"economic espionage" (ecspionage?) is in full swing as being promoted as the new bogeyman to justify spending billions of dollars to our intelligence agencies, both military and the FBI. we already have a very good example where this has backfired. I was watching Nightline on Tues night or so in which there was info about how the FBI helped get an informant into Intel in a *very* sensitive position, where he was able to film the pentium chip plans. he said he sold them, as I recall, to iraq, syria, china, etc. at the end of the show, the reporter stated that the FBI was seeking stronger laws against theft of "intellectual property" in congress that might solve the problem. there was much lamentation over the fact the criminal in question only got about 33 months of prison time or something. the FBI emerged with great egg on their face. I would say if anyone wants to ridicule them for getting into covering "ecspionage" cases, this is a prime candidate case. is this what they are aiming for? heh, heh. == somehow we have missed a good public debate about ecspionage in the country. there were a few NYT editorials, but it is clearly being used as a very major aspect of promoting the new post-cold-war spy and intelligence strategy without almost any notice by major analyists. I was thinking about all the objections I had to the FBI ecspionage treatment that were never raised on the program: 1. there was an implicit assumption that merely having the plans to the chip would allow other countries to somehow slaughter us in economic competition. but INTEL has spent billions of dollars on physical infrastructure without which the plans are virtually useless. it would take other countries years to get the kind of equipment necessary to produce the pentium, by which it might actually be yesterday's technology that no one cares about any more. 2. we have a tradition of separation of church and state in this country, and also separation of the public government and private industry. suddenly we have the FBI saying they want to infiltrate companies to deal with economic espionage. well, these companies have their own policy, and what do they gain by having a government agency working inside them? in the above case I note, it led to exactly the *opposite* of what was intended: the theft of *highly*sensitive* plans by an FBI mole. 3. hence, one wonders if the FBI could do a better job of combating ecspionage than companies are already doing, or if they are just going to botch it as has already been spectacularly proven in this case. 4. we could have companies that are run like the NSA to prevent "theft of information" (in quotes because I wonder if this will be considered a crime in future decades, just as heresy and blasphemy were once considered crimes a long time ago but no longer are today). however, we have the old "openess vs. security" catch-22. we can't have technological development without some degree of openess. 5. what is "intellectual property"? I think a very good case can be made that there isn't really any such thing, that the term itself may be thought in the future as something like an oxymoron. there is a big red flag going up here: why do we need all kinds of laws to combat this? is it really a problem? can anyone actually point to a very sinister situation in which massive amounts of cash were lost by a company due to ecspionage? as the steve jackson games incident proved, companies are liable to vastly exaggerate their losses to the point of fantasy. they have a tendency to think that "their information" is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars when it may actually be freely legally obtainable. if someone else can give more info on this case (apparently a book is coming out about it or something) including the guy's name, I'd appreciate it, I didn't take any notes so this is a bit fuzzy.