Hytera Accuses Feds of Running a Classified Probe Into the Company

Hytera seeks for the second time an order compelling the government to produce discoverable information it had gathered in the trade secrets theft complaint against the company and for the court to hold a hearing under the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), said its renewed motion Wednesday (docket 1:20-cr-00688) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. A grand jury in May 2021 returned an indictment listing multiple counts of trade secret theft against Hytera and seven of its engineers who developed digital mobile radios for Motorola in Malaysia beginning in 2004 (see 2301260060). The engineers quit Motorola in 2008 and 2009 to go to work for Hytera in Shenzhen, and the government alleges they took Motorola’s DMR trade secrets with them when they left. Hytera moved last fall for an order compelling the government to produce discoverable information it had gathered, but the court denied that motion after concluding the company had nothing more than a speculative basis to believe that discoverable classified information was being withheld, said the renewed motion. While Hytera disagrees with the court’s prior CIPA ruling, it now has “incontrovertible evidence that the government is indeed conducting a classified investigation into Hytera, and possesses discoverable information that must be produced,” the defendant said. The surveillance of and invasive questions posed to Hytera’s in-house attorney about his affiliations with the Chinese government, along with the imaging of his electronic devices, “confirm both that the government is surveilling Hytera and its employees for national security reasons, and that the government possesses relevant and discoverable information about Hytera, its employees, and this case,” it said. Hytera also has identified in discovery the translation of an email to an employee “that appears to have classified markings redacted out of it,” said the motion. The defendant asked the government “to produce an unredacted copy of this document so that it could see whether classified markings had been applied to the document, but the government has refused,” it said.