The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair

podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair.

That's patreon.com slash LawFair.

Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair

no bull and the aftermath.

They are not focused on collecting, analyzing or providing intelligence that is giving

our businesses some type of economic advantage.

This is not to say that law enforcement or intelligence organizations don't sometimes

provide information to businesses about threats, but that's done to protect against known

or suspected illicit activity targeting a particular company or group of companies.

That information is not given by the government, at least in my experience, to give it an

economic advantage. It's given to protect it from the serious activity.

I'm Quinteduressic and this is the LawFair podcast December 1st, 2020. American companies are

in a bind. So argue Bill Priestap and Holden Treplet who have written a series of articles

for LawFair making the case that more and more state intelligence agencies are turning

their attention to private businesses, using the tools of espionage in order to build their

own economic power. Both writers are speaking from experience.

Priestap ran the FBI's counterintelligence division from 2015 to 2018 and Treplet led the

FBI office in Beijing from 2014 to 2017 and was deputed ahead of the office in Moscow

from 2012 to 2014. We brought them on the podcast to discuss why countries have started

to use their intelligence services in this way, what dangers this creates from American

businesses, and why counterintelligence risks might be hard to intuitively understand.

...