Commercial Espionage Versus Competitive Intelligence

Thursday, April 24, 2014

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COMMERCIAL ESPIONAGE - PROFITABLE, ILLEGAL, RISKY AND SOMETIMES FATAL

Note: It’s crucially important to know the difference between commercial espionage (which generally involves theft, among other illegal activities), and competitive intelligence, which is more challenging, but which does not ever require the foolishness of breaking laws and risking incarceration, deportation or, on occasion, death. Stealing information and selling it to a third party for a price is not a profession -- it is a death wish waiting to be fulfilled.

It takes a great set of skills to gather competitive intelligence by fully legal means, and there is even more skill required not to make it apparent to your quarry that you are obtaining information and putting it into the hands of his or her competitors.

A recent news story follows which describes the ordinary outcome of a commercial or political espionage campaign. We, at Global Edge Technologies Group LLC, don’t ever endorse this type of activity.

FinFacts Ireland

Japan arrests ex-SanDisk employee in commercial espionage case

FinFacts Ireland

Last Thursday Tokyo police arrested a man suspected of illegally providing a South Korean firm with research data from SanDisk Corp, a US high tech …

- Douglas E. Castle