National and Industrial Sabotage One of the problems we have in this country is we seem to not be able to keep secrets. Sometimes we do the dumbest of things with our so-called secret data. We know personal data is not very well protected by some companies but this would probably be different if they were punished for not abiding by strong standards of protection, by the way which we do not have. This is only a piece of the story however, while it is important to protect a person’s data, it could also be very important to protect advanced weapons and many other things. What is the sense of spending billions of dollars on defense projects, only to have them stolen and built by another country who used our own expensive research for free? This has happened more times than I would like to mention. All one has to do is look at the newest Chinese aircraft to see how it resembles our own. We know China is infamous for stealing data and it is not only data which was developed for building weapons, but it is also secret business data. Businesses invest a lot of money on secrets which make them successful, for example the formula to Coca-Cola. While this has not been stolen, many other secrets have been. It has been said one in five corporations have claimed the intellectual property law has been violated by Chinese companies. This is why it is so important for us to have a clause in our trade agreements punishing any action by a foreign government who violates these properties. According to phase 1 advocates of the new agreement with China, there is such a clause. If this is true it will be the first time we have been able to enforce punishment for a violation and suspend the treaty for that action. While China is traditionally the biggest violator of trade secrets, it is by no means the only country to steal trade secrets from us. Sometimes no matter what protections you have you can get fooled. In one case a Chinese American scientist who worked for the government for over thirty years stole secrets from us and fled to China with them. One of the only ways to prevent this is to make sure scientists who are involved in secret projects have no relatives in other countries which would put pressure on them to perform illegal actions. What I am getting at is simple. If a scientist has a relative in a country which hates the United States it is an easy thing for that country to put pressure on that scientist if he doesn’t want his relative to be killed or harmed. Even the Romans protected their trade secrets with the Roman law known as action servi corrupti. It is said that when we interpret this term it translates as “action for making a slave worse” which also has been interpreted as an action for corrupting a servant. If the Romans had a company with a certain name a competitor could not use that name because the law protected him against unfair usage of his name. Scholars debate the purpose of some of the Roman laws and sometimes they do not agree with each other, muddying the waters. There is no doubt Roman civilization was very advanced for its time and some protections had to be in place. Trade secrets law appeared in the machine age in England in 1817. There is a long history of countries and companies wanting to protect their secrets. While I’ve stated China was not the only country to steal trade secrets, if one goes to Google and talks about trade secret violations inevitably China will appear everywhere as a violator. It has been said India has not yet produced enough laws to protect other’s intellectual property, but they have talked about doing it. Venezuela and Pakistan along with Algeria were listed as offenders in an article by Chief Executive, a website. It is not mentioned much, but even some of our allies have been accused of violating our patents. An example of this is Israel which was on our intellectual property watch list for a few years but has since been removed. Stealing intellectual property can be accomplished many different ways. What the Chinese liked to do was buy a few items and then reproduce them in large numbers. They did this to the Russians several times with their planes. They would buy a few planes, disassembling them, and then manufacture the planes themselves after they discovered how they were made. This upset the Russians to no end and at one point it was said they weren’t going to sell planes to the Chinese in very small lots, but I don’t believe they ever enforced this. Companies are infamous for the sabotage they perform on each other. Industrial espionage is often taken place. Some of the ways industrial espionage is conducted were listed in a book in 2006 as, desktop investigations, database research, market research, engaging consultants for research, visiting exhibitions and trade fairs to collect information, working for a company while employed by another company to get trade secrets. Then there are criminal activities to get trade secrets such as hacking computers, tapping phones, theft, bribery, blackmail and trespassing. It is said the most famous case of industrial espionage was a case where the victim was the Gillette razor company. In 1997 a man stole plans for a new Gillette shaving system which had been worked on for over a year. He had gotten a hold of technical drawings of the new system and released them to Gillette’s competitors. He pled guilty. Kodak had also been a victim and an employee who had worked for them for over thirty years, left the company and took confidential documents which he attempted to sell before he was caught. It may be strange to think glue could be protected by a patent but the glue Avery Tennyson was protecting was the glue used on postage stamps and other important items, and they became the victims of industrial espionage. They won their case and a $40,000,000 verdict. There are plenty of other companies who have been victimized. Everything is up for grabs whether it be systems or objects important to this country’s security, or the patents responsible for companies making profits. Obviously, there are some people with whom money is more important than the safety of the country and this is demonstrated all the time. As far as industrial sabotage goes, it just proves the absence of ethics in the world.
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