Business Espionage: White Pigment Spy Sentenced by Judge White

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a California chemical engineer to 15 years in prison and fined him $28.3 million for a rare economic-espionage conviction for selling China a secret recipe to a widely used white pigment.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland said Liew, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had "turned against his adopted country over greed." (more)

You Know You Want One...

Have something small — cash, microfilm, an SD card loaded with private videos — that you want kept safe and out-of-sight? 

Hide it in plain view with the Spy Bolt. Based on Soviet KGB hollow bolts, this handy gadget features a secret storage compartment that's nearly half and inch in diameter and almost three inches long, offering plenty of room for covert communications. And should the bolt find its way outside, you rest assured that the contents are safe, thanks to an O-ring seal around the top. (more)

Emboldened by Their Upcoming World Cup Victory this Sunday...

Germany expelled the CIA station chief in Berlin over alleged spying by the United States which has refused to break its silence over the escalating row between the Western allies.

The expulsion came after two suspected US spy cases were uncovered in less than a week in Germany, where anger still simmers over the NSA surveillance scandal...

“The representative of the US intelligence services at the embassy of the United States of America has been told to leave Germany,” German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said. The step was highly unusual among NATO allies and underlined Berlin’s anger. (more)

The NSA Speaks (humor)

The NSA addresses allegations that the U.S. has been spying on Germany. (video)

Before There Was Snowden There Was Mitrokhin

The papers spent years hidden in a milk churn beneath a Russian dacha and read like an encyclopedia of Cold War espionage.

Original documents from one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history — a who's who of Soviet spying — were released Monday after being held in secret for two decades.

The files smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by senior KGB official Vasili Mitrokhin describe sabotage plots, booby-trapped weapons caches and armies of agents under cover in the West — the real-life inspiration for the fictional Soviet moles in "The Americans" TV series.

In reality, top-quality spies could be hard to get. The papers reveal that some were given Communist honors and pensions by a grateful USSR, but others proved loose-lipped, drunk or unreliable.

Intelligence historian Christopher Andrew said the vast dossier, released by the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University, was considered "the most important single intelligence source ever" by British and American authorities.

Mitrokhin was a senior archivist at the KGB's foreign intelligence headquarters — and a secret dissident. For more than a decade he secretly took files home, copied them in longhand and then typed and collated them into volumes. He hid the papers at his country cottage, or dacha, some stuffed into a milk churn and buried.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin traveled to a Baltic state — which one has never been confirmed — and took a sample of his files to the U.S. Embassy, only to be turned away. So he tried the British embassy, where a junior diplomat sat him down and asked, "Would you like a cup of tea?"

"That was the sentence that changed his life," said Andrew.

Smuggled out of Russia, Mitrokhin spent the rest of his life in Britain under a false name and police protection, dying in 2004 at 81. (more)

Priest Bugged

Australia - Police are examining alleged threats made to a Greek priest and the bugging of a church house in which he was living.

The alleged threats, involving an unnamed priest from the Autocephalic Greek Church of America and Australia, were reported a fortnight ago while the discovery of the concealed listening device was reported to police in late March.

The alleged threats are ­related to the controversial ordination of Father Prokopios Kanavas as bishop of the AGCAA last August.

Father Kanavas resigned in acrimonious circumstances in April – just eight months after he was ordained. He has been stripped of his titles and moves are now being made to expel him from the Greek Orthodox Community of South Australia.

While GOCSA executives ­believe they know who made the unlawful threats to the priest, the precise motive and culprit ­responsible for the bugging remain unclear.
The listening device was hidden in the rangehood of a church house in Grattan St, in the city, adjacent the Greek ­Orthodox cathedral. Such devices, which are freely available for purchase on the internet, have a range of around 50m. (more)

Employee and Aid Bug Co-Workers

An accountant resigned from her $42,000-a-year part-time job as West Seneca’s comptroller two months ago after employees accused her and an aide of using a tape recorder to secretly record their workplace conversations.

Town officials confirmed that two town employees made complaints against Jean M. Nihill, 57, about a month before she resigned from her job as the town’s top finance officer on May 12. Nihill, a certified public accountant, is the business partner of one of the town’s most politically powerful individuals – town Democratic Party leader Paul T. Clark, who served as town supervisor for 16 years.

The employees also alleged that former deputy comptroller Linda Kauderer took part in the bugging. Kauderer retired from her town job May 20.

Police investigated the complaints and verified that a tape recorder was used to record the employees while they were working in town offices, Police Chief Daniel M. Denz confirmed. (more)

1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act Instigator Dead at 68

David Truong, a Vietnamese antiwar activist whose conviction on espionage charges in the United States in 1978 raised alarms about the federal government’s use of wiretaps without court orders and spurred passage of the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act prohibiting such practices, died on June 26 in Penang, Malaysia. He was 68. (more)

Happy Fourth of July

Kevin

Today in Business Espionage News

PA - Cumberland County-based Harsco Corp. is suing one of its former top executives in federal court, accusing him of corporate espionage for allegedly passing confidential company information to a competitor.
Clyde Kirkwood essentially acted as a mole, Harsco contends in the U.S. Middle District Court complaint it filed this week.

Kirkwood abruptly quit his post as commercial vice president for Harsco's Metals & Minerals Division in early June, three months after he secretly agreed to take an executive job with the Michigan-based Edw. C. Levy Co., Harsco's suit states.

Harsco claims that, starting early this year, Kirkwood not only passed confidential Harsco information to Levy, including data on top-level corporate decisions, he also intervened to try to steer Harsco away from international projects where it could be in competition with Levy. (more)

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Taiwan tech giant Hon Hai said today it has pulled out of a deal to buy 4G equipment from Huawei after the government warned that the Chinese company posed a national security threat.

