Corporate Spying: The Next Growth Industry

 

The corporate spying business is booming. The largest companies around the world are all involved in “competitive intelligence gathering” by highly trained professionals according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“Corporations have people trained to obtain raw data from a wide range of sources and apply traditional intelligence analysis techniques to produce usable information,” PwC dispute analysis and investigations director Richard Batten said.

 

The corporate spying business is booming. The largest companies around the world are all involved in “competitive intelligence gathering” by highly trained professionals according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“Corporations have people trained to obtain raw data from a wide range of sources and apply traditional intelligence analysis techniques to produce usable information,” PwC dispute analysis and investigations director Richard Batten said.

In a story from Wired:

Veterans from the most infamous private security firm on Earth and one of the military’s most controversial datamining operations are teaming up to provide the Fortune 500 with their own private spies – who call themselves Jellyfish.

Jellyfish is about corporate-information dominance. It swears it’s leaving all the spy-world baggage behind. No guns, no governments digging through private records of its citizens.

[quote]“Our organization is not going to be controversial,” [/quote]pledges Keith Mahoney, the Jellyfish CEO, a former Navy officer and senior executive with Blackwater’s intelligence arm, Total Intelligence Solutions.

During a Thursday press conference in Washington that served as a coming-out party for the company, Jellyfish’s executives described an all-purpose “private-sector intelligence” firm.

What’s that mean? Through a mouthful of corporate-speak (“empowering the C-suite” to make crucial decisions) Mahoney describes a worldwide intelligence network of contacts, ready to collect data on global hot spots that Jellyfish can pitch to deep-pocketed clients. Does your energy firm need to know if Iran will fall victim to the next Mideast uprising? Jellyfish’s informants in Tehran can give a picture.

If you’re in maritime shipping, for instance, Jellyfish can build you a search-and-aggregation app, operating up in the cloud, that can put together weather patterns with Jellyfish contacts in Somalia who know about piracy.

Of course, there’s a security element to all of this, too. Jellyfish will train your staff in network security, as well as “physical security,” Yorio says. But Mahoney quickly adds, “Jellyfish Intelligence has no interest in guns and gates and guards.”

But is it legal? Corporate Intelligence firms insist their methods are totally legitimate. Surely, we haven’t heard the last of corporate spying.