A wide range of federal departments, including intelligence agencies, are working together on the new effort, which will employ the aggressive tactics used to pre-empt terrorist attacks against would-be industrial spies.

"The United States has become the world's primary target for technology theft," said Assistant Attorney General Ken Wainstein, who heads the Justice Department's National Security Division. "Foreign states are actively and aggressively seeking out our technology to advance their own military systems and technical capacity."

"We know that several countries have established full-fledged procurement networks that work through front companies, joint ventures, trade delegations and other mechanisms to methodically target our government, our private industries and our universities as sources for this material," he told a news conference.

He said that China and Iran had been "particularly aggressive in this area."

Wainstein said the centerpiece of the new initiative would be the establishment of joint counter-proliferation task forces at an unspecified number of U.S. attorney's offices around the country.

More training for prosecutors in handling what he said were "the most complex federal prosecutions" and monthly high-level interagency meetings to improve coordination would also be part of the effort.

Mirroring the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, the new counter-proliferation teams "will bring together the prosecutors, the investigating agencies, the export licensing agencies, and the intelligence community to coordinate their efforts against export theft on both the strategic and an operational level," Wainstein said.

The concept of such joint task forces, which the department said would be based initially in "districts with large concentrations of high-tech businesses and research facilities," was welcomed by Brian Finlay, the top proliferation expert at the Stimson Center think tank.

"Interagency coordination has been abysmal," he told United Press International, saying the different federal entities involved had "competing and conflicting and poorly integrated mechanisms" for dealing with the transfer abroad of sensitive technology.

"We hear that from the (technology) companies and from people inside the agencies," he said.

Finlay, who has studied the role the private sector can play in counter-proliferation, said companies attempting to report suspicious approaches were often given the runaround from agency to agency.

If the new joint task forces were a single, effective point of contact for companies who wanted to be "good corporate citizens" and report possibly suspicious activities, he said, that would be "a positive development."

"There's a wealth of intelligence that could be gathered there," he said, accusing the Justice Department of having bungled its outreach to the private sector so far.

"They've done practically nothing, and what they have done is heavy-handed," he said.

"Industry is likely to look at this with suspicion," he said of Thursday's announcement. But "the private sector is the principal place where these (hostile proliferation) efforts can be detected and disrupted."

Wainstein told reporters the task forces would do outreach to industry and universities and other potential targets.

"We're going to be doing outreach in each of these areas to say, look, if you all have information, we'd like to have it, and we'd like to partner with you."

The department's statement said the composition of the task forces would vary depending on local needs, but that some might be modeled after existing efforts in the Southern District of New York, Connecticut and Maryland.

Finlay said the "macro-level problem" was that in a globalized world "the means, the methods (used by would-be proliferators) are no longer susceptible to effective government control."

Julie Myers, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that enforces export control laws, said the increasing prevalence of this type of crime was a byproduct of globalization.

She said that early last year her agency had decided to double the number of agents assigned to export control.

"The type of illicit behavior that we are seeing," she told the news conference, "has grown from the traditional cloak and dagger of countries seeking critical technology to a new world of opportunity for the entrepreneur. More often than not, unfortunately, today's violator is one merely with an eye for the bottom line."

The Justice Department statement cited a report prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies for Congress about foreign economic espionage and industrial collection. It said the report found "private-sector businessmen, scientists, students, and academics from overseas are among the most active collectors of sensitive U.S. technology."

But U.S. intelligence concluded most were merely opportunistic criminals.

"Most did not initially come to the U.S. with that intent, nor were they directed to do so by foreign governments. Instead, after finding that they had access to technology in demand overseas, they engaged in illegal collection to satisfy a desire for profits, acclaim, or patriotism to their home nations."

Intelligence about such individuals was much more likely to come from suspicious co-workers or competitors than from an FBI sting operation, said Finlay.

He said Thursday's initiative was "based upon the flawed presumption that more rigorous enforcement is the solution. That is not the case."

He said industry was concerned that too great an emphasis on controlling the flow of technology and knowledge would hamper the ability of U.S. businesses to compete.

"The adversarial relationship (to industry) is part of the problem," he said. "We need less enforcement and more education."

The tone of officials at Thursday's rollout suggested that was unlikely.

Darryl Jackson, who heads the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, called export enforcement "one of the fronts in the war against global terrorism."

In the war against terrorism, "export enforcement is the equivalent of cutting an enemy's supply line in a conventional war," he said.

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