But the FBI is only one of many agencies that deal with the problem in the USA. The President's Annual Report to Congress on "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage" dated July 1995, describes the multiple competitive intelligence (CI) roles of the Customs Service, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the CIA.
The federal government alerts its contractors to CI threats and subjects them to "awareness programs" under the DOD's Defense Information Counter Espionage (DICE) program. The Defense Investigative Service (DIS) maintains a host of useful databases such as the Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence (FOCI) register. It is active otherwise as well, conducting personal security interviews by industrial security representatives and keeping tabs on the foreign contacts of security cleared facilities. And the list goes on.
According to the aforementioned report to Congress: "The industries that have been the targets in most cases of economic espionage and other collection activities include biotechnology; aerospace; telecommunications, including the technology to build the 'information superhighway'; computer software/ hardware; advanced transportation and engine technology; advanced materials and coatings, including 'stealth' technologies; energy research; defense and armaments technology; manufacturing processes; and semiconductors. Proprietary business information-that is, bid, contract, customer, and strategy in these sectors is aggressively targeted. Foreign collectors have also shown great interest in government and corporate financial and trade data".
The collection methods range from the traditional - agent recruitment and break ins - to the technologically fantastic. Mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, research and development partnerships, licensing and franchise agreements, friendship societies, international exchange programs, import-export companies - often cover up for old fashioned reconnaissance. Foreign governments disseminate disinformation to scare off competitors - or lure then into well-set traps.
Foreign students, foreign employees, foreign tourist guides, tourists, immigrants, translators, affable employees of NGO's, eager consultants, lobbyists, spin doctors, and mock journalists are all part of national concerted efforts to prevail in the global commercial jungle. Recruitment of traitors and patriots is at its peak in international trade fairs, air shows, sabbaticals, scientific congresses, and conferences.
On May 2001, Takashi Okamoto and Hiroaki Serizwa were indicted of stealing DNA and cell line reagents from Lerner Research Institute and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. This was done on behalf of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan - an outfit 94 funded by the Japanese government. The indictment called RIKEN "an instrumentality of the government of Japan".
The Chinese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was involved on May 2001 in an egregious case of theft of intellectual property. Two development scientists of Chinese origin transferred the PathStar Access Server technology to a Chinese corporation owned by the ministry. The joint venture it formed with the thieves promptly came out with its own product probably based on the stolen secrets.
The following ad appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1991 - followed by a contact phone number in western Europe: "Do you have advanced/privileged information of any type of project/contract that is going to be carried out in your country? We hold commission/agency agreements with many large European companies and could introduce them to your project/contract. Any commission received would be shared with yourselves".
Ben Venzke, publisher of Intelligence Watch Report, describes how Mitsubishi filed c. 1500 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests in 1987 alone, in an effort to enter the space industry. The US Patent office is another great source of freely available proprietary information.
Industrial espionage is not new. In his book, "War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America", The Wall Street Journal's John Fialka, vividly describes how Frances Cabot Lowell absconded from Britain with the plans for the cutting edge Cartwright loom in 1813.