Spy
vs. CI
By
John Allen
There
are those, however, for whom the difference between
telephone elicitation and outright spying may seem
cloudy, and popular culture doesn't make such distinctions
any easier. In March 2002, for instance, TIME
ran a pair of articles on CI, one of which, to the
dismay of Johnson and his colleagues in SCIP, was
titled "Spies Like Us."
"The trouble," explains Michael Sandman, a vice president
for the CI firm Fuld and Company, "is that spying
is more glamorous [than legitimate CI], and to many
people, it seems less reprehensible."
Five years ago, Sandman joined the teaching team for
the two-day course on CI run by the UW School of Business's
Fluno Center for Executive Education. Linda Gorchels,
the center's managing director of executive marketing
programs, created the course fourteen years ago as
a primer on intelligence concepts, methods, and ethics.
Sandman gives instruction on CI tools and techniques.
Like Johnson, his information extraction tool kit
doesn't include rubber hoses or naked light bulbs.2
Instead, he advises participants on ways to get the
most useful data using computers and the telephone.
"The basic guide for collecting intelligence ethically
is this," he says. "Don't do anything you'd be embarrassed
to see published in the newspapers."
Few of the class participants seem to desire lessons
in devious spy techniques. According to Gorchels,
of more than 400 executives who have taken the course,
only one has ever asked about the methods for collecting
illicit information. "Our participants are a highly
ethical group," she says.
And that's a good thing, because U.S. law offers draconian
punishment to illegal corporate spies. The Economic
Espionage Act, passed in October 1996, protects companies
from the theft of trade secrets. Gorchels says she
tries to familiarize her students with the basics
of the act, including exactly what it considers a
trade secret: the legal definition includes "all forms
and types of financial, business, scientific, technical,
economic, or engineering information ... whether tangible
or intangible," provided that information is worth
"independent economic value, actual or potential."
"Essentially,"
says Gorchels, "any information that a company has
a reasonable expectation of keeping secret, and makes
a reasonable effort to keep secret, falls under the
act's definition."
Stealing
a trade secret — or even conspiring to compromise
one — can lead to penalties of up to ten years
in prison and a $5 million fine for U.S. citizens,
and fifteen years and $10 million for foreign agents
and entities. "Merely the gathering of information
about another company's secret information
is illegal," says Gorchels. "The law is based on the
attempt to commit espionage, not on a spy's success."
2
"I prefer thumbscrews," he jokes. "They're
portable."
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