PARIS (AFP) – Industrial espionage that targeted Renault posed a serious threat to the French carmaker’s “strategic assets”, the company said on Thursday.
Renault said on Wednesday that it had suspended three managers for leaking secrets about its electric cars.
This decision was to “protect, without delay, the strategic, intellectual and technological assets of our company,” senior vice president Christian Husson told AFP.
“For Renault, this is a very serious incident concerning persons in a particularly strategic position in the company,” he said.
A months-long probe had established a “body of evidence which shows that the actions of these three colleagues were contrary to the ethics of Renault and knowingly and deliberately placed at risk the company’s assets,” said Husson.
Renault has staked its future on electric cars as automakers face up to rising demand for more environmentally friendly methods of transport.
The suspensions were the latest in a series of industrial espionage scandals to hit France’s huge and strategically important auto industry.
French Industry Minister Eric Besson warned on Thursday that the country was facing “economic war” in the light of the espionage at Renault.
You may not believe to see it but Rupert Murdoch‘s British tabloid News of the World has rules.
The paper suspended assistant editor Ian Edmondson yesterday for approving hacking into the voice mail of Sienna Miller.
According to Bloomberg the suspension came after Miller alleged in a lawsuit that Edmondson had “approved a contract with an investigator to eavesdrop on personal messages between her, her friends and business associates” and paid him $3,900 to do so.
This is just the latest in a tabloid phone-hacking scandal that has plagued Britain in recent months, and reached all the way to the British family.
FRANCE is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage on other European countries, even ahead of China and Russia, said leaked US diplomatic cables quoted today by Norway’s Aftenposten.
“French espionage is so widespread that the damages (it causes) the German economy are larger as a whole than those caused by China or Russia,” an undated note from the US embassy in Berlin said, according to a Norwegian translation by Aftenposten.
The Norwegian daily of reference said last month it had obtained all the 250,000 US diplomatic cables WikiLeaks had accessed and would publish stories based on them independently of the whistleblowing website’s own releases.
Its article based on leaked cables included an October 2009 comment from Berry Smutny, the head of German satellite company OHB Technology, quoted in the diplomatic note.
“France is the Empire of Evil in terms of technology theft, and Germany knows it,” a Norwegian translation of Smutny’s comment in the cable read.
OHB Technology became known to the general public in January 2010 when it obtained a contract for the construction of several satellites for the Galileo satellite navigation system, a much-delayed European challenger to the American-developed Global Positioning System (GPS).
The small German firm won the bid for the contract over Astrium, a subsidiary of pan-European giant EADS.
A leaked US cable posted yesterday by Aftenposten described Franco-German competition in terms of spy satellite development.
The cable said Germany was developing, with the help of the US, its own High Resolution Optical Satellite System (HiROS), despite the objections of France, which is leading pan-European efforts in the field with its Helios satellites.
A chain of restaurants affiliated with the North Korean government recently opened a Dubai branch. Visitors to the Okryu-Gwan restaurant have the rare chance to enjoy traditional North Korean dishes while putting valuable hard currency into Pyongyang’s pocket.
Okryu-Gwan is basedin Pyongyang and also maintains outlets in China, Nepal, and
Thailand. The Dubai edition, which opened last summer, is a joint venture between an undisclosed United Arab Emirates-based partner and several other unnamed shareholders. But according to Abu Dhabi’s The National newspaper, the real shots are called by North Korea through an intermediary drawn from the expatriate Chinese community:
The Chinese businessman Gavin Tang, who has worked in the Emirates for
more than two decades, has said he also has a stake in the venture.
Still, there’s no question about its management according to the
manager. “Everyone knows that it is run by the North Korean government,” said that executive, who identified herself only as Ms Jin. “A group of
people from the foreign ministry direct the restaurant.”
Mr Tang agreed to act as a local fixer for the business after meeting Ms
Jin at a franchise restaurant in Beijing, where she also worked as a
manager. Though he denied North Korean officials were directing
operations, he said there were “special people” taking care of
them.”
Okryu-Gwan is also reportedly opening their first European branch in the
Netherlands. The restaurant in the Netherlands will instead be called
Pyongyang and is scheduled to swing open its doors later this year.
But the big question for any restaurant is of course: How’s the food? The
Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s state news agency, ran
this blurb on the central Pyongyang restaurant in 1998:
National dishes are mainly served in it. Those include Pyongyang cold noodle,
cold noodle on shallow round plate, gray mullet soup and boiled rice,
Pyongyang Onban, beef rib soup, sinsollo and green bean pancake. In
particular, Pyongyang cold noodle is popular among the people at home
and abroad. The dish is chiefly made of buckwheat. The thin and tough
noodles with various kinds of mince are served with noodle broth
processed with much care. The noodle broth is made of water boiled
with pheasant, beef and chicken and cooled. It makes people’s mouth
water…Cuisines of other countries are served for foreign tourists…General Secretary Kim Jong Il sent thanks to the employees for their
excellent services on some 50 occasions.”
More pictures
of the food, which look like the North Korean take on
haute cuisine, can be viewed here.
At these foreign branches, one of the primary draws is entertainment. The
Okryu-Gwan location in Kathmandu, Nepal, is well known for daily
song-and-dance routines and for North
Korean karaoke parties, as shown below.
