Tough economic times increase security risks

Stratfor:

"Things are tough all over, and this financial strain will create some large security problems for corporations and governments....

...The current financial crisis — and vulnerability to espionage — is not just confined to the private sector. There are many federal government employees in the United States who have watched their investments in the stock-based funds of the government’s Thrift Savings Plan wither on the vine over the past two years, and judging from the performance of foreign stock exchanges, the investments of employees in other governments have followed suit. Additionally, government employees tend to live in places with very expensive real estate, like Washington, London, Paris and Tokyo. This means that a foreign intelligence officer armed only with a briefcase full of dollars, euros or yen can make a killing. With many corporate security departments being cut to the bone, many internal security services focused on the counterterrorism mission and many law enforcement agencies chasing white-collar criminals, it is a good time to be in the intelligence business.

One day we will look back on this time through a counterintelligence lens and see that, although it was a time of bear stock markets, it was a tremendous bull market for practitioners of human intelligence."