United States V. Spy An Analysis of the Deterrent Effect of the Economic Espionage Act

Sarah Moore

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Coe, Richard

Keywords

Trade Secrets, Economics, Law

Area of Concentration

Economics

Abstract

As technology has changed the global marketplace and global politics focused as much on economic competition than political or military battles, information has come to be the single most important factor in determining global leadership. The Economic Espionage Act (EEA) was passed in 1996 to protect the US economy by deterring the increasing theft of proprietary information threatening US corporations� ability to compete in the global marketplace. This thesis uses Gary Becker�s economic theory of crime to determine that sentences under this law do not appear to serve as a deterrent to trade secret theft. Additionally, aggregate data from the American Society of Industrial Security concerning the annual incidences of and monetary losses due to trade secret theft is presented. While this data is inconclusive it may indicate that patterns of trade secret theft have changed since the passage of the EEA. In order to further examine deterrence related to the EEA, memoirs written by industrial spies were mined for content related to the information market. Accounts from these spies illustrate that the people caught for violating the EEA are not trained spies. Based on these accounts, it appears that intelligence professionals are highly skilled at avoiding detection and do not get caught. Further, large corporations have so much to gain from industrial spying activities that the penalties offered by the EEA are not sufficient to deter them. The study concludes that the EEA serves as a deterrent to trade secret theft by penalizing conspiracy to steal trade secrets and attempted trade secret theft and that the EEA is most effective at protecting smaller companies that do not have the budget to protect themselves through counter-intelligence measures and whose secrets are not valuable enough to risk violating the EEA.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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