Industrial espionage
[4] Information can make the difference between success and failure; if a trade secret is stolen, the competitive playing field is leveled or even tipped in favor of a competitor.
[20][21] American founding father and first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton advocated rewarding those bringing "improvements and secrets of extraordinary value"[22] into the United States.
East-West commercial development opportunities after World War I saw a rise in Soviet interest in American and European manufacturing know-how, exploited by Amtorg Corporation.
[23] Later, with Western restrictions on the export of items thought likely to increase military capabilities to the USSR, Soviet industrial espionage was a well known adjunct to other spying activities up until the 1980s.
[26][27] He revealed information about industrial espionage conducted by the ring, including the fact that Russian agents had obtained details of Concorde's advanced electronics system.
[26] According to a 2020 American Economic Review study, East German industrial espionage in West Germany significantly reduced the gap in total factor productivity between the two countries.
[29] A secret report from the Military-Industrial Commission of the USSR (VPK), from 1979–80, detailed how spetsinformatsiya (Russian: специнформация, "special records") could be utilised in twelve different military industrial areas.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Philip Hanson detailed a spetsinformatsiya system in which 12 industrial branch ministries formulated requests for information to aid technological development in their military programs.
[b][24] Following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, commentators, including the US Congressional Intelligence Committee, noted a redirection amongst the espionage community from military to industrial targets, with Western and former communist countries making use of "underemployed" spies and expanding programs directed at stealing information.
[32] Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner stated in 1991, "as we increase emphasis on securing economic intelligence, we will have to spy on the more developed countries-our allies and friends with whom we compete economically-but to whom we turn first for political and military assistance in a crisis.
This means that rather than instinctively reaching for human, on-site spying, the United States will want to look to those impersonal technical systems, primarily satellite photography and intercepts".
[33] Former CIA Director James Woolsey acknowledged in 2000 that the United States steals economic secrets from foreign firms and their governments "with espionage, with communications, with reconnaissance satellites".
[35] In 2014 former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden stated that America's National Security Agency was engaged in industrial espionage and that they spied on German companies that compete with US firms.
[37] In September 2019, security firm Qi An Xin published report linking the CIA to a series of attacks targeting Chinese aviation agencies between 2012 and 2017.
[42] In 2014 American counter-intelligence officials told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees that Israel's current espionage activities in America are "unrivaled".
This method was allegedly utilized by Russian secret services, over a period of two weeks on a cyberattack on Estonia in May 2007, in response to the removal of a Soviet era war memorial.
[10] The case, which was finally settled in 1997, resulted in one of the largest settlements in the history of industrial espionage, with Volkswagen agreeing to pay General Motors $100 million and to buy at least $1 billion of car parts from the company over 7 years, although it did not explicitly apologize for Lopez's behavior.
Specifically, former head of its luxury brands group, Ron Klein, was accused of downloading "truckloads of documents" from a laptop to his personal email account.
[47] Concerned about the possibility of hackers taking advantage of this previously unknown weakness in Internet Explorer, the governments of Germany and, subsequently France, issued warnings not to use the browser.
[58] Some commentators speculated as to whether the attack was part of what is thought to be a concerted Chinese industrial espionage operation aimed at getting "high-tech information to jump-start China's economy".
[64] Critics pointed to what was alleged to be a lax attitude to the intellectual property of foreign businesses in China, letting them operate but then seeking to copy or reverse engineer their technology for the benefit of Chinese "national champions".
[67] Revelations from the Snowden documents have provided information to the effect that the United States, notably vis-à-vis the NSA, has been conducting aggressive economic espionage against Brazil.
[71] A 2009 report to the US government, by aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman, describes Chinese economic espionage as comprising "the single greatest threat to U.S.
[45] Blogging on the 2009 cyber attack on Google, Joe Stewart of SecureWorks referred to a "persistent campaign of 'espionage-by-malware' emanating from the People's Republic of China (PRC)" with both corporate and state secrets being "Shanghaied".
[72] The Northrop Grumman report states that the collection of US defense engineering data stolen through cyberattacks is regarded as having "saved the recipient of the information years of R&D and significant amounts of funding".
[80] These lists have been subject of controversy as in 2008 it was revealed that they contained some terms targeting the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the Eurocopter project[81] as well as French administration,[82][80] which were first noticed by BND employees in 2005.
[81] After the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the BND decided to investigate the issue whose October 2013 conclusion was that at least 2,000 of these selectors were aimed at Western European or even German interests which has been a violation of the Memorandum of Agreement that the US and Germany signed in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.
[80][83] The BND's project group charged with supporting the NSA investigative committee in German parliament set up in spring 2014, reviewed the selectors and discovered 40,000 suspicious search parameters, including espionage targets in Western European governments and numerous companies.
[80][84] The investigative parliamentary committee was not granted access to the NSA's selectors list as an appeal led by opposition politicians failed at Germany's top court.
Instead the ruling coalition appointed an administrative judge, Kurt Graulich [de], as a "person of trust" who was granted access to the list and briefed the investigative commission on its contents after analyzing the 40,000 parameters.
