Jail for commercial/industrial espionage

Charles Tan Chye Guan (Managing Director of a company called “du Lexbuild International Pte Ltd) is probably the first man in Singapore to be sent to jail for 3 weeks and fined $5,000, for a commercial or industrial espionage case. In this particular case, he had downloaded a confidential computer file from a notebook computer belonging to the DSTA into his thumbdrive. Defence Science and Technology Agency or DSTA is the consulting arm of the Ministry of Defence.

By doing this unauthorised downloading, the accused committed an offence under section 3(1) of the Computer Misuse Act. The key relevant words of this sub-section are
"any person who knowingly causes a computer to perform any function for the purpose of securing access without authority to any program or data held in any computer".

He pleaded guilty to the offence and was sentenced by the Subordinate Courts. He then appealed to the High Court regarding his sentence but Justice Choo Han Teck dismissed his appeal. Among the facts justifying his jail sentence when previous offenders who were former employees of Citibank were only fined, were the information related to a tender for a contract to build the SAF’s Munitions Storage Container System (“MSCS”) (in other words, an ammunition rack) and this information was "not devoid of military signifance" (to quote the judge).

It is possible that the accused could also have been charged under section 9 of the Computer Misuse Act which deals with protected computers which includes computers containing national defence information. The punishment for this could be up to 20 years jail.

One important point to note is that if the accused had seen hard copy of the relevant information and had used a handphone camera to take pictures of it, it is unlikely that he would have committed any criminal offence, although an offence under the Copyright Act might be a remote possibility.