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by greatpatton 832 days ago
Funny that you mention France when the USA is #1 in the world for corporate spying. Having been involved in western Europe for deal where US competitor were given "advantage", USA spying was always number one concern over all other countries (and this is how counter spying agencies brief companies) as it had more direct economic damage and is more difficult to identify than Chinese spying.

Few examples just for Airbus every few years you get report of US spying: * https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-fires-16-over-suspected-german-... * https://edition.cnn.com/video/news/2015/05/01/airbus-spying....

1 comments

The American government will spy, but will not explicitly spy to provide IP directly to a private company like Boeing or Lockheed, as this enters felony level corruption territory due to the Procurement Integrity Act, Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, and the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

The main difference is DGSE would explicitly attempt to steal American IP and then provide it to Thales or Dassault.

They may not provide direct R&D details but they will provide direct information about offers price, negotiation status etc. This is part of the Snowden leaks that people seems to have completely forgotten.

https://wikileaks.org/nsa-france/spyorder/#spyorder2

IANAL but Competitive Intel around pricing and SKUs isn't IP except in certain cases.

If they were, just about every single private sector company globally would be guilty of IP infringement, let alone Public-Private Partnerships like the ones I mentioned.

Intelligence agencies often have their own interpretation of the law, which coincidentally allows them to do what they want.

And if you don't like that, you can sue them in the special intelligence court where the evidence cannot be revealed, the proceedings are secret, and the judges are very unbiased.