The end of the cold and economic pressures have increased
             the
             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
             assembled
             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
             private
             companies to collect competitive intelligence from their corporate
             rivals(
             Lester:96). What exactly is economic espionage? how prevalent is it?
             Who
             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
             governments,
             it has become a must for modern international business. Large
             corporations
             around the world particularly in western Europe and Asia now hire
             agents to
             gather intelligence on their competitors and other countries. The goal
             of
             economic espionage is to steal trade secrets, plans and confidential
             procedures or anything to give your company or country a competitive
             edge
             over another (Perry:1996). The areas that interest industrial spies
             the most
             include radiation transfer technology, systems diagnostic and testing
             software, traveling wave tubes, aviation technologies, microwave
             monolithic integrated circuits, inferred signature measures software,
             radar
             technologies, wet processing systems, information management and
             processing, simulation technologies, physical security technologies,
             ram-jet
             engine and ram-jet technologies.(Special Security news letter:1995).
             Although this is not all of the areas that modern spies target, it will
             give you
             an idea of the scope of the problem. Peter Schweiser author of the book
             "Friendly spi...