DMR trade secrets, the criminal complaint states.

“Company B [Hytera] needed to steal Company A’s [Motorola’s] trade secrets to compete in the DMR market,” according to the criminal complaint.

Hytera e-mails indicate that G.S. Kok was recruited personally by the Hytera CEO beginning in June 2007, ultimately offering him a 78% salary increase and stock options ultimately worth more than $2 million to lead Hytera’s DMR group, the criminal complaint states. G.S. Kok submitted his letter of resignation to Motorola on Dec. 31, 2007, and joined Hytera on Feb. 1, 2008.

G.S. Kok was the only conspirator to inform Motorola of plans to join Hytera, according to the criminal complaint.

Even before leaving Motorola, G.S. Kok began recruiting other members of his “team” at the Motorola Malaysia facility to join him at Hytera. Within a two-week period ending on June 16, 2008, five of the alleged conspirators had started new careers with Hytera: Samuel Chia, Wong Kiat Hoe, Yu Kok Hoong, Chua Siew Wei and Y.T. Kok.

With encouragement from G.S. Kok, these alleged conspirators began accessing Motorola DMR documents at a remarkable rate during the months prior to joining Hytera, according to the criminal complaint. Motorola’s system at the time logged when user accessed a particular document, although it did not record whether the document was downloaded or saved by the user to external or removable media, the complaint states.

One notable example of this activity was Chia, who accessed only 10 documents in the Motorola database from the start of 2008 through Feb. 11 that year, but his access to documents increased dramatically after G.S. Kok made a “recruiting” visit to Malaysia. Chia accessed about 11,058 documents during the month of April 2008, the criminal complaint states.

“Chia’s rate of access to [Motorola’s] database in April 2018 dwarfed his usage for the previous five years,” according to the criminal complaint, which noted that some of the documents were “accessed only seconds apart.”

At least 1.,855 of the Motorola documents accessed by Chia in April 2008 had titles that included the term “DMR” or Motorola names for DMR projects, and 1,466 of these files were designated “Confidential Restricted,” the complaint states.

Chia accessed these files when it was doubtful that they were relevant to his work for Motorola at the time.

“Approximately six months before leaving [Motorola], Chia was transferred from [Motorola’s] DMR division to work on a different technology,” the criminal complaint states. “In his deposition, Chia conceded that his new assignment ‘did not’ overlap in any way with his prior work on DMRs.”

Text messages and e-mails indicate that G.S. Kok directed the other conspirators’ efforts to copy Motorola DMR documents—for example, asking Chia whether he had copied the Motorola squelch algorithm. After Chia confirmed that he had copied the squelch algorithm to a hard drive, he updated G.S. Kok on the overall progress in an e-mail on Feb. 22, 2008.

“Y.T. [Kok] and I have been working very hard in backing up all the information,” Chia wrote in the e-mail, according to the criminal complaint. “We are trying to grab whatever we can … I think we have a total of 30G [gigabytes of data] now. Do you have anything in mind that you need while we are still here?”

Hoong also greatly increased his access to Motorola documents during his final months, according to the criminal complaint.

“Overall, between March 6 and June 6, 2008, Hoong accessed approximately 70 document (nearly as many as in the previous 30 months), including 21 on June 5^th—his second-to-last day at [Motorola]—all but one of which he had never previously accessed,” the criminal complaint states.

Although Y.T. Kok started working with Hytera in June 2008, he did not officially resign from Motorola until Oct. 3, 2008, according to the criminal complaint. Y.T. Kok took a leave of absence from Motorola in June 2008 and apparently did not physically return to work for Motorola, but he continued to access Motorola database, according to the criminal complaint.

“During the time period where Y.T. was on ‘leave’ from [Motorola], but actually working for [Hytera], Y.T. accessed [Motorola’s] document database in a manner consistent with downloading documents for use at [Hytera],” the complaint states.

One example of this was Y.T. Kok accessing the documents in the Motorola document shortly after Chia—who had started working at Hytera earlier in the month, like Y.T. Kok—asked him to find answers to DMR questions raised by a Hytera engineer.

“[Motorola] records show that Y.T. accessed information in [Motorola’s] database in response to Chia’s tasking,” the criminal complaint states. “According to [Motorola] database access logs, between June 23 and June 29, 2008—which is after Y.T. began work for [Hytera]—Y.T. accessed approximately 316 [Motorola] files on the [Motorola] database. Of these files, approximately 207 were accessed by Y.T. for the first time.”

