Global articles on espionage, spying, bugs, and other interesting topics.

What are the risks of using CI (competitive intelligence) for espionage?

A:

The line between competitive intelligence, or CI, and illegal corporate espionage is not always clear. This is especially true as technology increases the ability to gather and distribute information. There are also differences between domestic and international espionage laws. Whenever a company engages in an uncertain area of CI processing, it opens itself up to possible legal risk.

Intelligence Vs. Espionage

Corporate espionage, sometimes referred to as industrial espionage, is different than spying for political or national security reasons. The purpose of corporate espionage is to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of a specific business or industry. These are the same goals pursued by competitive intelligence strategies. The difference between CI and corporate espionage normally comes down to the means of acquiring information.

For example, it is legal to ask a competitive firm’s customers what they like or do not like about the competitor’s products. No illicit activity occurs to receive the information. On the other hand, blackmailing a competitor’s employee to garner information is illegal; blackmail is an illicit activity in the United States. The differentiation between licit and illicit is generally cited as the difference between espionage and intelligence gathering.

Risks of Corporate Espionage

Corporate espionage is relatively limited. Most forms of information gathering are legal, even if some are widely considered unethical. There are two broad means of committing corporate espionage: violating contracts or breaking other laws in the course of collecting information.

Nondisclosure agreements and gag orders are commonplace in corporate circles. Companies spend a considerable amount of time trying to protect trade secrets or other competitive advantages. Those with access to sensitive information can be required to sign away their right to reveal anything material.

Other acts normally considered illegal, such as fraud or bribery for example, can turn standard CI into espionage. Penalties for breaking these laws depend on their respective jurisdictional statutes. This is different than breaking a contract, where punishment might be detailed in the original agreement.

Israeli Military Indicts Soldier on Espionage Charges

The Israeli military says it has indicted a soldier on charges of sharing secret information that made its way into Syrian hands.

Thursday’s statement says the soldier relayed “classified information capable of harming state security” about the military’s activity along the frontier between Israel and Syria.

The soldier served in the armored corps and gave material to a “foreign agent” who then passed it on to Syrian officials.

Such cases are rare, and the military would not elaborate. Local media say the soldier is a member of Israel’s Druse minority.

Many Druse Arabs serve in Israel’s military. Members of the close-knit society have relatives on both sides of the Golan Heights.

Israel captured the strategic plateau overlooking northern Israel from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war.

NZ's spying 'damaging relations with our Pacific neighbours'

New Zealand’s relationships with its Pacific neighbours have been damaged by the latest revelations that the GCSB has been spying on Cabinet Ministers and top level Government officials in the Solomon Islands, the Green Party said today.

“Our relationships with Pacific countries are hugely important and the Government now needs to fix the damage it’s done by spying,” said Green Party security and intelligence spokesperson Kennedy Graham.

“When it first became known that the GCSB was spying on the Pacific, our Government said that it wouldn’t damage our relationships with our neighbours. That’s now clearly untrue, with a former chief of staff to the Solomon Islands Prime Minister saying he is ‘shocked’.

“This clearly has nothing to do with terrorism, because the spying targets were mostly senior officials within the Solomon Islands government, including the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

“Serious questions need to be answered around why the GCSB took such an interest in the Solomon Islands. Is it because of the PACER Plus trade deal being negotiated?

“We need to be sure that the New Zealand Government didn’t use spying to gain an unfair advantage in trade negotiations, in a similar way to how it has played hardball when negotiating trade deals with other Pacific nations such as Tonga and Samoa.

“It is also disturbing that the GCSB spied on anti-corruption campaigners in the Solomon Islands, who rely on confidential sources to do their important work.

“Pacific countries are our friends and neighbours. Spying on friends is not the Kiwi way,” Dr Graham said.

Leading figure in Chinese espionage at centre of anti-corruption investigation

A Brief History of the CIA's Unpunished Spying on the Senate

This is the story of John Brennan’s CIA spying on Congress and getting away with it.  

Last March, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of spying on the Senate intelligence committee as it labored to finalize its report on the torture of prisoners. “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution,” she said. “I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither.”

CIA Director John Brennan denied the charge. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.” It would be months before his denial was publicly proved false. “An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program,” The New York Times reported. “The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information.”

The Senate intelligence committee expressed appropriate outraged at these anti-democratic machinations:

A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that John O. Brennan, the agency’s director, had apologized to Ms. Feinstein and the committee’s ranking Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and would set up an internal accountability board to review the issue. The statement said that the board, which will be led by a former Democratic senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, could recommend “potential disciplinary measures” and “steps to address systemic issues.” But anger among lawmakers grew throughout the day. Leaving a nearly three-hour briefing about the report in a Senate conference room, members of both parties called for the C.I.A. officers to be held accountable, and some said they had lost confidence in Mr. Brennan’s leadership. “This is a serious situation and there are serious violations,” said Mr. Chambliss, generally a staunch ally of the intelligence community. He called for the C.I.A. employees to be “dealt with very harshly.”

Late last week, that internal “accountability board” announced the results of its review. If you’ve followed the impunity with which the CIA has broken U.S. laws throughout its history, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that no one is going to be “dealt with very harshly” after all. “A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode,” The New York Times reports. “The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan.”

Done at the behest of Brennan, who once feigned ignorance about the actions in question, going so far as to declare them beyond the scope of reason! “While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report,” the story continues, “the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.” Who’d have guessed that a panel appointed by Brennan to look into malfeasance presided over and in some cases ordered by Brennan would decide that neither Brennan nor any of the people Brennan leads should be held accountable?

Brennan and the CIA have behaved indefensibly. But substantial blame belongs to the overseers who’ve permitted them to do so with impunity, including figures in the Obama administration right up to the president and Senate intelligence committee members who, for all their bluster, have yet to react to CIA misbehavior in a way that actually disincentivizes similar malfeasance in the future. President Obama should fire John Brennan, as has previously been suggested by Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan. And the Senate intelligence committee should act toward the CIA like their predecessors on the Church Committee. Instead, the CIA is asked to investigate its own malfeasance and issue reports suggesting what, if anything, should be done.

The Times reports:

Mr. Brennan has enraged senators by refusing to answer questions posed by the Intelligence Committee about who at the C.I.A. authorized the computer intrusion. Doing so, he said, could compromise the accountability board’s investigation.

“What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview last week. “They haven’t answered those basic questions.”

Senator Levin, you’re a member of a coequal branch. You’ve flagged outrageous behavior among those you’re charged with overseeing. What are you going to do about it?

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief-history-of-the-cias-unpunished-spying-on-the-senate/384003/

• Politics Government
• Government
• John Brennan
• Senate intelligence committee