Arecent NPR visit to the Dubai branch found a surreal scene:
Asthe food begins to arrive, a synthesizer strikes up a
theremin-sounding introduction, and soon the waitresses are onstage,
belting out Korean songs and decades-old American pop. […]
Potential staff members are thoroughly vetted for political
reliability, he added, and pressure may be used against family
members to minimize the risk of defection. But as long as the
restaurants meet their monthly revenue quotas, the regime tends not
to interfere.
The restaurants have also been also tied to the murky world of intelligence and
espionage. A North Korean man defected to India through the Kathmandu restaurant.
The man was reportedly the former manager of the Kathmandu Okryu-Gwan
and fled to India with a large amount of cash taken from the restaurant.
According to media reports, foreign branches of the restaurant are required to send home at least $30,000 annually in addition to paying their own expenses. While returns sent by the restaurants back to the mother country remain relatively small, they still play an important role. While North Korea’s primary method of raising foreign capital is weapons sales, it is also generally believed that the North Korean government has a major hand in Japan’s pachinko industry.
Follow the author of this story,
Neal Ungerleider, on Twitter.
Indian private investigator fits a compact camera he uses for surveillance in the pocket of his shirt, at his office in Mumbai, May 30, 2007. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images)
NEW DELHI, India — For the past month, Indian business leaders have watched in horror as a series of tapped telephone conversations between a powerful lobbyist and top industrialists have surfaced in the press.
But local security experts say the revelations associated with the alleged 2G telecom scam are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to vulnerable company secrets. In India’s fast-growing economy, they say, no industry is booming bigger than corporate espionage.
“If you look at all the companies doing business in the electronic sector in India, the chances are that four out of 10 would invariably have faced or are facing such issues,” said Pavan Duggal, a supreme court lawyer who specializes in cyber law. “The reality is that these thefts of intellectual property rights and confidential data are hitting the corporate world in a big way.”
Cut-throat competition provides ample motive, as companies battle to carve out brand positions, retain top talent and develop new products. A lax legal environment allows spies to operate with relative impunity. And a boom in white collar jobs means that employees shift jobs every few months — making it all too easy for companies to plant a mole in competing operations, and all too tempting for job-jumpers to walk away with sensitive information or protected intellectual property.
“The perpetrators of unauthorized access of corporate data do it with impunity, knowing full well that the law is deficient and that it will take a long time for them to be prosecuted,” said Duggal.
According to a recent survey conducted by the consultancy firm KPMG, 14 percent of Indian companies have been victims of corporate spying, while another 39 percent fell prey to intellectual property theft and computer-related fraud — and business-sensitive information and user IDs/passwords were the principal targets.
The potential losses from this kind of spying are difficult to calculate — since nobody knows what effect a stolen ad campaign might have had, or how a stolen design might have dominated the market. But there’s no doubt that big money is at stake. Early this year, for instance, India’s Thermax agreed to pay Pennsylvania-based Purolite International $38 million to settle a lawsuit over the alleged theft of proprietary water purification technology.
“You may not use [your competitor’s] research work,” said Kunwar Vikram Singh, president of the Indian Council of Corporate Investigators. “But suppose you have already developed your own brilliant idea. Even to launch that brilliant idea in the shape of a product you must know the market.”
The spies aren’t always after new technology. The targeted information ranges from client lists to proprietary software to advertising strategies, says Singh.
Not long ago, for instance, a company was readying a new ad blitz when, on the day before the launch, executives saw their planned slogan all over the city on their morning commute — on billboards advertising one of their competitors.
In another case, one of the country’s foremost motorcycle and scooter manufacturers lost the design and specifications for an upcoming model to a competitor through a spy planted with the contractor that was running the company cafeteria.
“They planted a guy … who knew a little about IT and could become friendly with people, and then when the office was closed he would access employees’ computers and get the information out,” said Ravi Kapur of ACE Detectives, the private investigator hired to plug the leak.
Part of the problem is that Indian laws governing these areas are weak and ambiguous. India has no specific data protection law, so the theft of sensitive information like marketing strategies or employee salaries — which is not governed by intellectual property laws — throws up a host of legal questions.
And while the unauthorized downloading or copying of computer files is illegal, the civil and criminal penalties are minor compared with the sums at stake for corporations. A criminal booked for data theft under the Information Technology Act, for instance, faces a maximum three-year term in prison and a maximum fine of around $10,000, and the most a victim can seek in civil damage is about $1 million — which the Thermax-Purolite settlement reveals as a pittance.
“It’s extremely lax,” said Kapur. “People don’t generally get caught. Then, even if this guy gets caught, they’re not after this guy [who took the information] — they’re after the competitors. Now, to ensure that the whole chain gets into the loop is not the easiest of tasks.”
Private investigators have been the biggest beneficiaries, as the budding industry profits from both sides of the information war. While none of the detective agencies interviewed would admit to conducting actual corporate espionage, firms that perform similar work — such as planting spies for clients within labor unions — say that they get requests to steal competitive information on a daily basis.
Moreover, there’s almost as much money to be made in protecting firms from spies as there is from spying on them, not only through investigating leaks, but also in risk analysis, security systems design and — since it’s the enemy inside that’s most feared — employee background checks.
And that means going to work for an outsourcing company is starting to seem like applying to the Pentagon.
“Before, people were reluctant to snoop around,” said Singh. “Now, they go deep.”
