there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a

there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a hurry. tl;dr - State actors make getting away with it much easier. State actors providing cover is one of the serious issues with corporate security today. I was discussing this with coworkers over a decade ago when I was consulting inside a petroleum multinational. We could all see how we could exfiltrate valuable trading data. That would have been trivial. What was anything but trivial was the notion of getting away with it afterwards. None of us would seriously consider touching that with a ten foot pole. Even back then, however, we were talking about someone with the cover of a foreign state. That lowers the bar for "getting away with it" by a large margin, primarily by reducing the time for evading detection and capture from the rest of your life to a few weeks or months. Disclosure: I'm Asian and my wife was born in China and has multiple degrees, including one PhD. She was once a foreign born Chinese academic.