Stealing property from across the Globe A security guard may vigilantly patrol a company’s premises afterhours, checking every room and watching all the camera footage to safeguard his company, but major threats to the companies property may still be in danger from sources that aren’t even on the same continent. Due to the intertwined networks that makeup the functional framework of most business these days, more and more companies find themselves at risk of losing assets to overseas thieves. The article I read from The New York Times was titled U.S. Accuses Six Chinese Citizens of Stealing Tech Data. It concerned the recent case of, as descried in the title, six People’s Republic of China citizens who are being accused, under a law that is only rarely used, of stealing the intellectual property of a Silicon Valley based firm, namely the design for a chip that is used in the manufacturing of cell phones. The men in question held jobs in the United States for an extended duration and then following their time in the states, started to manufacture chips in China, selling and distributing them using the technology and trade secrets they learned during their time in Silicon Valley. The State Department is looking into this situation, however, even though they know who is responsible, guilty verdicts with actual prison sentences served are not the usual outcome due to the nature of US relations with the People’s Republic of China. This emphasizes one of the largest concerns with this type of theft on an international scale, technology, and the thieving of technology, is progressing faster than many of our foreign policies allow for. In the United States we are able to prosecute guilty parties for cybercrimes and stolen technology, but we do not have a similar control over all of the individuals we are sharing the Internet with. To a great extent the tool of technology, like other tools such as the tractor for farmers or missiles for armies, allows for a leveling of the playing field as it concerns accessibility to materials and concepts worth stealing. Although this case happens to have dealt mainly with corporate insiders stealing tech data, other data is often stolen through less direct means thanks to the access to the world’s resources and information provided by the internet. This can lead to complications for companies that do business internationally. If a company did business with the Chinese company that stole the intellectual data then they are supporting its theft and participating in unsavory business. For tech companies this will inevitably lead to increasingly rigorous hiring practices and exit contracts for their employees, having a big impact on the ways companies must develop to deal with their employees. The theft of the technical information does not just have an impact on the tech field, it also has an impact on the government’s actions to protect the company’s intellectual property and will likely result in widespread changes to employee policies and the ways employees are handled in the future. The concerns about similar troubled in the future only serve to underlie the ways in which international markets are still highly influenced by the country of origin, with the United States powerless to take action against the theft if China does feel like being cooperative. This kind of issue is likely to become more and more relevant as the international market continues to expand, and corporate spies from more and more countries all try to steal what they could not come up with themselves.