The best-kept secret in the world of theft is economic espionage. According to the recent Annual Report to Congress on Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage, American companies lose $300 billion a year to economic espionage. This is equivalent to losing a company the size of General Electric each and every year. That makes economic espionage the most successful form of theft in America. Yet hardly anyone talks about economic espionage, and still fewer do anything about it. It is like some dirty little family secret about which everyone pretends to know nothing. Only it really isn’t little; and it really isn’t secret.

Economic espionage is so wildly successful because protection of intellectual assets is simply ignored. The government is otherwise occupied, and virtually no corporation has anyone tasked with protecting intellectual assets from espionage. Indeed, most corporations have never done an audit of intellectual assets other than trade secrets. They don’t know what needs to be protected, let alone how. This is puzzling in a country where 70 percent of a company’s value lies in its intellectual property.