There are spies among us. Yawn

The stories in "Spooked" just aren't sexy enough. Corporate theft -- at least as described here -- appears to lack any of the intrigue or drama that you would normally associate with spying. There are no miniature cameras, no disguises, midnight break-ins or Bondian gadgetry. And while it's interesting to learn exactly how companies do their surreptitious research (one particularly fun passage describes how a frozen pizza company called Schwan's dug up information about Kraft's rising-dough crust factory), most corporate intelligence gathering doesn't make for scintillating reading.

Barry and Penenberg seem to realize this, so they structure the book around one of the more sensational episodes in the history of corporate spying: Avery Dennison's lengthy lawsuit against Four Pillars Enterprises, a Taiwanese company that stole trade secrets -- patent applications, formulas for adhesives and business plans -- from America's largest label corporation.

For nearly 10 years, an Avery Dennison scientist named Victor Lee quietly shipped top-secret information to his company's Asian competitor, Four Pillars. Eventually, he was snitched on by an angry Avery employee and forced to help catch Four Pillars CEO P.Y. Yang in the act of receiving the pirated documents. The result was one of the first lawsuits to be tried under the Economic Espionage Act, a 1996 law that made it illegal for foreign companies to steal intellectual property from American corporations.

Unfortunately, even this supposedly juicy story makes for pretty dry reading. Although the authors try to turn it into a courtroom drama with blow-by-blow accounts of cross-examinations and lengthy profiles of the lawyers involved, the simple fact is that this was a lawsuit about a guy who stole some glue recipes and passed them on to competitors. Perhaps the authors found the trial nail-bitingly exciting, but I didn't. At one point, after 10 pages describing some exceedingly dull courtroom banter, the authors note that "not all of the trial was filled with such 'High Noon' drama." If this is the dramatic pinnacle in "Spooked," you can imagine what the rest of the book is like.

The one place where "Spooked" really shines is a chapter on hacking espionage, in which Penenberg draws on his expertise about that underworld. There's a terrific passage describing how a 15-year-old kid named t3k-9 hacked into the server of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in India -- a country he couldn't even locate on the map -- using a free, downloadable hacking utility. Another section looks at the release of Back Orifice, the Cult of the Dead Cow program that lets you spy on your target's network simply by sending an innocuous e-mail attachment.

But there just aren't enough of those stories. According to Penenberg and Barry, businesses don't use hackers to dig up corporate secrets: "Don't expect corporations to turn to hackers to find out what rivals are up to any time soon ... Corporate suits don't trust computer culture kids ... and have even less desire to work with them. Usually the only time corporate IT departments interface with his kind is when the company's home page has been graffitied by some script kiddie."

And so the book's last chance for some real spy drama vanishes in a poof. This isn't so much the authors' fault -- Penenberg is a great investigative journalist, even if his prose is a little flat. The problem is that the material they dug up is dull. Alas, there just isn't much spookiness in the spook industry these days. Where's James Bond when you need him?

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