Tasmania, Australia –
An overnight break-in in which burglars ransacked Aurora Energy’s Hobart head office has puzzled police and company chiefs.
Only the second-floor commercial section of Aurora was targeted by the thieves, who cracked a secret safe and stole a small sum of cash.
Computers were accessed and documents strewn across the office…
Police have not ruled out corporate espionage as a possible reason for the break-in, which occurred either late on Monday night or in the early hours of yesterday…
Professor John McFarlane, from the Australian National University’s Centre for Excellence in Policing and Security, said yesterday industrial espionage was not uncommon in the business world. “There have been very few prosecutions in Australia for this sort of activity, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” Prof McFarlane said. (
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Canada – At the time of his kidnapping by the FLQ, Pierre Laporte was being monitored by the police as part of a probe into the Montreal Mafia that went as far as planting a microphone in his coffin after his murder, according to stunning revelations by a retired SĂ»retĂ© du QuĂ©bec wiretapping expert.
Claude LavallĂ©e, who pioneered wiretapping techniques in Quebec in the late 1960s, said in a book to be released Wednesday (RĂ©vĂ©lations d’un espion de la SQ / Revelations of an SQ Spy – ISBN 13: 9782761927048) that the murder of the Liberal minister in October 1970 by the Front de LibĂ©ration du QuĂ©bec put an end to the investigation.
The author even claims that
wiretaps caught a leading organized crime figure offering the Mafia’s help in finding Mr. Laporte before he was killed. (
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Note to D.R.: Please start your book.
American counter-intelligence efforts are snagging more Chinese spies. This may be more because of increased spying effort by China, than more success by the FBI and CIA…
For over two decades, China has been attempting to do what the Soviet Union never accomplished; steal Western technology, then use it to move ahead of the West…
China gets around this by making it profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things right. At the same time. China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While most of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, some will come back to China, and bring American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the “thousand grains of sand” approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit. (more)
In many societies, this activity is considered normal and patriotic. This highly organized info-harvesting for the sake of the tribe is not the norm in Western society. We have a difficult time fathoming this mentality. Our natural reaction is to treat the threat as unreal. Crime victims often mention this phenomena when describing their experience.
Accepting the evidence is the first step in defending yourself from an international mugging. Put yourself in the other society’s shoes for a moment. Think about it. Their strategy makes sense. Look around. Their strategy works. Accept the evidence. There is no reason for them to change tactics. There is every reason for it to continue and intensify.
They have a working strategy. You need a counter strategy, before your pockets are picked. Call us or the person who hosts Kevin’s Security Scrapbook on their web site. Get a counterespionage strategy… while you can still afford one.
A new study shows that the overheard half of cell phone dialogue can steal our attention from other tasks, with potentially dangerous outcomes.
Currently a doctoral candidate in psychology at Cornell University, Lauren Emberson and her co-authors recently published a study that helps explain why hearing only one half of a cell phone conversation is so aggravating, yet so captivating. The researchers argue that such “half-alogues,” as they dub them, make for dissonant eavesdropping because they are unpredictable. The less information we glean from a conversation, the harder our brains work to make sense of what we hear and the more difficult it is to stop listening. The findings,
published online September 3 in
Psychological Science, further suggest that cell phone half-alogues demand more of our attention than dialogues and decrease our performance on other cognitive tasks—whether we are sitting at a computer in the lab, trying to read on the subway or driving a car. (
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