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Industrial Espionage

The article, "U.S. Companies Exposed to Industrial Espionage," (September 2002, page 6) offered some excellent advice to businesses regarding the need to think of the value to competing companies if they should have access to corporate plans or technical details of projects or designs in the works. In my opinion, bringing such ideas out into the public's consideration is extremely important.

I say that because of my experience in technical surveillance countermeasure (TSCM), in which we use specialized equipment and procedures to check client companies for any possible electronic eavesdropping or other actions to collect valuable information. However, the vulnerability that we find regularly does not require our very specialized skills.

Frequently, we have to tell our client in our report that it makes no sense to spend their money to hire us to check for high tech espionage, when they have not taken the simple step to have a company employee present while the clean-up contractor employees are working to be certain that they do not sort through the trash for items of possible value to a competitor.

For example, one night, a member of our crew handed me a letter draft from a wastebasket that specified the full details of an offer that involved another company that was joining in with our client to buy a third company. It specified the amount of money being offered, timetable, etc. Gad!

James A. Ross

MANASSAS, VA

Smart Munitions

In the first paragraph of "U.S. Army Presses Ahead On Precision-Guided Artillery" (October 2002, pg. 34) the subject article under "Range and Accuracy," makes the statement that "Current U.S. howitzers are outgunned by those used by potential adversaries, such as Iraq and North Korea, according to Army officials." As a retired guy who worked armament R&D and ammunition, the above statement by "Army officials" is totally incorrect. We may be out-ranged, but we are far from out-gunned...