Days Before Iran Strikes, DOJ Charged Silicon Valley Engineers in Case Involving Tech Secrets Sent to Tehran
With the United States forces engaged in destroying the Iranian military, it’s easy for Americans to think the enemy is on the other side of the world.
But a Department of Justice operation that resulted in the arrests of three Iranian-born computer engineers on the virtual eve of Operation Epic Fury has a different kind of message:
The danger can be much, much closer to home.
As the New York Post reported Monday, two sisters and the husband of one of the women were arrested in mid-February, 10 days before military operations against Iran began, and charged with stealing trade secrets from Google and other Silicon Valley powerhouses.
Alleged Iranian spies are already in the US and infiltrating Silicon Valley https://t.co/XCJ83LIXdj pic.twitter.com/iO9jucUddk
— New York Post (@nypost) March 23, 2026
A Department of Justice news release from Feb. 19 identified the trio as Soroor Ghandali, 32; Samaneh Ghandali, 41; and Samaneh Ghandali’s husband, Mohammadjavad Khosravi, 40.
The Ghandali sisters are former Google engineers who went on to work at another unidentified tech company; Khosravi worked at a third tech company, the release said.
And they apparently operated like trained professionals.
“As part of the alleged scheme to commit trade secret theft, the defendants used their employment to obtain access to confidential and sensitive information,” according to the DOJ release.
“The defendants then exfiltrated confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and cryptography and other technologies, from Google and other technology companies to unauthorized third-party and personal locations, including to work devices associated with each other’s employers, and to Iran.”
In official terms, the three are charged with “conspiring to commit trade secret theft from Google and other leading technology companies, theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, and obstruction of justice,” according to the news release.
But as the U.K.’s Daily Mail noted, “trade secrets” in this case sounds more like a euphemism for technology that can pose a direct danger to American troops, and the country itself.
“The case has intensified fears that foreign adversaries are increasingly turning to insiders, employees with legitimate access, to penetrate America’s most sensitive industries,” the Daily Mail reported.
“And the stakes could hardly be higher. The technology at issue — advanced chips, cryptography, and secure processing systems — sits at the core of modern computing and defense infrastructure.”
All three were in the country legally, according to the Daily Mail: Samaneh Ghandali is a naturalized citizen; Khosravi, her husband, is a legal permanent resident; and Soroor Ghandali has a student visa.
All three are free on bond after pleading innocent on March 2, according to the website Courthouse News: Bonds for Samaneh Ghandali and Khosravi were each set at $150,000; Soroor Ghandali’s bond was set at $75,000.
But judging by the DOJ news release, it appears they went to great lengths conceal their alleged activities, including “submitting false, signed affidavits to victim technology companies about the conduct and the stolen trade secrets; destroying exfiltrated files and other records from electronic devices; and concealing the methods of exfiltration to avoid detection by the victim technology companies (for example, manually photographing screens containing the documents’ contents instead of exfiltrating complete documents using a third-party communications platform).”
During a December 2023 visit to Iran, the Justice Department said, Samaneh Ghandali and Khosravi took steps to access stolen information, apparently with the intent of passing it on to a recipient in the Islamic Republic, no doubt under the watchful eye of the dictatorship in Tehran.
The case highlights the hidden dangers facing an open society like the United States.
While most sane Americans by now are aware of the criminal threat of illegal aliens allowed into the country in droves under the Biden administration, and the problems posed by politically active, anti-American agitators like the pro-Palestinian protesters that have struck American campuses, the potential hazard of potentially hostile agents burrowed deep in the country’s corporate infrastructure is a different matter.
Of course, an individual doesn’t have to be born abroad to be a danger — God knows the United States has enough native-born lunatics who are willing to play footsie with enemies (just look at Hollywood or any college campus where keffiyehs are a sign of both terrorism and terrorist chic).
But Iran has been at war with the United States since the triumph of its Islamic Revolution in 1979. And all three of the suspects in this case came of age in the era of the ayatollahs, in a country where “death to America” was the veritable national slogan.
It’s not shocking that they’ve been charged with what amounts to economic espionage. It’s really only shocking that there haven’t been more cases like it.
Because it’s a rock-solid bet that there’s plenty more of it — closer to home than most Americans think.
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