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- SANTA CLARA, Calif.
(AP) - Transmeta chief executive David Ditzel chuckles at the memory of
the sudden interest in the company's trash weeks before taking the wraps
off its top-secret new Crusoe computer chip. But with hundreds of millions
of dollars of research on the line, keeping the microprocessor's specifications
secret was no laughing matter.
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- Ditzel and other employees at Transmeta's sprawling low-rise
office complex, in an area tightly packed with semiconductor companies,
kept a careful watch on the trash bins and chased off several people, including
one whose car bore the bumper sticker of a well-known rival.
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- ''We made sure all they got were orange rinds,'' said
Ditzel, who kept the company's mission secret for five years until January,
despite heavy interest from the media and industry.
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- Even Oracle Corp.'s hiring of detectives to dig up information
on archrival Microsoft Corp., didn't shock executives in Silicon Valley,
where ''security'' companies hired by many of those firms say it is standard
procedure to get down in the dirt to muddy the image of competitors or
profit off their work.
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- ''Dumpster diving,'' hacking, bribery, hiring away key
employees - even not-so-casual conversations with unsuspecting relatives
of company executives - have become conventional tools in the unconventional
business of corporate espionage.
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- Fortune 1,000 companies lost more than $45 billion (U.S.)
last year from trade theft, according to a survey by the American Society
for Industrial Security and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Other estimates put
the figure closer to $100 billion.
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- But in the game of spy versus spy, few players are willing
to admit involvement unless caught in the act. In recent years, admissions
of unorthodox tactics have come from companies such as Microsoft Corp.,
America Online Inc., and this past week, Oracle.
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- Oracle chairman Larry Ellison said he authorized payments
to a private detective agency to spy on several trade and policy groups
that publicly supported Microsoft in the federal antitrust case. He portrayed
his efforts as a public service, although Oracle would benefit directly
from a wounded Microsoft.
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- According to executives at firms who do corporate espionage,
what has been dubbed ''Larrygate'' by some is by no means an isolated incident.
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- ''Corporate wars are just like real wars: They're ugly,
and they are won and lost in the details,'' said Eric Dezenhall, whose
Washington firm Nichols-Dezenhall hires private detectives, former CIA,
FBI, Drug Enforcement and other law enforcement officers for corporate
investigations.
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- ''A company might not want to know how you got the information,
but they still want the information,'' Dezenhall said.
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- Experts say high-tech companies are especially vulnerable
to espionage.
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- They often work to promote a casual atmosphere to their
employees and overlook establishing security procedures in their rush to
get out new products. Security guards are rarely posted in many companies'
lobbies, doors go unlocked, computers lack intrusion safeguards.
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- ''You can expect that your adversary is going to come
through the path of least resistance, the one gateway that you didn't secure,
whether it's your trash or your Internet gateway,'' said Amit Yoran, chief
executive of RIPTech, a security-monitoring company.
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- ''It's not something that's openly talked about, because
most people think it does smell,'' Yoran said. ''But you have to realize
this is a global economy we're now talking about; in the international
and global economies where we are competing, these are commonly accepted
business practices.''
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- Industry analysts estimate slightly more than 80 per
cent of the world's companies with a market capitalization of more than
$1 billion (U.S.) have a formal intelligence program to either gather information
on competitors or protect their own information.
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- Forrester Research, in its B2B Information Warfare report,
found that while corporate spending on security represents just a fraction
of total expenditures, the security spending has risen by a factor of 10
in just two years.
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- ''No one knows the total size of the problem, but even
if they don't talk about it and even if they're not quite sure what they're
afraid of, it's clear they see the risk,'' said senior analyst Frank Prince
at Forrester's e-business infrastructure group.
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