Industrial Espionage News
Japan Opens Investigation Of Industrial Espionage at Nikon
Associated Press
TOKYO — Tokyo police on Thursday asked prosecutors to investigate a former employee of Nikon Corp. on suspicion of stealing a high-tech device from the electronics company and handing it to a former Russian trade official, officials said.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police filed papers with the public prosecutors office against the Nikon employee and a former member of Russia’s Trade Representation office in Tokyo, said a police spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing protocol.
The men, whose names were not disclosed, conspired in the theft of the device, called a variable optical attenuator, the police spokesman said.
The device, which is still in the development stage, is used to help stabilize optical transmissions in long-distance fiber optic communications, Nikon spokeswoman Sayaka Suzuki said.
The former employee is believed to have stolen the device while he worked at Nikon in February last year, and gave it to the Russian trade official, Suzuki said.
Police believe the two men met “dozens of times” and that the Russian official paid the Nikon employee an undisclosed amount for acquiring the device, Kyodo News agency said.
Thursday’s police action came after Nikon, the Tokyo-based maker of cameras and precision instruments, filed a complaint with police against the employee on July 7, Suzuki said.
She said that the employee had left the company for “personal reasons” in March this year.
Police suspect the Russian official, who has already left Japan, may have thought about converting the civilian-use device into a defense technology, Kyodo News agency said.
An official at the Russian Trade Representation office refused to comment on the case.
Nikon said in a statement that it would fully cooperate with a police investigation, while stepping up its in-house management of products and equipment. Suzuki said the company could not disclose at this time how the device, if fully developed, will be used.
It was the sixth case since 1989 that Japanese police have opened into suspected espionage involving members of the Russian trade office.
Last October, police accused a member of the trade office of buying company secrets from a worker at a subsidiary of Japanese electronics maker Toshiba.
The 35-year-old Russian, who arrived in Japan in October 2003 and left in June last year, is thought to have links with Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Kyodo News reported in October.
The 30-year-old Japanese man worked for Toshiba Discrete Semiconductor Technology Corp., and was suspected of selling secrets to the Russian nine times between September 2004 and May 2005 for a total of 1 million yen ($8,700), police said.
Kyodo said the man sold secrets related to a type of semiconductor technology that can be used in radars of military submarines, fighter aircraft or in missile guidance systems. Toshiba, however, said the leaked information was for semiconductors used in digital cameras, mobile phones and electric cookers and had no conceivable military applications.
Kyodo said the Russian posed as an Italian business consultant in his dealings with the Japanese man.
In 1991, a Russian trade official approached executives at a Japanese electronics firm to try to acquire semicondutor chips regulated under the now-defunct Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or COCOM, a watchdog group formed by Western governments in 1949 to prevent the transfer of military-related technology to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The official was not charged, Kyodo said.
A different Russian trade official is also suspected of trying to obtain classified information on missile technology from a former member of Japan’s Self-Defense Force in 2002, Kyodo said
FBI warns 'your corporate data faces theft risk'
Cyber crime is the next Enron waiting to happen...
One of the FBI's leading agents in the field of computer crime has warned that industrial espionage and targeted data theft are on the increase.
Shena Crowe, InfraGuard co-ordinator for the FBI in the technology heartland of San Francisco, said: "Theft of trade secrets is a very big problem."
The use of laptops is contributing to the problem and Crowe predicts an increase in the number of "targeted laptop thefts".
Crowe added: "Computer crime is like white collar crime before Enron. It just hasn't gone 'boom' yet. It hasn't had that large scale event that makes everybody go 'oh'."
However, Crowe expressed mixed feelings about the fact a major event is likely to be required to make companies sit up and take note. Although reporting of such events is increasing, and will be necessary if there is to be any chance of thwarting the 'big boom', too many companies have in the past favoured sweeping the problems under the carpet and this is a mindset that must change, she said.
Crowe said: "Companies have been very worried about their public image and how it might affect their stockholder value. But the good news is that reporting is increasing. A lot of companies are realising this is happening to everybody."
According to recent FBI research, the amount of laptop theft has doubled over the past year and is now the third costliest form of computer related crime, behind virus outbreaks and the unauthorised accessing of information.
So with physical theft - such as stealing laptops - becoming a key component in data theft, Dave Marcus, global threats team manager at McAfee, said companies must do more to address physical as well as digital security.
