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is this level of industrial/scientific espionage even a critical factor in our current world Yes. It completely bankrupted and destroyed the Canadian company N

is this level of industrial/scientific espionage even a critical factor in our current world Yes. It completely bankrupted and destroyed the Canadian company Nortel [1]. Sure there were other problems that led to the downfall of Nortel, but this was a major contributing factor and has had a big impact on the Canadian tech ecosystem. https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-military-attack-on-nortel/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...

boomboomsubban 5y ago
So in the years before this hack, Nortel had already laid off more than 2/3rds of it's workforce, received a massive government bailout, and had top execs like their CEO fired for an "accounting mistake" that cost billions. "Other problems" is an understatement.
chalst 5y ago
That story revolves around Brian Shields's account, which, while I don't doubt the details, I think lacks the business perspective and doesn't really explain Nortel's demise. Nortel was maximising growth during the the dot-com boom, spending heavily on acquisitions and not paying attention to its profitability. It couldn't have been worse placed to handle the dot-com bust when its main market shrunk hugely. Huawei and ZTE were not really major competitors internationally at the time.
DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
It's dismaying to see history rewritten so brazenly. Nortel collapsed because it made bad investments during the tech bubble, and then was hit by the nosedive in investment in network expansion when the bubble burst. On top of that, Nortel was terribly led, resorted to fudging its finances, and got caught. That's what caused Nortel to collapse, not supposed Chinese spying. Huawei, the alleged beneficiary of the spying (which is just an unproven allegation at this point), was not even a major rival to Nortel when Nortel began to collapse. Huawei had barely even begun to expand out of China at that point. Nortel had much larger international competitors. Yet somehow, almost two decades after Nortel began to implode, a rewritten history of Nortel's collapse, somehow premised on Chinese spying, has begun to become popular. I think this has much more to do with the recent increase in tensions between China and Canada than with any new information about how Nortel went under.
908B64B197 5y ago
This shouldn't be a surprise. The Avro airplane was similarly infiltrated by soviet spies back in the 50's, thanks to lax immigration standards and policies. The thing is that, while Nortel was pretty much an open bar for technology transfers (Canada didn't seem to care), what killed the company was accounting fraud.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

So in the years before this hack, Nortel had already laid off more than 2/3rds of it's workforce, received a massive government bailout, and had top execs like their CEO fired for an "accounting mistake" that cost billions. "Other problems" is an understatement.

chalst 5y ago

That story revolves around Brian Shields's account, which, while I don't doubt the details, I think lacks the business perspective and doesn't really explain Nortel's demise. Nortel was maximising growth during the the dot-com boom, spending heavily on acquisitions and not paying attention to its profitability. It couldn't have been worse placed to handle the dot-com bust when its main market shrunk hugely. Huawei and ZTE were not really major competitors internationally at the time.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago

It's dismaying to see history rewritten so brazenly. Nortel collapsed because it made bad investments during the tech bubble, and then was hit by the nosedive in investment in network expansion when the bubble burst. On top of that, Nortel was terribly led, resorted to fudging its finances, and got caught. That's what caused Nortel to collapse, not supposed Chinese spying. Huawei, the alleged beneficiary of the spying (which is just an unproven allegation at this point), was not even a major rival to Nortel when Nortel began to collapse. Huawei had barely even begun to expand out of China at that point. Nortel had much larger international competitors. Yet somehow, almost two decades after Nortel began to implode, a rewritten history of Nortel's collapse, somehow premised on Chinese spying, has begun to become popular. I think this has much more to do with the recent increase in tensions between China and Canada than with any new information about how Nortel went under.

908B64B197 5y ago

This shouldn't be a surprise. The Avro airplane was similarly infiltrated by soviet spies back in the 50's, thanks to lax immigration standards and policies. The thing is that, while Nortel was pretty much an open bar for technology transfers (Canada didn't seem to care), what killed the company was accounting fraud.