Be on Your Guard When on Road, Experts Warn

The walls really do have ears.

That’s the message America’s top spy agencies are sending to U.S. businesspeople these days, especially those who take trade secrets on the road.

“As a U.S. business traveler, you can be the target of a foreign intelligence or security service any time, anywhere,” the National Counterintelligence Center states in a recent newsletter (their Web site is https://www.nacic.gov). “As you travel overseas, the risk of being an intelligence target increases.” The NACIC consists of counterintelligence professionals from 13 U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA, FBI and NSA.

Other counterespionage experts agree. Peter E. Ohlhausen, president of the Annandale, Va., security and criminal justice research firm of Ohlhausen Research Inc., warns that proprietary information is most vulnerable when the person possessing it is on the move.

“At the office, you can set up all kinds of systems to protect information,” he says. “But when you’re traveling, you’ve let your guard down in a lot of ways.”

Spying in the Information Age takes many forms, including wired hotel rooms, intercepted fax and e-mail transmissions, recorded telephone calls, theft of hardware and unauthorized downloads.

“They break into hotel rooms, go through briefcases. They pull luggage off the line,” says William DeGenaro, a former director of strategic countermeasures planning within the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Counterintelligence and Security. He now runs his own consulting firm in Sarasota, Fla., that specializes in competitive intelligence (the legal sister of counterintelligence). “Everything you’ve ever read in a spy story has been implemented in this industrial game,” DeGenaro says.

If all this sounds a little farfetched, consider a former chief of the French intelligence agency DSGE recently disclosed that it at one time bugged the first-class cabins of Air France jets and substituted spies for flight attendants specifically to eavesdrop on traveling U.S. executives.

A favored tactic for industrial spies is to attend trade shows and ask lots of good questions, says James Pooley, a California intellectual-property lawyer and the author of the book “Trade Secrets.”

“If you’re a salesperson, it’s your natural tendency to want to get people excited about your company and its products,” says Pooley of the Silicon Valley-based law firm of Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich. “That puts you in a particularly vulnerable position when it comes to protecting yourself from people who pretend to be interested as customers but who are actually trying to gather information on behalf of the competition.”

Leonard Fuld, president of the Cambridge, Mass., intelligence firm Fuld & Co., estimates that one in every 50 people attending a trade show is there specifically to gather intelligence.

“I know a technologist who regularly attends scientific conferences in her field,” Fuld says. “By diligently listening to the technical experts present their papers, she can learn about a competitor’s new product development efforts.”

Pooley advises business travelers to place limits on their shop talk before they attend a trade show or technical conference so they don’t accidentally disclose proprietary information. “You don’t need to be paranoid to be prudent,” he says.

Prudence is something that apparently fails with altitude. Pooley knows people who justify first-class bookings on the so-called Nerd Bird flights between the high-tech hubs of San Jose and Boston and San Jose and Austin, Texas, solely because of what they might see or overhear. A case in point: A few years ago, Howard Kendall was about halfway through American Airlines Flight 128 from San Jose to Boston when he reached down for his briefcase. The then-vice president of eastern sales for Seagate Technology was amazed to find, quite literally at his feet, a rival company’s business plan. Kendall read the entire report before pushing it back under the seat in front of him.

Few espionage agents are so fortunate as to get proprietary information placed at their feet. Instead, they have to do things such as stealing laptop computers--”the keys to the kingdom,” as Darren J. Donovan puts it. The vice president of Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations in Manhattan notes that portable computers used by businesspeople these days often contain the access numbers for their companies’ intranet system. With those numbers, the laptop can serve as a doorway to the mainframe.

A recent survey of U.S. corporate security directors showed that 150 of the 521 respondents reported laptop thefts during the previous 12 months. Moreover, the survey, which was conducted by the FBI and the private Computer Security Institute in San Francisco, found that 62% reported computer security breaches during 1998 despite increased use of firewalls, encryption and digital IDs. The number of intrusions is likely to rise, experts say, because data thieves are leaving fewer footprints.

“It’s gotten to such a sophisticated level that people will steal the information off your laptop, keep the original copy, then alter it and leave you with the corrupted copy,” says Donovan. “So you’re walking around thinking you have your information--your formulas, your Excel spreadsheets . . . and you don’t.”

And the thief won’t have any trouble finding a buyer, say intelligence experts.

