THREAT REPORTS
COMPANIES CHARGED WITH ESPIONAGE
Thoughts of espionage often conjure up in one’s mind images of shadowy government agencies stealing documents, tapping phones, compromising individuals, or using the Internet to gain information about other nations – both foe and ally alike, and, while it is true that such activities do occur, occur often, and will continue to occur in the future, there are other forms of espionage that are also significant threats to the public. Corporate espionage is one such threat. Corporate espionage involves either other companies – foreign or domestic – or other countries illegally acquiring competitive information – such as trade secrets, customer lists, pricing lists, etc. – and subsequently using such information to gain an advantage over the victim in a given market. It should be noted that this is different from competitive intelligence which is a legal practice that involves using legitimate methods to acquire an understanding about a competitor so that one’s company is better equipped to succeed in a market; furthermore, although already mentioned, it is significant that corporate espionage is not simply an activity that companies engage in against one another. Rather, some nations – especially those with significant state-owned enterprises – have been credibly accused of engaging in corporate espionage against the foreign competitors of so-called national champions.
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USING DRONES TO FIGHT CRIME
Drones are, increasingly, becoming an everyday facet of modern life. They are being used to combat terrorism, they used as personal entertainment – indeed, one can readily purchase one online or at a store, and they are being used to provide services to individuals – e.g., Amazon’s ongoing experimentation with deliveries via drones through their Prime service. Those areas, however, are not exhaustive. Both within the United States and abroad, drones are increasingly being used by law enforcement to more efficiently and effectively discharge their duties.
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Corruption around the world // 2018
For as long as there have been institutions and governance of any significant scale, corruption has existed. Nevertheless, while the existence of corruption is universal, the scale of corruption varies amongst societies and, notably, the perception of levels of corruption vary amongst different countries – i.e., some countries are perceived to have very little or virtually no corruption; whereas, in some other countries, corruption is assumed to be endemic. The non-governmental organization (NGO) Transparency International, yearly, publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) an index of countries that are rated by how corrupt they are perceived to be. Investopedia describes the CPI as a scoring mechanism – a score of 0 indicating extremely high levels of corruption and a score of 100 indicating low levels.
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