He said: "It doesn't matter how hard you try to lock everything down digitally if you leave the closet door open."
Industrial Espionage Made Easy
By: RHYMER RIGBY, Financial Times
"Last year Manchester United discovered that its dressing room talks about team tactics had been bugged during a crucial match. Tapes of the talks had been offered to The Sun newspaper."
Similarly, the Japanese bank Sumitomo in London was alerted last year to its computers being physically bugged with keystroke loggers by a gang hoping to steal 220m Pounds; the bugs were thought to have been attached by cleaners.
In 2003, Boeing was stripped of US Air Force contacts worth Dollars 1bn when it was discovered that it illegally obtained documents from rival Lockheed Martin.
With all the worry about crime in cyberspace and tight physical security inthe aftermath of terrorist attacks, businesses may sometimes forget that there are plenty of other opportunities for private information to be secretly obtained and misused. "Everyone's very keen to control who comes in and out of the building and protect cyberspace," says Crispin Sturrock, chief executive of information security company White Rock. "But there is a big hole in the middle. Far fewer companies prepare for industrial espionage."
Peter Yapp, deputy director of network forensics at Control Risks Group, adds: "If people want information from you, they'll go for the weakest link. If you've got a good well-managed firewall, that won't be it. It might be the bins, it might be overhearing conversations in the pub, it might be (bribing) a cleaner to obtain information. It doesn't have to be sophisticated."
Brian Stapleton, head of financial investigation at the risk-consulting group Kroll, says companies appear to be increasingly "actively and regularly targeted". He ascribes this to the huge amounts of money that investors can make very quickly with access to secret information.
Eavesdropping on businesses has become easier as bugs have become more available, cheaper, powerful and smaller. A concealed MP3 player, for example, can record days of conversation. A phone bug can be planted in a room and dialled into from anywhere: the call often escapes detection because it resembles an ordinary mobile phone call. They are, says Mr Sturrock, "the current bug of choice".
They are readily available in shops such as Spymaster in London and on the internet and cheap enough to be disposable. Other James Bond-style gadgets, small and easily concealed - a fake smoke detector with a hidden camera, for example - are also very affordable.
Would-be spies are also happy to raid your rubbish. Many businesses believe a shredder takes care of sensitive information, but that faith is misplaced, Mr Sturrock explains. Shredding devices have six grades. Six is the most effective, but three is the most common. Any documents shredded by a machine below level five can be reconstructed with software or by sending the waste to be sorted in a country with cheap labour.
Technology has made spying easier, but so have new employment trends. The spying device at headquarters or in a hotel room or a bar may be a person. It might be the low-paid, probably unvetted and possibly temporary cleaner. It could be a disgruntled employee.
Staff can be persuaded unknowingly into giving out passwords, or they may give away information by talking loudly on a mobile phone or by mislaying a BlackBerry. Spies might operate near top-level staff's homes, looking for an open Wi-Fi Âconnection or cordless phone.
Industrial espionage tends to take place at times of high sensitivity and risk to a company, says Norman Bolton, a director of the security consultancy C2i International: "We usually find it happens to companies that are suffering." This often provides the combination of incentive (the company may be ripe for a takeover bid) and means (the employees are likely to be miserable or worried about job security).
Commercially sensitive information may not always take the form most obvious to staff: as well as information affecting a company's area of operation, spies could be interested in the details of a joint venture or technology transfer.
Many developing countries have neither the intellectual property law nor culture of information security that have developed in the west and far more is considered fair game.
Bill Waite, chief executive of Risk Advisory Group, says: "It's not unknown for hotel rooms to be entered at night and entire laptop hard drives to be copied. Those who this happens to usually don't have any idea what has gone on."
Spies can be defeated. On the bugging side, counter-surveillance companies can sweep the premises and throw "electronic blankets" over rooms during secure meetings. Very determined spies can use lasers to "read" the vibrations of a conversation or film videos through long lenses to be viewed by lip readers, so if the meeting is really sensitive, businesses can use secret locations with private entrances.
On the staffing side, prospective employees should be checked, and staff should be encouraged to tidy away papers and anything of a sensitive nature from their desks. They should not use shared printers for sensitive documents and should be wary when carrying sensitive information on their laptops. More businesses should remember that the only way to erase information on an old hard drive is to destroy the disk.
