Overlapping Employment, Sanctions, Surveillance and a Crisis of Trust
This article reflects my personal experience and ethical assessment as a former employee. All factual statements are based on publicly available sources cited below. Readers are encouraged to review the cited sources and form their own conclusions. No criminal wrongdoing by any individual or company is alleged.
A Career Moment That Forced Reflection
There are moments in your career that really force you to pause, reassess where you are, what you’re involved in, and just how much you’re willing to accept.
For me, that moment came while working at my previous employer, a Proptech company, after a leader joined the organization [11] (Figure 3). When someone new joins the company I’m at, I like to run a little background check. After all, this new exec now had direct influence over my work and where the company was going. I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did.
An Unusual and Concerning Employment Overlap
A quick LinkedIn search revealed this executive began working for Chinese state-linked CloudWalk (Yuncong) Technology, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, despite still being an official employee of Facebook.
While he’d joined CloudWalk Technology, announced in December 2017 [1] (Figure 1), his employment at Facebook only ended in April 2018 (Figure 2). Public records appear to show an overlap between the two roles of approximately five months [1].
Figure 1 (news announcement In China that he was joining CloudWalk in Dec. 2017)
Figure 2 (work till Apr. 2018 at Facebook)
Figure 3 (public announcement)
I found no public explanation for the overlap. No disclosure. No clarification of how conflicts of interest were handled. Could that be right? Had there been some oversight?
Working simultaneously for a U.S. big tech and a fully state-linked Chinese AI firm overseas is a serious issue, especially at a senior level. Publicly available information indicates CloudWalk’s line of work was widely documented at the time, and that the transition occurred while his U.S. employment was still ongoing.
In technology companies, overlapping senior employment isn’t just some technicality. These are people handling sensitive information every day. To me, this represented an immense breach of trust.
Senior engineers and executives are entrusted with:
- Proprietary intellectual property
· Strategic road-maps
· Internal research and development
· Institutional knowledge that competitors—and governments—value
Most major tech firms explicitly prohibit outside employment or require full disclosure to protect their data, especially when another employer operates in related domains. Ethical responsibility should’ve also prevented it.
National Security, Human Rights, and IP Risks
Had CloudWalk Technology been experimenting on the margins, perhaps it might’ve been more excusable. But CloudWalk Technology was a major, purely domestically funded enterprise that refused overseas investment and relied solely on Chinese funding [2].
After further digging, I found that CloudWalk Technology later became the subject of U.S. government sanctions and was added to the Department of Commerce Entity List for its role in developing surveillance technologies linked to human rights abuses [3][4]. It was also designated by the Department of Defense as part of China’s military-industrial complex [5][6].
Public records [7][10] show Honglu He on multiple Chinese filings related to community monitoring and surveillance systems filed during his tenure at CloudWalk Technology. These filings relate to technologies linked to China’s public-security, military apparatus [9] (Figure 4) and possibly the biometric surveillance that tracks ethnic and religious minorities in China [3].
Figure 4
While these sanctions did not exist when the overlap period began, I don’t believe that erases ethical duty. More importantly, records (Figure 2) show he continued working on tech systems for CloudWalk for almost five more years after the company was sanctioned by both the U.S. Department of Commerce and Defense.
From my perspective, this raised serious concerns about repeated risks of intellectual property transfer, national security exposure, and back-and-forth security leakage. These are not isolated incidents. When leaders move between sensitive U.S. companies and sanctioned foreign entities without transparency, the risk of knowledge and technology flowing outward does not disappear. It compounds.
This cycle of vulnerability and quiet normalization needs to stop.
The Ethical Failure of Continued Involvement
As a fellow professional in the tech industry, the overlap was hard to palate.
At the time, I was working at an American start-up serving the U.S. public. I took to heart the ethos that the company valued ethical behavior and accountability. I had hoped the leadership guiding our work observed those same standards.
I couldn’t understand how somebody could spend over a decade working for reputable US tech companies, observing protocol, then just flip and do something like this. This deeply troubled me.
Once somebody blurs the line so casually, there’s no telling what else they’re willing to compromise. If this was acceptable, then who’s to say further violations of trust, or graver misuse of technology wouldn’t be acceptable, also?
To me, ethical conduct is about disclosing obvious conflicts of interest and using one’s power responsibly. Continuing to work for a sanctioned company after clear U.S. government action reflects a lack of alignment with those responsibilities.
Power and Hidden Risks
This was a leader who’d decided to casually bend the rules and redefine what was considered acceptable. That set a dangerous precedent.
If this could so easily be hidden from view, what else could be overlooked for the sake of professional fluidity? And how much sensitive information could be quietly transferred across borders?
Though the company publicly celebrated this hire, it failed, in my view, to adequately consider the ethical and security implications.
What worried me more than the overlap itself was how easily such breaches of trust are concealed when it comes to leaders.
Why I Ultimately Left
The decision to leave the company was not easy. Yet ultimately, I realized I did not want to work under leadership that had:
- Simultaneously served a U.S. tech giant and a state-linked Chinese AI firm
· Failed to demonstrate transparency around that overlap
· Continued working after U.S. sanctions
· Been involved in developing surveillance technologies linked to repression
I could not reconcile that history with my own values. I had a hard time accepting how my superiors had dismissed it as nothing out of the ordinary.
I could no longer trust the people I worked for, nor could I have trusted myself had I continued working there. Public records indicate that Honglu He has close ties with the CEO of CloudWalk Technology, including being directly recruited by the CEO of CloudWalk Technology [8]. Given this background, it is reasonable to question whether my former PropTech company’s decision to hire a former senior director from a sanctioned, state-linked Chinese surveillance firm was intended to facilitate business cooperation with sanctioned CloudWalk Techology. If that were the case, it would have been devastating to my career and harmful to the public interest in the United States. In light of this hire, such a possibility cannot be easily dismissed.
This isn’t an attempt to call out or condemn. But I don’t think such things should be overlooked in the corporate world.
When leaders cross professional and ethical boundaries in this way, it affects more than internal policy. It impacts national security, human rights, public trust in technology, and the safety of sensitive information.
It damages confidence and contributes to ongoing cycles of security leakage between U.S. firms and restricted foreign entities.
Ethics shouldn’t be about “playing it safe” only when others are watching. It’s about having the strength to walk away when your own lines of morality have been crossed.
For me, this experience made clear that transparency, accountability, and respect for both legal and ethical boundaries are not optional. They are essential—especially in industries that shape surveillance, security, and the future of information itself.