Industrial or Economic Espionage :: International Business Competition Essays

Industrial or Economic Espionage A small Mississauga electronics safety equipment beau monde is broken into.Although filing cabinets and desks were rummaged through, nothing was seeminglytaken. An officer discovered the company had drawn up a bid for $7 milliondollar expurgate a day or so before the break-in. The contract in point wasfor a foreign country. It was later discovered that the company in question wasknown for its aggressive economic espionage. An iron ore shipping company wasalso broken into. At first it was thought that the target had been the firmscomputers. But, nothing was taken, it was assumed that the burglars had been stir off. Within thirty minutes it was discovered that the company wasapproaching its fiscal year end. staff eventually found that most of the recentdatabase backup record was missing. A Quebec based company with the laser-basedsystem for inspecting materials used in, among other things, the stealthaircraft, had three computers stolen. On thei r harddrives were mysteriouscodes for specialized software used by the Canadian Armed forces. The above areall true examples of the modern threat facing international business todayknown as industrial or economic espionage. The end of the cold and economicpressures have increased the risk of economic espionage. The collapse of theSoviet Union has left unemployed KGB and other reason communist blocintelligence agents selling everything from Russian night vision devices tocompletely assembled and functional bugging devices. Even friendly westernEuropean governments have been caught espial on private corporations based inthe U.S. and other countries, while industrial competitors sometimes hireprivate companies to collect competitive intelligence from their corporaterivals( Lester96). What on the dot 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 thequestions that will be demeanored at in the following pages. F irst lets look at, what exactly is economic espionage. Espionage andintelligence is no longer the exclusive domain of monarchs and governments, ithas become a must for modern international business. Large corporations aroundthe area particularly in western Europe and Asia now hire agents to gatherintelligence on their competitors and other countries. The goal of economicespionage is to steal trade secrets, plans and confidential procedures oranything to give your company or country a competitive edge over another(Perry1996). The areas that interest industrial spies the most include light beam transfer technology, systems diagnostic and testing software,traveling wave tubes, aviation technologies, microwave monolithic integratedcircuits, inferred signature measures software, radar technologies, wet