Corporate Espionage Detailed in Documents

[MountainLaurel]

Some interesting Sunday reading:

They scavenged through trash and tailed people for hours. They used undercover operatives to infiltrate private meetings. The targets were not agents of foreign powers but advocacy groups that had been critical of corporations.

In the 1990s, a Maryland-based private detective agency composed of former CIA agents and law enforcement officers spied on such activist groups as Greenpeace, the firm's records show.

The agency, Beckett Brown International, had an operative at meetings of a group in Rockville that accused a nursing home of substandard care. In Louisiana, it kept tabs on environmental activists after a chemical spill. In Washington, it spied on food safety activists who had found taco shells made with genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption.

BBI, which was founded in 1995, disbanded in 2000, and the activists might never have learned they were spied on. But a disgruntled BBI investor began digging through company records two years ago and has been contacting the former targets. He also gave The Washington Post access to the records, which provide an unusually detailed look into the secretive world of corporate spying.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101572.html

[alfredo]

1. Industrial espionage has been around for a long time. Back in the sixties

I could have gone to work intercepting communications of competing oil companies. I could have been paid $18,000 tax free (good for the 60's, and more than a CIA agent). I'd have free housing, free food, free travel and free vacations.

The bad side would have been living in Saudi Arabia and being a target of assassination by competing oil companies. Living in Saudi Arabia makes assassination a viable option.