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When most Americans think of espionage, we think of debonair foreign spies sneaking around military compounds – or bespectacled hackers hammering away at keyboards to steal top secret information from foreign adversaries.
But there is an entire world of espionage happening right under our noses – at American colleges and universities.
Foreign intelligence services routinely probe computer systems at US higher education institutions – and they also enlist (or implant) students and professors as assets to pass important research and findings to their spy agencies.
The main goal isn’t typically to learn any classified state secrets (not in academic espionage anyway). Foreign actors want to steal the important technological advancements, research, and innovations being created by our nation’s best and brightest researchers and scientists.
Back in 2013, the Commission on the Theft of Intellectual Property said that this academic espionage made up a significant part of the estimated $300 billion of intellectual property theft America endured that year. According to the commission, “American scientific innovations and new technologies are tracked and stolen from American universities, national laboratories, private think tanks, and start-up companies, as well as from the major R&D centers of multinational companies.”
This is a serious problem for the United States. If this level of academic espionage continues, our ability to lead the world in innovation and new technology could be severely hampered – and the future could be defined by the countries who are stealing our ideas.
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