After Y.T. Kok officially resigned from Motorola on Oct. 3, 2008, he recruited the final alleged conspirator—Phaik Ee Ooi—to leave Motorola and join Hytera, but not until after she copied key Motorola DMR documents that Hytera determined it needed for its DMR product development.

“Based on the context of this [text] conversation, it appears that Y.T. is informing Ooi that he already had large sections of [Motorola] source code for several DMR products, but asks her to ‘copy those we don’t have,’” according to the criminal complaint.

“In a January 9, 2009, Gtalk conversation, Y.T. again asked Ooi to obtain [Motorola] source code and information about specific [Motorola] DMR projects, and also discussed the smuggling of [Motorola] radios and hardware.”

Ooi also followed directives from Chia, who at one point referred to his requests as a “shopping list” of Motorola DMR assets.

Like other alleged conspirators, Ooi’s document-access activity increased dramatically during her final days at Motorola, according to the criminal complaint.

“According to [Motorola] access logs, on January 25, 2009—just days before her departure for [Hytera]—Ooi’s [Motorola] Database User ID access 202 documents within approximately 85 minutes,” the complaint states. “Approximately 133 of these 202 documents were first-time access events. Approximately 146 of those documents were designated as ‘Confidential Restricted.’”

In October 2008 text communications with Y.T. Kok, Ooi expressed ethical concerns about copying Motorola documents and software code, according to the criminal complaint. Y.T. Kok responded that “I never do copy and paste here,” after which Ooi appeared to accept the situation as long as there was “no too much copy and paste” by Hytera.

Despite the assurances from Y.T. Kok that code would be rewritten, Hytera used the copy-and-paste tactic often in its DMR products, which the China-based LMR company was trying to develop quickly to enter the market quickly and compete with Motorola, according to the criminal complaint.

“[Hytera’s] DMR source code contained hundreds of thousands of lines of copied code from multiple [Motorola] source-code and library files, which were either identical or similar,” the criminal complaint states. “[Hytera’s] copying of [Motorola’s] source code was so extensive that included not only the code and comments, but even typos.”

All of the alleged conspirators signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with Motorola prior to leaving the company. However, Y.T. Kok told Ooi in a text message that Motorola’s NDAs “had no effect in China, writing, ‘not valid in the country … the rule is not apply here … you are moving to China, different country.”

But the alleged conspirators did express concern about the potential ramifications of their actions, if they were discovered, according to the criminal complaint. One tactic discussed within the group was to keep the stolen Motorola documents out of the hands of other Hytera engineers.

“Chia concluded that, ‘Giving them documents which can implicate use may put us in hot soup with you know who [Motorola],” the complaint states.

But this warning apparently was not heeded, according to the criminal complaint.

“By later in 2008, [Hytera] engineers who had never worked for [Motorola] were overtly discussing [Motorola] documents with the recruited employees, and [Hytera’s] internal document database for its DMR project had an entire folder labelled ‘[Motorola],’” the complaint states.

And the Motorola DMR trade secrets were not just discussed at the engineer level; Hytera leadership also was aware of the situation, the criminal complaint states. In a March 4, 2008, e-mail to five of the alleged conspirators, G.S. Kok stated, ‘By the way I just talked to President yesterday, he wants the whole DMR. We need to talk about this when you guys are here.’”

The criminal complaint provides the following interpretation of the e-mail from G.S. Kok:

“It appears that G.S. is telling Chia and the other recruited employees that the ‘president’ of [Hytera] told G.S. that [Hytera] wanted “the whole DMR,” namely all of [Motorola’s] DMR technology,” the criminal complaint states.

Motorola Solutions provided the following statement from Mark Hacker—Motorola Solutions’ executive vice president, general counsel and chief administrative officer—about the unsealed criminal complaint against the seven alleged individual conspirators:

“The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) unsealed criminal complaint sheds new light on the extraordinary evidence underlying the federal indictment of Hytera Communications Corp. Ltd., which includes 21 counts of federal criminal trade-secret violations, including engaging in a decade-long criminal conspiracy to steal and use Motorola Solutions’ trade secrets and proprietary information,” Hacker said.

“These new details crystallize the extent of Hytera’s illegal activity aimed at Motorola Solutions and underscore how Hytera’s illicit behavior permeates its culture and values, from the leadership down. Moreover, these details highlight Hytera’s inability to innovate, as its own engineers admitted in emails that DOJ recovered. This complaint further validates our ongoing efforts to hold Hytera accountable for its theft, copying and infringement of our intellectual property.”

Hytera did not respond to a request for a comment from IWCE’s Urgent Communications in time to be included in this article.