An important part of minimising risk, says Mr Stapleton, is maintaining loyalty and morale among employees. "Our view is that if you have a disgruntled and demotivated workforce, they will be far more open to approaches from outside agencies - and that is the easiest way to get information out." Industrial espionage may have replaced industrial action as a way of acting on a grievance.
"Don't forget", says Mr Stapleton, "there is still a lot of sensitive information inside people's heads."
Corporate and Industrial Espionage
President Bush this week vigorously defended his decision to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining court approval, saying the move was both legal and vital to preventing terrorist attacks.
Privacy advocates and people who snoop for a living aren't so sure.
At a time when consumers have to be constantly vigilant for identity thieves, phishers, scammers, data aggregators and other traffickers in personal information, now people have to be looking over their shoulders as well for government agents listening in on private conversations.
Sean Walsh, president of the California Association of Licensed Investigators, said most people would be outraged to discover that federal authorities are monitoring their calls.
"I would assume that the average American would be shocked to be listened to by an agency of the government without a court order," he said. "If somebody was listening to my conversations, I would be righteously indignant."
Before becoming a private eye, Walsh spent 19 years as an investigator in the San Francisco district attorney's office.
He now specializes in corporate espionage and knows firsthand the ease with which company secrets -- not to mention sensitive personal matters -- can be divulged when someone doesn't know he or she is being surreptitiously listened to.
Last year, Walsh was brought in to perform a routine sweep for electronic bugs at a well-known Bay Area tech company (he declined to say which one).
While poking around, he found a tape recorder hooked up to the phone line of one of the company's top executives. It was rigged to activate anytime the exec made or received a call.
Walsh never discovered the identity of the spy. But he believes whoever it was had access to weeks of the exec's business and personal communications.
My theory is that it was someone else at the office, someone positioning himself politically by gaining information," Walsh said. "But it could also have been a rival company."
The American Society for Industrial Security says it's impossible to know how many incidents of corporate espionage occur each year. But it places the annual economic harm to companies in the billions of dollars.
"It's far more common than most people will believe," Walsh said.
Corporate espionage is illegal in all cases. At issue now is whether Bush has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was approved in 1978 and provides rules for counterintelligence involving a "foreign power."
Under the act, a panel of seven federal judges is empowered to quietly authorize wiretaps or surveillance of "U.S. persons" in the name of intelligence gathering.
The U.S. Justice Department reported earlier this year that a record 1,758 applications for secret surveillance were submitted to the panel of judges in 2004. Not one was denied.
"I used them a lot," said Rick Smith, a former FBI agent who now runs a San Francisco security service called Cannon Street. "If you lay out exigent circumstances, you can get a court to approve a wiretap pretty quickly."
Smith knows a thing or two about using wiretaps to fight bad guys. During his 25 years as a federal agent, he specialized in counterintelligence activities targeting the Soviet KGB.
Like Walsh, Smith currently focuses primarily on corporate espionage.
"It seems like it could have been done properly, using due process," he said of Bush's decision to bypass the court system and have the National Security Agency listen in on U.S. citizens' phone calls. "The administration should follow the guidelines."
For his part, Bush indicated during a news conference Monday that the surveillance court wasn't quite fast enough for the war on terrorism.
"This is a different era, a different war," he said. "This is where people are changing phone numbers and phone calls and moving quick. It requires quick action."
As such, he said, he has reauthorized the warrantless surveillance program more than 30 times since Sept. 11, 2001.
"Do I have the legal authority to do this?" Bush asked rhetorically. "The answer is, absolutely."
That's a question for legislators and lawyers to decide. Yet it's a disturbingly slippery slope when you start stripping away safeguards that protect U.S. citizens from overly zealous government authorities.
Chris Hoofnagle, who runs the West Coast office of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the red flag for consumers is that the secretive NSA isn't always able to pinpoint terrorism suspects before eavesdropping begins.
"They can't tell from the outset what's going to be a terrorist conversation and what isn't," he observed. "The reality is that they have to listen to everyone and then choose who to analyze more closely."
For example, Hoofnagle said, the NSA may be focusing on calls originating from the United States to overseas locations. All such calls will be filtered through the agency's computers, which will scan for words like "bomb" or "kill."
A human analyst will then be brought in to comb through suspect recordings.
"People might say, 'So what? It's only a computer.' I say, 'It's a computer!' It can capture everything and thus far exceeds the privacy invasion that a human analyst can commit."
