Here is an example:
Who: NSA, What: Wind wheel for electricity generation, developed by Aloys Wobben, an engineer from East Frisia, Aim: Forwarding of technical details of Wobben's wind wheel to a US firm, Consequences: US firm patents the wind wheel before Wobben; (breach of patent rights)
Sounds exactly like "stealing trade secrets and giving them to a domestic company" to me.
Basically, the French government selectively leaked to a New Zealand journalist, to justify retaliation (tariffs at the EU level, which never materialized) against the US government for burning their Saudi deal.
There has never been any credible evidence that US intelligence agencies pass trade secrets to American companies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#Patent_dispute "the patent in question was registered in 1991, three years before the alleged espionage event"
what does any of this mean ????
Is it all basically posturing and everyone is stealing secrets from everyone whenever anyone can ???
I mean... does this just mean that the US is the only country that actually sued anyone for it ? I mean... even though we do the same thing too as anon1385 pointed out?
To be fair, I do agree with you.
What ?
We've known that the NSA was engaging in corporate espionage on behalf of American corporations for a long time now and the American government doesn't even deny it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/820758.stm (from 2000)
>The journalist, who has spent much of his life investigating Echelon, has offered two alleged instances of US snooping in the 1990s, which he says followed the newly-elected Clinton administration's policy of "aggressive advocacy" for US firms bidding for foreign contracts. The first came from a Baltimore Sun report which said the European consortium Airbus lost a $6bn contract with Saudi Arabia after NSA found Airbus officials were offering kickbacks to a Saudi official. The paper said the agency "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information. Mr Campbell also alleges that the US firm Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF.
>former CIA director James Woolsey, in an article in March for the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that the US did conduct economic espionage against its European allies, though he did not specify if Echelon was involved.