S8 Ep412: Guest: David Shedd. Shedd discusses the conviction of a Google engineer for stealing AI secrets, illustrating corporate naivety regarding China's state-mandated espionage and intelligence gathering operations. With Thaddeus McCotter co-host.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Guest: David Shedd. Shedd discusses the conviction of a Google engineer for stealing AI secrets, illustrating corporate naivety regarding China's state-mandated espionage and intelligence gathering operations. With Thaddeus McCotter co-host.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchler. That is McCarter American Greatness, my colleague and co-host, |
| 0:21.8 | and we're very pleased to bring on a colleague who has a new book out that can reveal what you all sense is happening |
| 0:27.7 | all the time, which is intellectual property theft by the People's Republic of China's agents, |
| 0:34.3 | either hired agents of the Ministry of State Security or freelancers. |
| 0:39.2 | The book that David and his colleague Andrew Badger have recently published is The Great Heist. |
| 0:45.3 | This is a story of some of the anecdotes gathered up over the years of the blatant theft and espionage and bad acting by agents of the People's Republic of China, |
| 0:58.6 | the subtitle China's epic campaign to steal America's secrets. |
| 1:02.9 | It continues. |
| 1:04.5 | David is a former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and longtime veteran of the intelligence community for various, for different |
| 1:13.4 | administrations over time. David, the story that I ask immediately your attention is in your book, |
| 1:20.0 | and then I see it pop up in a headline in these last days, ex-Google engineer convicted of |
| 1:25.9 | stealing AI secrets for Chinese companies. This just happened. |
| 1:30.9 | And he's convicted and he's to be sentenced. What does this illustrate, David, about our vulnerability |
| 1:37.1 | and about the relationship between Washington and Beijing ongoing because of the trade dispute. |
| 1:45.0 | Good day to David. |
| 1:53.1 | Good morning. It's delightful to be here with you again, John. And thank you for raising this very important topic of China's what from all appearances unfettered heist of our intellectual property, know-how, innovation, and data. |
| 2:04.8 | And there's elements stage one of those. |
| 2:07.3 | But in the case of Linway Ding, he was a Google engineer, who I believe it was last Thursday, |
| 2:16.1 | he was convicted on a number of counts of a second |
| 2:21.3 | series of indictments, the first ones being in 2024, but this was expanded. A Google |
| 2:29.4 | engineer who joined Google in 2019, and by 2022, he was a capitalist in his own way, as you say, a freelancer in which he downloaded |
| 2:44.3 | or uploaded, I should say, a number of the graphic processing unit designs |
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