The surveillance law was enacted partly in response to aggressive efforts by the FBI to monitor protesters during the Vietnam War. For its part, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that "few threats to liberty exist which are greater than that posed by the use of eavesdropping devices."
On the other hand, one person's privacy invasion is another's business opportunity.
San Francisco's International Spy Shop, a purveyor of do-it-yourself surveillance gear, says it's getting an unusually high number of inquiries about a device called the C31-2.
The unit, which sells for $1,500, hooks up to a phone line and can detect if someone else hangs up after you put down your receiver.
Jason Woodside, owner of the International Spy Shop, said he typically sells one or two of the gadgets each month. In recent days, however, he said a number of people have been asking about the C31-2.
"People believe they're being bugged by the government," Woodside said. "They're worried."
Are their fears legitimate or just paranoia?
Chinese Spy Exposes CCP Espionage Network in Europe
Central News Agency
LONDON - In order to gain competitive advantage in global commerce, the Beijing authorities have laid a meticulous industrial espionage network throughout Europe, which penetrated all levels of the key industries in Europe including national defense, aerospace, chemistry, heavy industry and communication. This spying has taken place for at least 10 years and is causing serious concerns to the governments in Europe; countries including England have already started to fully investigate it
On the other hand, a recent report by U.S. House of Representatives states that China’s breakthroughs in many scientific and technological fields were achieved by the information obtained through industrial espionage. Those include a supercomputer that runs at speeds previously achieved only by America and Japan, sophisticated communication system and satellite technology, etc.
Experts hold China’s recent advances in the sensitive Taiwan Strait military force is also the result of Chinese espionage against United States. It includes the new cruise missile system that mimics the American Tomahawk cruise missile and the coast defense system that was developed by stealing the blue print of the American Aegis weapons systems
A senior Chinese spy that has been dispatched to stay in Europe for long-term recently defected in Belgium and exposed the Beijing authorities’ plan of obtaining European advanced industrial information and dominating the global industry. The Belgium intelligence expert says the Chinese industrial espionage network in Europe is not only large-scale, but also very penetrating.
The British Daily Telegraph reported that this Chinese spy defector has already turned over the names of several hundred other spies in Europe and detailed their espionage activity to the Belgian government. Because many countries have been penetrated, governments including Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and England have all started full investigations.
As the defector has so far not been granted political asylum, he refuses to appear in public. According to intelligence officials, this defector is a full-time student, who holds a high-ranking position at the Chinese Students and Scholars Association of Leuven (CSSAL) in Belgium, and he is in charge of coordinating Chinese industrial espionage in Europe. (Note: the President of the Brussels-based European Center for Strategic and Security Studies (ESISC), Mr. Moniquet, said that this defected spy had been working at a European university and company for ten years. He is only an ordinary member of CSSAL and has not held any high-ranking positions.)
Intelligence officials say that CSSAL helps Beijing officials to stay in contact with Chinese people in different social classes. Whether they are secret agents at embassies, post-graduate students sent to study abroad in Europe or private individuals, they have all independently worked for five to ten years.
Belgian officials pointed out that the French-based communication company Alcatel is a target of infiltration by Chinese industrial spies in Europe. Alcatel obtained a one billion euros (1.2 billion $US) partnership agreement with its Galileo satellite navigation system, which is considered by European leaders to be competitive with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS.)
Intelligence officials say that thanks to the information collected by secret agents, China has been able to successfully become a partner in Galileo satellite navigation system.
Chinese spies have not only infiltrated Europe, they have also penetrated the United States. FBI officials in charge of counter-espionage said that China is rapidly weakening the United States’technological advantages. One official said this was evident when China could produce something that would normally take a decade of development in just two or three years.
This official went on to say that China’s intelligence work is used in every area, including personal business, industry, and institutional technological research; nothing is left out.
Tilting the Playing Field: Economic Espionage Hasn't Gone Away Since 9/11
JINSA Online
Costs to the U.S. Economy Could Be in the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars
Overshadowed since 9/11 and the age of spectacularly explosive acts of terrorism, economic espionage against businesses, industries, technology, and trade interests continues to erode American economic strength and, consequently, U.S. national security. The notoriety of a French school dedicated to teaching the finer points of what is called ‘business intelligence,’ may be drawing more attention to a type of warfare that, pre 9/11, was considered a grave threat to America.
