In the first article in this series, I reviewed some of the information in the annual reports of the National Counterintelligence Center, or NACIC, which later became the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, or ONCIX. Here I continue with additional methods of industrial espionage from later research.

The 2000 NACIC report added these methods:
* Requesting information through e-mail or letters, including apparent responses to advertising or trade show exhibits.
* Exploiting Internet discussion groups, especially research-oriented list servers.

A survey organized by NACIC among about a dozen Fortune 500 company officers extended the list of industrial espionage methods with the following approaches:
* Breaking away from tour groups.
* Attempting access after normal working hours.
* Supplying different personnel at the last minute for agreed-upon projects.
* Stealing laptops.
* Customs holding laptops for a period of time.
* Social gatherings.
* Dumpster diving (searching through trash and discarded materials).
* Intercepting non-encrypted Internet messages.

I want to make it clear that the NACIC/ONCIX authors and I as a writer reporting on their findings are _not_ implying that foreign nationals and foreign-born citizens in this country are inherently threats to national security. The vast majority of such people - and I am one myself, having been born in Canada and having been granted U.S. citizenship in July of this year - are honest, loyal people who have never done anything against the interests of our country.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2004, there were more than 34 million foreign-born residents out of a total population estimated at over 293 million. So even if we guessed there were a thousand foreign-born spies (a high estimate for which there is no factual basis whatsoever), that number would represent a mere 0.003% of the foreign-born population - leaving 99.997% as unworthy of suspicion. So the next time someone tries to convince you that purely ethnic profiling divorced from any study of individual behavior is a good idea for law enforcement and national security, do a similar calculation with them and calculate the costs of resources wasted on false positives.

The NACIC/ONCIX reports are clear on the threat from purely domestic, all-American citizens:

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, is Program Director of the Master of Science in Information Assurance program at Norwich University.