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From: Patricia Neill <pnpj@db1.cc.rochester.edu>
Subject: IP: EPA: Providing a bonus for snoops and spies
To: jad@locust.etext.org
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>From Forbes Magazine, Oct. 20, 1997

http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/97/1020/6009176a.htm


Providing a bonus for snoops and spies 

 By Pranay Gupte and Bonner R. Cohen 

 IN ITS ZEAL to impose its severe standards on U.S.
 industry, the Environmental Protection Agency may
 unwittingly have opened American companies to industrial
 espionage.

 Since taking office in 1993, Carol Browner has spearheaded a
 Clinton Administration drive to expand the so-called toxic
 release inventory. TRI is a compilation of the chemical
 emissions from manufacturing operations of 26,000 U.S.
 companies. Under Browner, the number of the kinds of
 chemicals that must be reported has doubled to more than
 600. 

 Now, the EPA wants even more numbers. It wants to get
 detailed and sensitive production information, including the
 quantity of raw material inventories, the quantity of materials
 and product produced at specific manufacturing facilities, and
 the quantity of raw, intermediate and finished materials and
 products that these facilities ship off-site. 

 All of this is to be posted on the Internet for easy
 "community" access. 

 The Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) is
 understandably none too happy. In a just-released report, it
 calls this sort of information the bits and pieces that spies
 string together to "reveal some of a company's most important
 and valuable production secrets." 

 In 1995 the trade association commissioned Kline & Co., a
 member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence
 Professionals, to determine what information a foreign
 competitor could glean about a U.S. company based both on
 current TRI reporting requirements and on EPA's proposed
 expansion. Its conclusion: Foreigners would gain access to
 information that in wartime would be "the equivalent of
 having the U.S. voluntarily turn over its code book to its
 enemies." 

 It's one more example of how the EPA rides roughshod over
 business in the name of protecting children. -P.G. and B.R.C. 



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