Accused Trade Secret Thief: "The 'Bot Set Me Up!"

At first, it seemed like sour grapes, when iRobot first accused an ex-employee of stealing trade secrets. After all, the former employee, Jameel Ahed, had just landed a major league contract from the military, to build 3,000 small, bomb-spotting robots in a hurry. Which had to piss off execs at iRobot, the presumptive favorite to win the bid.

Then things got interesting.

iRobot officials hired private detectives to put Ahed under watch. They sued Ahed's new company, Robotic FX. And they asked the judge to stop the government from awarding the $280 million contract. In the meantime, the *Boston Globe *reports, iRobot's lawyers warned Ahed's attorneys: make sure your client doesn't destroy any evidence.

The day the suit was filed,
Ahed was seen loading objects into a car owned by Kimberly Hill,
Robotic FX's chief operating officer. The next day, Ahed placed the items in a dumpster near Hill's home.

*Detectives retrieved electronics components inside a box marked
"iRobot." They also allegedly found a specialized "hot plate" device used by iRobot workers to weld sections of the rubber caterpillar treads used by [iRobot's military] PackBots. *

Ahed says it was all a set-up.

Ahed admitted discarding most of the items found by the detectives. But he denied ever having the hot plate. "I can only imagine that this was possibly planted," Ahed said...

Under questioning... Ahed acknowledged shredding about 100 CD-ROM disks the day after iRobot sued. Ahed said the disks contained Robotic FX data, not iRobot trade secrets.

Ahed said that he wiped all data from the hard drive of a laptop computer he owned, using software that eliminates all traces of the data. When US
marshals went to Hill's apartment, where the laptop was located, the software was still running. Ahed shoved the machine under Hill's bed.

"I
was afraid and a little panicked that this thing was still running,"
Ahed said. "I had a frightening day. I don't know why I did it."

The *Globe's *Hiwatha Bray, in an earlier story, gives some background on the accused:

Ahed, a 2000 biomedical engineering graduate of the University of
Illinois, was employed as an intern at iRobot in 1999, then hired full time in February 2000. He had access to detailed technical information about the PackBot, and was bound by his employment contract to keep the information confidential even after he left iRobot. Ahed said in a deposition that he was already thinking about creating a company when he resigned from iRobot in June 2002. But iRobot's suit alleges that one day after his resignation, Ahed used his still-active iRobot e-mail account to send confidential iRobot files to a Robotic FX address. Ahed set up his new business in the Chicago suburb of Worth, in the same building where his father runs a dentistry practice. Robotic FX has since relocated to Alsip, Ill.

Officials for iRobot say they learned about the Robotic FX
Negotiator robot in September 2005, more than a year after Robotic FX
began selling the Negotiator to law enforcement agencies. "As we took a look, we were significantly concerned," said Joseph Dyer, president of iRobot's government and industrial robot business unit. The
Massachusetts company took action Feb. 7, sending a letter to Robotic
FX to demand that the company stop using iRobot trade secrets. Through his attorney, Ahed replied to iRobot that he was in compliance with the confidentiality agreement he'd signed and hadn't violated iRobot's intellectual property rights.