Thread by @mattdrange

NEW: A while back, I requested emails and funding agreements from UC Berkeley about its lucrative relationship with #Huawei.

For months, UC Berkeley officials ignored my public records request.

So we sued.

They found the records.

Here's what they show:
thein.fo/2c892665a7aa0b…

Huawei donated ~$1.5 million to fund various UC Berkeley research projects earlier this year.

All of the money was given *after* UC officials announced in January a "moratorium" on accepting Huawei's $$, in the wake of major federal criminal indictments.

scmp.com/news/china/dip…

At the time, most media outlets published stories saying UC Berkeley had severed ties with Huawei.

Randy Katz, the UC Berkeley official overseeing the relationship, told the LA Times a few weeks later that the indictments were “the point in which the line was crossed for me”

Internal emails tell a different story, however. Whatever line Huawei crossed was later overlooked by Berkeley's Katz.

(This is the part where I mention that Huawei reps were meeting with the LA Times yesterday when I called their spokesman asking for comment. 👋, @NPearlstine!)

@NPearlstine So what happened? And why was Berkeley not being transparent about its decisions?

I asked the school last year about the partnership. Even basic information, such as the names of faculty who worked on Huawei-funded research, was withheld from the public. Via UC spox Dan Mogulof:

@NPearlstine So in May, nearly a year after I first requested information from UC about the relationship, we sued.

Before Berkeley even responded in court, its attorneys sent me a stack of documents, including emails from this year.

We published every document here:documentcloud.org/search/project…

@NPearlstine A few things stood out.

First, while Huawei has given $$ to UC since 2013, the donations started coming in faster just as the Trump administration ramped up pressure.

Huawei gave $2.2M in 2018, up from $855K in 2017. And in the first quarter of this year alone, Huawei gave $2M.

@NPearlstine I started to notice a pattern in the grant letters, too. After almost every donation, Huawei reps requested updates on the research. Here's an example from March.

@NPearlstine US law prevents universities from transferring sensitive tech to co's like Huawei without a license; it's a safeguard for valuable intellectual property.

But in this case, since the research is technically public, an early heads up is ok--as long as there's no IP changing hands.

@NPearlstine This didn't stop Huawei from trying to negotiate for IP rights on research it was funding at UCLA.

Emails I got from the school document two such attempts. In both cases, the request raised alarm bells among university staff once they were notified by professors.

@NPearlstine A high-profile UCLA professor, Song-Chun Zhu, told me at the time he would stop accepting Huawei's $$:

"Because of this current climate, people do not want to go on with this. Right now, China-U.S. relations are toxic…we are caught in the middle of this."theinformation.com/articles/huawe…

@NPearlstine Experts who study these relationships told me that had UCLA approved Huawei's requests to commercialize the research, the deals would have violated federal export control law.

Situations like these are what make US officials so nervous about corporately-funded academic research.

@NPearlstine Many white-shoe law firms are now advising their clients -- including tech co's -- to tread carefully.

Intel, VMWare, Amazon Web Services, Google and Nvidia are just a handful of the companies that have funded cutting-edge research at UC Berkeley.

hklaw.com/en/insights/pu…

@NPearlstine In exchange for opening their deep pockets, the companies get early access to published research as well as exposure to a steady stream of engineering talent in the form of PhD students, which they frequently end up hiring.

@NPearlstine There are other perks, too.

UC Berkeley also granted a handful of employees of Huawei’s Futurewei research team access to its Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory in late 2018.

But that arrangement was terminated earlier this year after US authorities sanctioned Huawei.

@NPearlstine It's important to note: all of this information is plainly public. And yet, we wouldn't know any of it had @theinformation not sued with the help of attorney Paul Boylan.

It's bad for all of us when public agencies feel empowered to ignore the law. Too often, the strategy works.