[luckylion]

> Nothing wrong with the goal of advancing ones local industries. Competition is good, but only if it's fair.

Are you suggesting it's unfair to have a National Security Agency with the explicit goal of industrial espionage to help domestic companies?

Let's not pretend that the US doesn't do that, please.

[sterlind]

I always assumed the NSA only did industrial espionage for the defense sector.. but it would make sense for them to steal e.g. foundry processes to hand to Intel. How's the hand-off work? How do they keep the (Chinese-American) engineers from realizing where the ideas come from?

It makes strategic sense to do industrial espionage but there's so many ways it can go wrong.

[luckylion]

I don't know how they'd proceed after exfil, but I'm sure we can come up with lots of interesting ways to hide the origin of tech/IP.

Snowden mentioned more on NSA industrial espionage in an interview with German state-owned TV, but they didn't provide a lot of details. There was also quite a bit on NSA operations spying on all French companies that are active in IT/telecommunications, energy/power, natural resources, logistics, health care/biotech etc, so pretty much anything but how to make baguettes.