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The Return of Industrial Espionage and the Building

Powerful men fall like flies because of their inability to violate their authority, it is clear that the problem is widespread. Similarly, it is possible that we will find that the problem of alleged industrial espionage is not limited to Uber. You see, when people misuse authority – and the problem of sexual harassment is a major misuse of authority – people usually don’t abuse it in one area.

For some time, I have suspected that harassment issues were just one aspect of a larger problem. The accusations that Uber aggressively made to steal intellectual property from Google and cover up the evidence of theft may be indicative of another area in which officials are abusing their authority.

Instead of waiting for the next scam on the surface, I figured it would be interesting (since I am a pre-internal auditor who has been through a cycle like this before) to look at other areas where we are likely to find an officer. Others who claim authority will continue to do malicious work. I’ll close with my product of the week: one of the few security offerings, which can prevent against a significant amount of this unethical behavior, Varonis.

connecting the dots

One of the reasons that sexual harassment claims seem to be out of control is that human resource departments are doing more to cover such problems than to fix them.

This is largely because HR has the responsibility to address such problems, but currently it does not have the authority to justify the executive’s behavior. Even if it were possible, it is likely that the career of a poor HR person taking such action would end.

HR is hardly alone in losing its right to work. Whenever you have a mismatch of authority and responsibility, you have a crucible for wrongdoing. Currently, a lot of employee organizations – such as security, human resources, and internal audits – should have very low employee standards that I expect are a lot of companies that are as clueless as they are bleeding as Google.

Industrial espionage

The last time I saw the rise of industrial espionage was in the early 1980s, when many Japanese technology firms took illegal steps to try to better compete with IBM. They were caught, and the monetary costs in terms of damages and penalties were massive – so much so that it erased the practice mostly outside of government-sponsored efforts from countries such as China, North Korea and Russia.

Over time, security organizations were once staffed and missioned to capture and prevent such activity. They were run by X-Spooks (originally experts in catching or spying) hourly employees who, in a lot of cases, could not even be hired as a beat cop.

There is a lot of money in selling intellectual property. There is a huge advantage, if you can catch it, in terms of accomplishing your objectives, moving forward and getting a big bonus. Incentives are massive. State-level players are again active with more resources and cyber capabilities, with a ton of staff who have not seen any growth since Carter became president.

Misuse of expenditure

We have seen a sign of this in the new Trump administration. Some members of his cabinet abused spending policies in a big way and either used government jets improperly or booked seats on large amounts of private jets.

These were considered isolated cases, but those involved came out of the private sector, and such behavior is commonly learned. It is very likely that this practice of misuse of expense accounts and company assets has come from firms where they were working before joining the Trump administration.

This suggests that these practices are widespread, but because internal audits are disregarded, unlike government audits, it is yet to be caught. A lot of it has been done with sexual harassment, I hope all we are waiting for is the right post to be picked up by a reporter on social media, and suddenly we will have another wave of firing, and expense abuses. The likelihood will be far and wide from incidents of sexual harassment.

Wrapping Up: Power Abuse

The key element in all this is the misuse of power. Whether we are talking about jail guards or officers, there are many people who do not do well when given electricity. Their boundaries do not work, and the result is that they push the envelopes until a catastrophe occurs and they are fired.

There should be control and monitoring to offset this behavior, but it is fairly clear that the controls that are currently in place in many firms and government agencies are not functioning. When we are focused on sexual harassment, we are likely missing other bad behaviors – such as selling company assets or misusing expenses – that go with abuse of power.

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