Rodney White, Senior Special Agent, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of Investigations

Bio: Rodney White is a Senior Special Agent with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Investigations (OI), where he is a member of the NRC’s CFSI or “Counterfeit, Fraudulent, Suspect Items” Team. He has more than 15 years of Federal law enforcement experience, having previously served as a Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), where he garnered extensive experience in Product Substitution and Contract Fraud Program Management, involving multi-billion dollar Air Force and Department of Defense weapons systems. Senior Special Agent White is a graduate of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and holds a B.S. degree, in Physics, from Morehouse College. He has also completed Contracting Officer studies at the Air Force Institute of Technology.

Abstract: Market conditions identical to those that gave rise to counterfeit consumer items and luxury goods are causing similar havoc to industrial products and construction materials. A global economy, advances in information management and manufacturing processes, e-Commerce, and a culture of anonymity, combined with little fear of prosecution, minimal penalties, and an unwillingness to report nefarious activity have created a fertile environment for the counterfeiting of industrial products. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC), Office of Investigations (OI), the law enforcement arm of the agency, has joined a task force of 22 other partner agencies through the National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Center to both reactively and proactively combat this constantly growing threat. The IPR Center is led by Department of Homeland Security’s, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and consists of 19 key federal agencies, Interpol, Europol and the governments of Canada and Mexico. In an extension of the IPR Center’s Operation Chain Reaction (OCR), the full resources of the IPR Center are being brought to bear on supporting the goals of Presidential Policy Directive PPD-21, “Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience,” to ensure that our nation’s critical infrastructure is secure and able to withstand and rapidly recover from all hazards - including those introduced through the supply chain. This presentation will discuss how a highly organized and well executed collaborative effort between the public and private sectors can be a formidable weapon in the war on counterfeit industrial products.