Economic Espionage

Intelligence activities are traditionally thought to comprise the activities of a nation state’s intelligence organizations attempting to steal secrets, usually those pertaining to national security, from the organizations of another nation state.  However, intelligence activities have seldom, if ever, been confined to the government sphere.  Most nation states have employed their national intelligence systems to steal privately held economic information from other countries to benefit their economies: many continue to do so. Private enterprises have long employed methodologies associated with “traditional” intelligence to obtain trade secrets from domestic and foreign competitors.  The establishment of a legal and ethical framework to govern this activity –- the discipline of “competitive intelligence’, is a relatively recent phenomenon. 

This course will examine in depth the interaction of intelligence and private sector on these three levels.  Part one of the course will cover economic espionage:  the deliberate targeting of private sector entities by foreign intelligence services.  Soviet/Russian and Chinese conduct of Economic Espionage will be discussed in detail.  A separate class will examine the prevalence of economic espionage among democratic nations, usually considered allies of the United States in both theory and practice.  The U.S. attitude towards economic espionage, and the U.S reaction to the threat, will be the subject other class meetings. The course will then move on to industrial espionage, companies spying on other companies, and its’ more socially acceptable counterpart, competitive intelligence, attempting to distinguish between legal and illegal uses of intelligence by the private sector.