The end of the cold and economic pressures have increased
risk of economic espionage. The collapse of the Soviet Union has left
unemployed KGB and other former communist bloc intelligence agents
selling everything from Russian night vision devices to completely
and functional bugging devices. Even friendly western European
governments have been caught spying on private corporations based in the
U.S. and other countries, while industrial competitors sometimes hire
companies to collect competitive intelligence from their corporate
Lester:96). What exactly is economic espionage? how prevalent is it?
does it? How do they do it? and what can we do to stop it. These are the
questions that will be looked at in the following pages.
First lets look at, what exactly is economic espionage. Espionage and
intelligence is no longer the exclusive domain of monarchs and
it has become a must for modern international business. Large
around the world particularly in western Europe and Asia now hire
gather intelligence on their competitors and other countries. The goal
economic espionage is to steal trade secrets, plans and confidential
procedures or anything to give your company or country a competitive
over another (Perry:1996). The areas that interest industrial spies
include radiation transfer technology, systems diagnostic and testing
software, traveling wave tubes, aviation technologies, microwave
monolithic integrated circuits, inferred signature measures software,
technologies, wet processing systems, information management and
processing, simulation technologies, physical security technologies,
engine and ram-jet technologies.(Special Security news letter:1995).
Although this is not all of the areas that modern spies target, it will
an idea of the scope of the problem. Peter Schweiser author of the book
"Friendly spies" speculates that for the most part, modern indus...