If you’re not the type to fret over conspiracies about black helicopters and shadowy figures in trench coats, you might want to inject a little paranoia into your life. Industrial espionage is a serious threat, warn security experts, but the perpetrators probably are not who you’d expect. Rather than companies themselves engaging in this sort of clandestine activity, more often it is government intelligence agencies playing a super-secret game of cat and mouse to assist companies and key industries in their own countries.
It is almost impossible to quantify just how prevalent the practice of industrial espionage is throughout the business world. The FBI has uncovered stories of spies from foreign Coca-Cola bottlers secretly taping the conversations of Pepsi bottling executives, and of rival computer software firms hacking into each others’ networks to gain secret information. But such cases, it would appear, are few and far between.
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