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Magazine Issue 2 - Winter 1996

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Finding out - by fair means or foul The words 'Industrial Espionage' conjure up images of cloak-and-dagger secret agents furtively slipping into their competitors and stealing all their most closely-guarded secrets. Or, alternatively, they could describe the activities of concerned shareholders or customers attempting to find out potentially embarrassing or damaging information about large companies they don't particularly like. It's useful to know that in most Western countries, industrial espionage is not in itself a crime. The major exception to this is Switzerland, who managed to send Stanley Adams to jail in 1973 for the heinous crime of disclosing the price-fixing practices of Hoffman-LaRoche to the commission of the EC. So the scope for any concerned individual or group is large - in this country at least. An enormous quantity of information exists even in the public domain which could be used to great effect. Examples include scanning through lists of new tenders being offered (or better still, searching through Tenders Electronic Daily, available online) to see whether there are any new and controversial schemes in the pipeline, for which companies are bidding for the contract, and who the eventual winners are. Gaining potentially sensitive information on a company's activities can be almost laughably easy. The places where all this information lives are, of course, the offices of the company concerned. Corporate Watch can obviously not condone any illegal activities for the gathering of sensitive information; but it can suggest, for instance, that when signing into an office the names and details of other previous visitors are easily visible in the visitor's book. Furthermore, in many small branches or offices, the telephonist and receptionist are often the same person: it is thus perfectly possible that visitors can be kept standing around doing nothing in particular while the receptionist is on the phone. The entertainment possibilities of this are considerable, particularly if a visitor and a telephone call coincide. On the subject of telephone calls, remember that while actually tapping calls is illegal in the UK, the use of many other listening devices is not. If you leave a tape recorder running in a room, if you leave a hidden microphone in your target room and run a wire to a pair of headphones or a tape-recorder elsewhere, or if you use a long-distance microphone for recording 'birdsong', you commit no criminal offence whatsoever. You may commit the offence of trespass in the course of installing or retrieving some of this equipment, but this is solely a matter for the civil courts; and the penalty is limited to any physical damage to the target's property. Radio transmitters are less legal, however: using them contravenes the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949. While this is all very sexy and exciting, most of the actual work involved in any kind of company research or industrial espionage (call it what you will) operates on a much more prosaic level. The gathering of any kind of intelligence, whether on people or companies, will always mean establishing simple known facts and building up from there. How far the investigator or researcher goes from there depends entirely on whether they feel they have achieved the intelligence goal they set in the first place. Issue 1 of Corporate Watch (plug plug - buy your back issues today) contains a wealth of information on public-domain sources and routes for finding out what your target's up to. This article isn't going to go over that ground again, but will instead concentrate on specialised industries that various groups might be interested in. ENERGY The Energy Industries Council Catalogue, published by the EIC, details British suppliers to world energy industries, under the headings of: products and services, names and addresses, and product data. Comprehensive and useful: should be in any large library. Longman publish two related titles in this sector: the FT Oil & Gas International Yearbook, which gives details on over 900 companies; and the FT Who's Who in World Oil & Gas, full of biographies if looking for a specific person. The North Sea Oil & Gas Directory is also useful: published by Spearhead, it is full of information on manufacturers, suppliers and key personnel. Very handy. MINING FT Mining International is a useful book in this sector: published by Longman, it gives corporate and financial information on all the major mining companies and most of the little ones too. A more wide-ranging tome is the huge Mines and Mining Equipment and Service Companies Worldwide, published by Spon. Like most of the directories described, it's published annually, so resourceful campaigners might be able to get hold of last year's copy for next to nothing. CHEMICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL The most useful directory here is the Chemical Industry Directory and Who's Who, published by Benn Business Information. This also includes a very useful Who Owns Whom section. For those interested in specific products, the Directory of World Chemical Producers (published by Chemical Information Services) includes an alphabetical list of chemical and pharmaceutical products and their producers, together with a guide to the countries these producers operate from. Even more detailed is Major Chemical and Petrochemical Companies of Europe, published by Graham and Trotman, which is full of in-depth information on these firms including chairmen, directors, agents and bankers. Very heavy going but a potential goldmine. TIMBER AND FURNITURE The only journal we could find for this ended in 1992 but might still be useful. It's the TTJ Telephone Address Book, published by Benn, and covers the timber industry and allied trades; with a who's who, a who owns whom and a who belongs to whom. CONSTRUCTION Find out who pays for new projects with the Construction News Financial Review, published by the Building Trades Journal. This shows all the financial stuff including a rundown of EC funding for joyous things like building roads and supermarkets and all the other lovely stuff that everyone likes so much. Oh yes. The last thick book we could find is The Directory of Contractors and Public Works Annual published by Biggar. Just the ticket if you can't find a local office for your favourite building company so you can go and tell them just how much you appreciate what they're doing.