Taiwan raised those concerns in March after Hon Hai announced the USD 178 million deal, saying telecom equipment purchased from Huawei could be used for cyber espionage. (more)

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The wife of a Chinese company’s chairman was arrested in California after she was charged in an indictment filed Wednesday in federal court in Des Moines with conspiracy to steal trade secrets from U.S. seed corn companies.

Mo Yun, 42, was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles. She is a citizen of China. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt said he could not comment on whether she was in the U.S. on a work or visitor visa or why she was in California.

Her arrest is the latest development in a case Klinefeldt announced in December in which several employees of Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co., known as DNB Group, or its subsidiaries were alleged to have stolen patented seed corn from fields in Iowa and Illinois and shipped it to China to try to reproduce its traits. (more)

Marti Oakley's Pre-4th of July Privacy Review

• We have street lights spying on us in public.
• We have your SMART meters tracking what you do in your home, not to mention making many people ill.
• We got your scan enabled license plates so that you can be tracked for any reason or no reason as you travel.
• These plates will also be handy for “tax per mile” calculation at the pump coming to a state near you in the very near future.
• Our cell phones can be tracked using GPS installed in them.
• Retailers can access your cell phone while you shop in their stores.
• NSA can listen in and track you anytime they want on the phone, on the net, or on any gadget you might possess.
• GPS allows the tracking and location of our vehicles.
• Black box recorders are now installed on all new models of cars so that conversations in the cab of the car can be retrieved, insurance companies can access info about you and so can the NSA.
• And there is not one major retail establishment that you can enter without having your picture snapped, compared to millions of faces in the system, and identified. You can and will be tracked throughout the store you are in, along with your purchases and how you paid for them.
• We have nano-chips, scan enabled from satellites, sprinkled in numerous high volume food products so that what we eat can be tracked, if anyone really wants to know what we are eating and where we are eating it.
• Medications are soon to be laced with nano-chips so that your doctor and/or insurance provider can determine if you are taking prescribed medications.  (You can be dropped from your insurance for non-compliance if you are not taking the drugs for any reason)
• They will also be inserted into medical devices, like your hip and knee replacements. (more)

Note: The above comments are not mine and should be subject to fact-checking.

On the other hand, fireworks haven't been banned in all states, yet.
Map that shows the types of fireworks allowed in each state.

"Talk to the badge, Axxxxxx."

UK - Shop workers who have been the victims of hate crime are to be given 'spy' name badges - in a bid crack down on racism.

Some 48 devices are being bought by Merseyside's Police Commissioner Jane Kennedy to help tackle hate crime.

The semi-covert video cameras, which look like large name-badges, are intended to support victims of racial abuse. The cameras will capture evidence to help prosecute offenders.

The commissioner is also buying 100 personal safety devices for use by high-risk victims of domestic abuse, harassment and stalking. (more)

Spy Badges Gain Traction...
HIGHLY trained officers keeping the peace during G20 will wear tiny, spy-like cameras – the first to be issued by the Queensland Police Service.

The lightweight, miniature video cameras will be clipped to officers’ uniforms to record potential evidence during November’s summit.

The Courier-Mail can reveal 70 high-definition cameras will be used by frontline police. (more)

The Government Owns Your Tweets - No, not the NSA... the LOC

Even deleting your Twitter account won't help. 
You're brain farts are permanently archived.

Twitter and the Library of Congress have this "deal", see. Twitter gave the right to the Library of Congress to archive your public tweets from 2006 on. The result... everything posted publicly by you, since then, is now owned by the government.

"An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America and to acquire collections that will have research value. So when the Library had the opportunity to acquire an archive from the popular social media service Twitter, we decided this was a collection that should be here.

In April 2010, the Library and Twitter signed an agreement providing the Library the public tweets from the company’s inception through the date of the agreement, an archive of tweets from 2006 through April 2010. Additionally, the Library and Twitter agreed that Twitter would provide all public tweets on an ongoing basis under the same terms."

FutureWatch: Data mining of your tweets by employers, attorneys, investigators, retailers, insurance companies, LOEs, ex's, and plain old creepy people.

BTW... Kevin's Security Scrapbook post headlines are Tweeted.

Infographic - NSA Interactive Spy Chart

This is a plot of the NSA programs revealed in the past year according to whether they are bulk or targeted, and whether the targets of surveillance are foreign or domestic. Most of the programs fall squarely into the agency’s stated mission of foreign surveillance, but some – particularly those that are both domestic and broad-sweeping – are more controversial.

Click to see whole chart.

Just as with the New York Magazine approval matrix that served as our inspiration, the placement of each program is based on judgments and is approximate.
For more details, read our FAQ or listen to our podcast. Also, take our quiz to test your NSA knowledge. (more)

BSI Publishes Study on Enterprise Mobile Device Security

BSI, the German Federal Office for Information Security, has published a report on "Enterprise mobile device security" (in German*) that provides a comprehensive overview on the current risks associated with the deployment of mobile devices in an enterprise context.
The report... covers Apple iOS, Google Android and Blackberry devices, taking a hard look at the current generation of hardware and software and the resulting dependencies on a limited number of key suppliers.

The study identifies key risk areas associated with the deployment of mobile devices in an enterprise context... and makes the case for doing so only in the context of a well-defined framework of organizational and technical measures that secure the enterprise against industrial espionage and other kinds of attacks. 

* An English version may be available. Ask at ESD America. 
Audio interview about Cryptophone, a high security cell phone ≈ 6 min.