IBM's Armonk, New York headquarters. The pioneering computer firm has been a target of foreign industrial espionage.
Al Qaeda’s 2001 strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon dealt a serious blow to the nation’s economic wellbeing in direct losses and in a profound ripple effect nationwide. Economic espionage wields the potential to cause greater damage, experts fear. It can serve to destroy the rewards of investment and, hence, “to destroy the incentive to innovate,” in the words of Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The U.S. economy is the world’s leader in no small part because of the tremendous innovation that goes on here. In fact, the very socialist underpinnings of European economies tend to stifle innovation. As former CIA Director R. James Woolsey explained in a March 17, 2000 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “[European] governments largely still dominate [their] economies, so you have much greater difficulty than [the U.S.] in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances.” Unable to change their economic foundations, Europeans have found that “[I]t’s so much easier to keep paying bribes.”
What makes the threat of economic espionage against the U.S. unique from other security concerns is that the culprit nations are, by all other accounts, America’s strongest allies and trading partners. In a world of increasing globalization, competition, and economic integration, however, they have become our biggest rivals. France, in particular, has emerged as perhaps the most serious practitioner of economic intelligence against the U.S. As one Clinton Administration official told the New York Times in 1996, “when it comes to economic espionage, no one is any better.”
France is “one of the most aggressive collectors of economic intelligence in the world,” according to Schweizer, who authored the 1993 book “Friendly Spies: How America’s Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993). Utilizing espionage methods normally associated with traditional intelligence targets, the French government has been accused of infiltrating numerous American companies including IBM, Texas Instruments, and Corning, which, among other things, produces cutting edge fiber optics, semiconductors and advanced materials for the telecommunications industry. According to Schweizer, these operations, mainly aimed at stealing American technology, were carried out by France’s “well-developed intelligence service,” the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE). Parallel to these state-run efforts, however, France has also, in recent years, been cultivating a controversial academic approach and institutional framework intended to develop a strategic edge in the current climate of intense economic competition between countries and between firms. In 1996, the Ecole de Guerre Economique (EGE) or School of Economic Warfare was established by Christian Harbulot, described by the French daily Liberation in November of 2004 as an “ex-Maoist of the proletarian Left.” He still heads the school, located in Paris.
Despite criticism from some in the U.S., including the online magazine GeoStrategyDirect.com, that the EGE is “a special school for economic espionage that trains students to target U.S. technology and information,” Harbulot denies these accusations, and maintains that the mission of the EGE is not to teach espionage, but instead to practice “economic intelligence”, which he defines as “the management of information to develop an economic strategy in the context of conflict and the battle to conquer segments of the market.” According to Harbulot, the EGE teaches students how to wage aggressive economic war, but they are prohibited from undertaking the sort of espionage practices pursued by the DGSE.
America is, according to Schweizer, “target number one” when it comes to economic espionage. Harbulot confirmed that while the School of Economic Warfare “does not work against American targets”, it does seek to “undertake research on the problems of economic confrontation which arise in France and abroad.” In an interview with Liberation, however, Harbulot explained that while countries like China do pose an economic threat to French companies, “the urgency” lies with the United States. As reported by Liberation, in a series of articles on the subject, the School of Economic Warfare is only one part of a broader French strategy of economic intelligence that began to emerge in the 1990s. As part of their November 2004 series titled “Guerre Economique” which focused on the French concept of “Economic War”, Liberation explains that without utilizing economic intelligence, the French would be at a disadvantage against economic superpowers like the United States. As Harbulot explained, the wider objective of the EGE is to “make companies more operational” in the face of what he views as “unfair competitors.”
To some, the crux of what the EGE is teaching may blur the line between legitimate and illegitimate business practices. Arthur Hulnick, a professor at Boston University and an expert on corporate espionage with 35 years of experience in the intelligence field, explained that there are three categories of economic espionage: legal, illegal, and a “gray and shady” area, which may be an accurate categorization of the teachings conducted at the EGE. According to Harbulot, the EGE focuses on giving students the tools to operate in a highly competitive business environment using information collected from open sources, such as the Internet, otherwise known as “methods of competitive intelligence.” The way in which this information and intelligence is used however may reflect France’s reputation as the world leader in nefarious economic practices. One EGE student explained to Liberation how open sources can be exploited to uncover unethical business practices in another company, information that can later be used to “crush” such adversaries.
