This past February, five individuals and
five companies were charged with economic espionage and theft of trade secrets
for their roles in a long-running effort to obtain information for the benefit
of companies controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
According to the superseding indictment,
the PRC government was after information on chloride-route titanium dioxide
(TiO2) production capabilities. TiO2 is a commercially valuable white pigment
with numerous uses, including coloring paints, plastics, and paper. DuPont, a
company based in Wilmington, Delaware, invented the chloride-route process for
manufacturing TiO2 and invested heavily in research and development to improve
the process over the years. In 2011, the company reported that its TiO2 trade
secrets had been stolen.
Among the individuals charged in the
case? Two long-time DuPont employees…one of whom pled guilty in fairly short
order.
Foreign economic espionage against the
U.S. is a significant and growing threat to our country’s economic health and
security...and so is the threat from corporate insiders willing to carry it
out.
And because we’re now in the digital
age, insiders—who not so many years ago had to photocopy and smuggle mountains
of documents out of their offices—can now share documents via e-mail or
download them electronically on easy-to-hide portable devices.
Why do insiders do it? Lots of reasons,
including greed or financial need, unhappiness at work, allegiance to another
company or another country, vulnerability to blackmail, the promise of a better
job, and/or drug or alcohol abuse.
How to stop them? Obviously, a strong
organizational emphasis on personnel and computer security is key, and the FBI
conducts outreach efforts with industry partners—like InfraGard—that offer a
variety of security and counterintelligence training sessions, awareness
seminars, and information.
You can help as well. In our experience,
those who purloin trade secrets and other sensitive information from their own
companies and sell them overseas exhibit certain behaviors that co-workers
could have picked up on ahead of time, possibly preventing the information
breaches in the first place. Many co-workers came forward only after the
criminal was arrested. Had they reported those suspicions earlier, the
company’s secrets may have been kept safe.
Here are some warning signs that MAY
indicate that employees are spying and/or stealing secrets from their company:
■They work odd hours without
authorization.
■Without need or authorization, they
take proprietary or other information home in hard copy form and/or on thumb
drives, computer disks, or e-mail.
■They unnecessarily copy material,
especially if it’s proprietary or classified.
■They disregard company policies about
installing personal software or hardware, accessing restricted websites,
conducting unauthorized searches, or downloading confidential material.
■They take short trips to foreign
countries for unexplained reasons.
■They engage in suspicious personal
contacts with competitors, business partners, or other unauthorized
individuals.
■They buy things they can’t afford.
■They are overwhelmed by life crises or
career disappointments.
■They are concerned about being
investigated, leaving traps to detect searches of their home or office or
looking for listening devices or cameras.
If you suspect someone in your office
may be committing economic espionage, report it to your corporate security
officer and to your local FBI office, or submit a tip online at
https://tips.fbi.gov/.
What
Do They Want From Us?
According to the latest economic
espionage report to Congress from the Office of the National
Counterintelligence Executive, although foreign collectors will remain
interested in all aspects of U.S. economic activity and technology, they’re
probably most interested in the following areas:
- Information and communications
technology, which form the backbone of nearly every other technology;
- Business information that pertains to
supplies of scarce natural resources or that provides global actors an edge in
negotiations with U.S. businesses or the U.S. government;
- Military technologies, particularly
marine systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other aerospace/aeronautic
technologies; and
- Civilian and dual-use technologies in
fast-growing sectors like clean energy, health care/pharmaceuticals, and
agricultural technology.
Successful
Investigation of ‘Insiders’
- In Detroit, a car company employee
copied proprietary documents, including some on sensitive designs, to an
external hard drive…shortly before reporting for a new job with a competing
firm in China. Details
- In Indianapolis, an employee of an
international agricultural business stole trade secrets on organic pesticides
from his employer and shared them with individuals in China and Germany.
Details
In Boston, a technology company employee
e-mailed an international consulate in that city and offered proprietary
business information. He later provided pricing and contract data, customer
lists, and names of other employees…to what turned out to be a federal
undercover agent. Details
All three subjects pled guilty. But in
two of the three cases, the stolen secrets probably ended up in the hands of
global businesses that will use them to attempt to gain an unfair competitive
edge over the United States.
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