This, he says, is one of the best reasons to hire a CI firm to collect intelligence. While an engineer at GM, for instance, might not talk about management structure or new engine designs to someone calling from Ford, there's a better chance that he or she would speak to a researcher from a firm with the innocuous name of Aurora Worldwide Development.
There are those, however, for whom the difference between telephone elicitation and outright spying may seem cloudy, and popular culture doesn't make such distinctions any easier. In March 2002, for instance, TIME ran a pair of articles on CI, one of which, to the dismay of Johnson and his colleagues in SCIP, was titled "Spies Like Us."
"The trouble," explains Michael Sandman, a vice president for the CI firm Fuld and Company, "is that spying is more glamorous [than legitimate CI], and to many people, it seems less reprehensible."