Corporate Spying: The Next Growth Industry

economywatch.com

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.

“Our organization is not going to be controversial,”

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.

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