In Depth

Nation States' Espionage and Counterespionage

An overview of the 2007 Global Economic Espionage Landscape

By Christopher Burgess

FBI's Domain program includes:

• "Business Alliance"—focused efforts involving U.S. government contractors who have U.S. government security clearances in the provision of counterintelligence awareness and sharing of "actionable intelligence" that will increase the ability of the contractor to better protect their own intellectual property.
• "Academic Alliance"—this portion of the program has two distinct components:
• "National Security Higher Education Advisory Board"—presidents and chancellors from public and private research institutions constitute the board, which meets with regularity and provides a forum for FBI leadership and academia to discuss national security issues.
• "The College and University Security Effort"—The Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the regional FBI office engages the heads of local colleges and universities for national security discussions, to include threats the institutions may be facing. In addition, the program provides counterintelligence protection via explanation of how foreign services may wish to steal the college or university's intellectual property.
• "Counterintelligence Working Groups"—this effort is divided into two working groups:
• National Counterintelligence Working Group, designed "to establish strategic interagency partnerships at the senior executive level among the United States Intelligence Community (USIC), academia, industry, and defense contractors."
• Regional Counterintelligence Working Group, a government-only group. "U.S.government counterintelligence entities that meet and discuss counterintelligence strategies, initiatives, operations, and best practices pertaining to the counterintelligence mission."
• Research and Technology Protection Special Interest Group—the follow-on to the previously sponsored and supported "Infragard" (Infrastructure Guard), an alliance between the FBI and the public dedicated to preventing physical and electronic attacks against our nation's critical infrastructure.

Interestingly, Mahlik's comments and the focus of the various parts of the Domain program seem to advocate that companies shoulder their own counterintelligence needs, with respect to protecting themselves from the nation-state threat, albeit with the expectation that the enterprises have a counterintelligence function as an integral part of their asset protection strategy and are ready and willing to work with the FBI to protect these assets. Mahlik noted that the means by which intellectual property exits enterprises has evolved. "This isn't about traditional spies anymore; the engineer, student, or business partner are the threat now, and these people are being given increased access to corporate secrets, intellectual property and pre-patent research information at universities," Mahlik said. "These types of people are being actively used to exfiltrate key pieces of information back to their homelands, as there is always a race to establish a competitive advantage."

Couple the messages coming from the FBI, the DOJ and the U.S.'s national counterintelligence executive, and the message is consistent: The threat is an insider threat, i.e. from an individual allowed inside the environment being protected by technology, policy and procedures.

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