Caroll Lee Campbell, the circulation manager of Gwinette
Daily Post (GDP), offered to sell proprietary business and
financial information of his employer to lawyers
representing a rival paper locked in bitter dispute with
GDP.
Nor does industrial espionage necessarily involve
clandestine, cloak and dagger, operations. The Internet
and information technology are playing an increasing role.
In a bizarre case, Caryn Camp developed in 1999 an
Internet-relationship with a self-proclaimed entrepreneur,
Stephen Martin. She stole he employer's trade secrets for
Martin in the hope of attaining a senior position in
Martin's outfit - or, at least, of being richly rewarded.
Camp was exposed when she mis-addressed an e-mail
expressing her fears - to a co-worker.
Steven Hallstead and Brian Pringle simply advertised their
wares - designs of five advanced Intel chips - on the Web.
They were, of course, caught and sentenced to more than
5 years in prison. David Kern copied the contents of a
laptop inadvertently left behind by a serviceman of a
competing firm. Kern trapped himself. He was forced to
plead the Fifth Amendment during his deposition in a civil
lawsuit he filed against his former employer. This, of
course, provoked the curiosity of the FBI.
Stolen trade secrets can spell the difference between
extinction and profitability. Jack Shearer admitted to
building an $8 million business on trade secrets pilfered
from Caterpillar and Solar Turbines.
United States Attorney Paul E. Coggins stated: "This is
the first EEA case in which the defendants pled guilty to
taking trade secret information and actually converting the
stolen information into manufactured products that were
placed in the stream of commerce. The sentences handed
down today (June 15, 2000) are among the longest
sentences ever imposed in an Economic Espionage case".
Economic intelligence gathering - usually based on open
sources - is both legitimate and indispensable. Even
reverse engineering - disassembling a competitor's
products to learn its secrets - is a grey legal area. Spying is
different. It involves the purchase or theft of proprietary
information illicitly. It is mostly committed by firms. But
governments also share with domestic corporations and
multinationals the fruits of their intelligence networks.
Former - and current - intelligence operators (i.e., spooks),
political and military information brokers, and assorted
shady intermediaries - all switched from dwindling Cold
War business to the lucrative market of "competitive
intelligence".
US News and World Report described on May 6, 1996,
how a certain Mr. Kota - an alleged purveyor of secret
military technology to the KGB in the 1980's - conspired
with a scientist, a decade later, to smuggle
biotechnologically modified hamster ovaries to India.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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