An open-source overview of the technical intelligence collection threat in Asia

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, April-June, 2004 by Wade C. Wilson

Japan and South Korea have a completely different perspective for monitoring foreigners' business in their hotels--economic espionage. U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Michael B. Smith, noted that Japan permanently bugged and monitored entire floors of many prominent hotels and that "Nobody in his right mind would make a telephone call [from a hotel in Tokyo]." Rather, "if you wanted to talk about something sensitive, you always went outside" because "They can't bug the parks." (6) In a classic example of Japanese hotel bugging, a U.S. telecommunications company executive traveled to Japan to test his company's prototype scrambler telephone. He plugged the telephone into the hotel room's telephone jack and two hours later, "a very polite but insistent serviceman from the telephone company appeared, unsolicited, at his door." Their conversation went something like this:

Serviceman: "There is something wrong with your telephone."

U.S. Businessman: "No, it works fine." Serviceman: "But we cannot understand what you are saying."

U.S. Businessman: "That is the point." Serviceman: "It is not compatible with Japanese standards." (7)

The fact that technical collection is as commonplace in Japan as in any other country on Earth should not come as a shock. Japan does not have a national intelligence service per se, because every Japanese business executive is an ad hoc collector for the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, an economic intelligence clearinghouse that assembles and distributes intelligence to the companies that could most benefit from it. The Japanese even built an industrial espionage school, the Institute for Industrial Protection, with government money to teach businesspersons the art of spying. (8) It is therefore unsurprising that Japanese hotels might cooperate with their government's efforts to keep tabs on all foreign guests for the "good" of the nation. Foreign businesses should likewise consider every telephone in their buildings and personal residences actively tapped by the telephone company as it would be highly unlikely that the only economic espionage targets of interest in Japan would be of those persons temporarily residing in a downtown hotel. After all, a Japanese auto-maker would be interested in the preliminary plans of U.S. American auto dealerships in Japan; there are hundreds of other similar scenarios.

Certainly, the fact of businesses bugging other businesses is an everyday matter in Japan, where neither the perpetrator nor the target might necessarily be foreign. In fact, politicians use the services of private investigative agencies to place bugs in strategic locations to collect on their political rivals, as do smaller businesses and domestic dispute clients. (9) On the other hand, if the person is so inclined, he could just as easily purchase a bugging device himself in the Akihabara electronic district in Tokyo where a plethora of different devices and how-to manuals are available. These Japanese-made devices, as well as Taiwan-made devices, find their way to similar electronics markets throughout Asia including South Korea and Thailand. Such clandestine surveillance devices are illegal to import into the United States--although there are numerous loopholes that spy and electronics shops in the United States are able to use to offer similar items for sale. In Asia, however, the limitations on importation and use are virtually nonexistent. Amazingly, an international air traveler will likely have a harder time importing and exporting commercial radio equipment (amateur "ham" radio, citizen's band [CB], etc.) from an Asian country than carrying illicit listening devices through customs and security checkpoints.