>The superseding indictment also includes new allegations about Huawei and its subsidiaries’ involvement in business and technology projects in countries subject to U.S., E.U. and/or U.N. sanctions, such as Iran and North Korea – as well as the company’s efforts to conceal the full scope of that involvement. The defendants’ activities, which included arranging for shipment of Huawei goods and services to end users in sanctioned countries, were typically conducted through local affiliates in the sanctioned countries. Reflecting the inherent sensitivity of conducting business in jurisdictions subject to sanctions, internal Huawei documents allegedly referred to such jurisdictions with code names. For example, the code “A2” referred to Iran, and “A9” referred to North Korea.
edit from this superseding indictment itself:
>For example, an official HUAWEI manual labeled “Top Secret” instructed certain individuals working for HUAWEI to conceal their employment with HUAWEI during encounters with foreign law enforcement officials.
>Beginning in or about 2000, the defendants HUAWEI and FUTUREWEI misappropriated operating system source code for internet routers, command line interface (a structure of textual commands used to communicate with routers) and operating system manuals from a U.S. technology company headquartered in the Northern District of California (“Company 1”), an entity the identity of which is known to the Grand Jury, and incorporated the misappropriated source code into HUAWEI internet routers that FUTUREWEI sold in the United States from approximately April 2002 until December 2002. Toward this end, HUAWEI and FUTUREWEI hired or attempted to hire Company 1 employees and directed these employees to misappropriate Company 1 source code on behalf of the defendants.
>In or about July 2004, at a trade show in Chicago, Illinois, a HUAWEI employee (“Individual-3”), an individual whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company (“Company 3”), an entity the identity of which is known to the Grand Jury, removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as “Weihua,” HUAWEI spelled with its syllables reversed. In official correspondence with Company 3 shortly after this incident, HUAWEI claimed that Individual-3 attended the trade show in his personal capacity and that his attempted misappropriation occurred “without Huawei’s authorization.” According to a purported official statement published in Reuters, HUAWEI claimed, “This is a junior engineer who had never traveled to the United States before. His actions do not reflect the culture or values of Huawei.” Notably, a resume that Individual-3 submitted to the U.S. government in approximately 2012 stated that he had been a “senior R&D Engineer” at HUAWEI from 1997 until July 2004, the time of the incident.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22320499