“People do put bounties on the laptops of CEOs, technologists and people who are carrying around corporate trade secrets that can result in billions of dollars in business,” says Richard Power, author of the FBI/CSI study. “That threat exists. People’s laptops are targeted.”

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Perhaps nowhere is there more evidence of that than at the San Jose and San Francisco airports, which serve Silicon Valley. Despite the presence of uniformed and plainclothes police officers, thieves make off with one laptop a week from the San Francisco airport, says Lt. William Gitmed, who heads SFPD’s Special Services unit at SFO.

At the San Jose airport, even the most conscientious business travelers are separated from their computer. A common scam involves two thieves: One passes through the security checkpoint ahead of their target. When the target places a laptop on the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt, a second thief carrying lots of keys and other metal objects cuts in front and enters the metal detector. While the second thief slowly empties his pockets, preventing the target from clearing security, the first thief makes off with the laptop.

Capt. Phil Beltran, who heads SJPD’s station at San Jose International, says the tactic is so common that a police training film has been made from surveillance tapes of thieves working the scam.

“People don’t think they’re a target to lose their laptop,” Beltran says. “But . . . that’s a mistake. Sometimes people go into the bathroom, they prop their stuff by the closed stall door, someone will walk in and wait until the victim is in a very compromising position, grab the stuff and they’re gone even before the victim can pull their pants back on.”

Comments or questions can be sent to global.savvy@latimes.com.

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Don’t Be an Easy Target

Common sense and counterintelligence awareness can stave off most industrial spies. Government and private security analysts encourage business travelers to take these precautions:

* Arrange a pre-travel briefing from your corporate security office.

* Maintain control of sensitive documents or equipment. Do not leave such items unattended in hotel rooms or stored in hotel safes.

* Limit sensitive discussions. Public venues are rarely suitable to discuss sensitive information.

* Do not use computer or facsimile equipment at foreign hotels or business centers for sensitive matters.

* Ignore or deflect intrusive inquiries or conversation about business or personal matters.

* Keep unwanted business material until it can be disposed of securely. Burn or shred paper and cut floppy disks in pieces and discard.

* Keep your personal computer as carry-on baggage. Never check it with other luggage and, if possible, remove or control data storage media.

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Be Advised

Businesspeople traveling overseas during the next month should be aware of the following:

Bangladesh

* Sept. 19: Nationwide general strike scheduled; such strikes usually paralyze the country because people refuse to work due to activists’ threats of violence against strikebreakers.

Chile

* Sept. 19: Armed Forces Day; demonstrations, ultra-leftist attacks against armed forces possible.

* Sept. 27: Augusto Pinochet’s extradition trial in London resumes; unrest expected in Santiago.

* Oct. 5: Anniversary of the 1987 founding of FRPL, a faction of rebel group FPMR; propaganda protests likely; token attacks on U.S. symbols (such as Mormon churches), security forces possible.

India

* Sept. 18, 25 and Oct. 3: General elections scheduled; nonessential travel during the election period ill-advised due to the likelihood of civil disorder.

Israel, Gaza and the West Bank

* Sept. 28: Anniversary of the Israeli-PLO peace pact extending Palestinian self-rule across the West Bank; Palestinian protests likely in the West Bank, Gaza.

Peru

* Sept. 17: Hundreds of Peruvian rail workers scheduled to be laid off on this day; likely disruption of rail service to the ancient mountain citadel of Machu Picchu.

* Oct. 4: Shining Path “prisoner of war” day; terrorists may mark the date with violence.

Philippines

* Sept. 21: Huge rally in Manila scheduled to mark the anniversary of declaration of martial law under the regime of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Russia

* Oct. 3-4: Anniversary of the abortive conservative uprising and the army clampdown in 1993; demonstrations likely in and around Moscow.

Yugoslavia

* Sept. 21: Visitors are advised to avoid protests planned by opposition factions across the country.

Note: Be Advised will appear monthly.

Sources: Control Risks Group, Kroll Associates, Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services

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To Our Readers

Starting today, The Times inaugurates a weekly feature on doing business in the international marketplace. “Global Savvy” will appear each Monday in the Business section and will explore topics ranging from safety and security on the road to real stories of success, mistakes and lessons around the globe. Readers with suggestions or questions may reach us at global.savvy@latimes.com./p>