Every once in a while, corporate spying stories slip into the mainstream media. Oracle, for example, recently got caught with its fingers in the trash of the Association for Competitive Technology, where it was pilfering information about the Microsoft-backed trade group.

And then there was the Time Warner broadband debacle, when the company eavesdropped on Southwestern Bell's customer representatives by paying its own employees to order and then cancel broadband service from the company.

Most of the time, corporate spying is cloaked in euphemisms. Your average corporate conglomerate may have a million-dollar budget for secret information gathering, but as the authors of "Spooked" tell us, "internal competitive intelligence departments [are] hidden from public and shareholder scrutiny, many with seemingly innocuous titles -- External Development, Market Research, and Strategic Marketing."

"Spooked" authors Penenberg, who made his name reporting on the world of hackers for Forbes, and Barry, himself a corporate spy, promise an inside look at this corporate underworld. Unfortunately, what's actually going on there isn't nearly as fascinating as the word "spying" might suggest.

"Competitive intelligence" is a growing industry, and its corporate spies are in high demand. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (basically, corporate spy central) has 7,000 members, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that $25 billion in shareholder money is lost every year in intellectual property theft. In the information age, intellectual property is money -- so is it any wonder that greedy multinationals are trying to get the dirt on what their competitors are up to?

For most of these companies, the target is data: business plans, patents, pricing lists and product details -- all readily available to the seasoned sleuth. "Spooked" describes a recent crop of former CIA agents who are now moving into corporate America to set up intelligence-gathering divisions. They're equipped with a new generation of high-tech spy tools like the answering machine pick, which steals messages off a target's machine; Raytheon's Silent Runner, which can access your enemy's e-mail; or the GPS digital tracking systems, which will track your target's location (for a mere $5,995.95).

But despite the CIA operatives and their nifty gadgets, corporate spy departments rely mainly on good old-fashioned, though stealthy, research. A Motorola spook spying on Toshiba (with which the company is considering a partnership) simply makes a lot of phone calls to analysts and suppliers who have worked with the company. The sneakiest thing he does is hire a foreign contact to have a friendly dinner with Toshiba executives and then report back on the conversation.

A corporate spy for PictureTel spied on its biggest competitor, Polycom, by going to a trade show with a fake name tag, striking up conversations with Polycom booth attendants and eavesdropping on conversations in trade-show cafeterias and airports. And then there are the "librarians," who basically do the same job as an analyst or journalist -- lots of Web research, telephone calls and reading -- but with the goal of feeding information back to executives.

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