Using real life case studies, students at the EGE also focus on such topics as “the destabilization of the salmon market,” although another EGE student explained that the school, while teaching how to destabilize markets, stops short of disrupting the private life of a company executive, which is a practice officially “prohibited” by the EGE.
Hulnick echoed Woolsey when he explained that one of the reasons why the French are among the leaders in economic espionage is the prevalence of state-owned enterprises in France, which creates a climate in which government interests can overlap with company interests. The U.S. maintains a tradition of limited government involvement in private business interests; what Woolsey referred to as America looking to Adam Smith as its economic patron saint as opposed to France which, he claimed, still looks to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister for King Louis IVX. American companies wishing to collect and use intelligence against competitors must proceed on their own, without the assistance of government intelligence services and within the boundaries of the law, specifically the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Asked about the role of the French government in providing economic intelligence to assist French corporations, Harbulot told this reporter that the EGE has no “official” or “semi-official” connections with French intelligence, despite the accusation by GeoStrategyDirect.com that the EGE was established by Defense Consultancy International, a semi-public company with ties to the French Defense Ministry. According to Harbulot, the school is instead affiliated with a larger business school, the Ecole Superieure Libre des Sciences Commerciales Appliquees (ESLSCA), and the EGE’s funding does not come from the French government, but from studies and research that it conducts and sells to the public.
What one defines as legitimate and legal economic practices and teachings may differ vastly from country to country, according to Schweizer. While the United States government has adamantly resisted using intelligence capabilities and resources to assist American businesses, there has been criticism by many that this approach is unrealistic and na•ve in the face of ever growing economic competition from the European Union, China and others. The necessity of engaging in economic espionage beyond traditional counter-intelligence is only magnified when one also considers the extent to which other countries are using economic espionage and other aggressive economic techniques against the United States. Foreign economic espionage and intelligence-gathering damages America’s economic health to an unknown degree. It is difficult to gain an accurate estimate of the totality of the damage done to the U.S. economy.
The sixth Annual Report to Congress on Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage, submitted yearly by the President, estimated the total cost to U.S. businesses in the year 2000 to be $100-250 billion. To stay on top it has been said that the U.S. must seriously reconsider its policy against using economic espionage to help American businesses. There is evidence in recent years, however, that the U.S. intelligence apparatus has been used not only for counter-intelligence measures against economic espionage, but also to ‘level the playing field’ against the tilt brought on by the sort of “shady” aggressive techniques that are alleged to be taught at the EGE.
According to an MSNBC report that aired in May 2004, correspondence during the Clinton Administration between the CIA and Congress obtained by the network indicate that U.S intelligence resources were devoted to assisting private American companies to win overseas contracts. These documents revealed that the U.S. undertook intelligence operations intended to act upon what the U.S. government deemed to be evidence of “unfair” competition by foreign businesses, including the bribing of officials in the customer country. Robert Windrem, an investigative producer for NBC News, noted in his May 7, 2000 report for MSNBC: “MSNBC.com has previously reported that in 1993 and 1994, the U.S. intelligence community helped U.S. firms win $16.5 billion in overseas contracts by alerting the governments in Third World countries that ministers and others were “on the take.” Among the U.S. companies that have benefited are Raytheon, Boeing and Hughes Network Systems. The intelligence community has clamped down on the release of such data since then.”
It has been alleged that the United States government used intelligence gathered from Echelon - a name given to software filters installed on computers that process the “take” from the U.S.-run global network of electronic interception and transmission sites. Echelon is said to search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses relevant to improper business conduct. European governments, and especially that of France, were critical of Echelon being utilized for this purpose. In response, Woolsey noted in his aforementioned op-ed that the United States used Echelon to even the playing field against European nations that had turned to economic espionage and bribery to win contracts over their American competitors. After all, Woolsey noted, “most European technology just isn’t worth our stealing.” As a matter of fact, he explained, there are but “a handful of areas where European technology surpasses American, but, to say this as gently as I can, the number of such areas is very, very, very small.”
The Global War on Terrorism looks to be an ongoing struggle against a determined enemy. American policymakers should not forget that prior to al Qaeda’s 2001 strikes, the U.S. was already under siege in war fought without bombs. France’s School of Economic Warfare is just a reminder of a different type of threat that could be no less dangerous to America.