PI Newswire

Corporate espionage is probably not what you think of when you hear the word spy. It’s not Sean Connery with his debonair manner, nor is it Tom Cruise hanging from suspension cable; sometimes it’s as simple as a man in a bathrobe sitting in front of a computer with a touchtone phone beside it. Google found out that espionage can “allegedly” be a sovereign state seeking to quash dissidents. We’ll look at both the fact and fiction surrounding the world of the corporate spy. (From godfathers to perps, familiarize yourself with the “criminal elements” creeping around Wall Street, in Handcuffs And Smoking Guns: The Criminal Elements Of Wall Street.)

Caught Napping
Why aren’t we rounding up corporate spies and applying the thumbscrews? Putting aside the music and film pirates who are prosecuted by the MPAA sporadically, there is nothing blatantly illegal about this profession. The freedom of information act can, with some imagination, be stretched to protect the collection of any kind of information as long as:

1. You have not signed a non-disclosure agreement and
2. You do not use fraud or break any laws while gathering information

When corporate spies are caught, they are charged for breaking rule two. (Ponzi schemes are just one example of this type of scam; learn how to avoid becoming a victim in Affinity Fraud: No Safety In Numbers.)

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Some social critics say companies that lay off employees are doing permanent damage to themselves. After all, they’ve spent years training the workers they’re casting aside. Moreover, they may be abruptly discarding a great deal of institutional memory.

It turns out there’s another cause for concern: Laid-off workers could be a valuable source of information to corporate spies. Such spooks have been known to stage fake job interviews to ferret out information about a former employer’s ways and future plans. Even still-employed workers “can be surprisingly candid about their own company when they think they’re interviewing for a job,” writes Politico correspondent Eamon Javers.

At its best, Javers’s uneven, intermittently absorbing new book, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage (Harper, $26.99), exposes a little-known world of black ops, eavesdropping, and corporate skullduggery. But the book is marred by an elastic definition of corporate espionage, stretched to include everything from routine financial investigations to ordinary detective work conducted by Kroll Associates. Worse, the volume’s historical chapters are poorly researched and larded with extraneous detail.

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