Industrial espionage is espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of the usual national security purposes. It is conducted both by governments and by private organisations.

At the most innocuous level, the term is applied to the legal and mundane methods of examining corporate publications, web sites, patent filings, and the like to determine the activities of a corporation (though this is normally referred to as business intelligence), through to bribery, blackmail, technological surveillance and even occasional violence. As well as spying on commercial organisations, governments can also be targets of commercial espionage - for example, to determine the terms of a tender for a government contract so that another tenderer can underbid.

Most large corporations openly acknowledge the existence of departments to perform the legal aspects of corporate espionage. Many also spend considerable amounts on precautions to protect against the more cloak-and-dagger varieties.

The United States government has admitted to using commercial espionage, for instance using surveillance of phone calls to determine that a French competitor of a US firm was bribing Brazilian officials to obtain an air traffic control radar contract (it was later revealed that the US firm was also bribing officials). It is generally believed that most large intelligence agencies are involved in the practice. A commission of the European Parliament suspects that ECHELON, a communications espionage system operated by the NSA and agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is used for political espionage and occasionally to help American companies against European competitors.

The government of France has conducted ongoing industrial espionage against American aerodynamics and satellite companies. [1]

The development of the Tupolev Tu-144 supersonic aircraft, with its rapid design and similarity to Concorde, was one of the most prominent examples of industrial espionage in the 20th century.

External links

• Recent cases and future of industrial espionage

See Also

• Business intelligence
• Trade secret