December 3, 2013
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Posing as volunteers. Stealing
documents. Dumpster diving. Planting electronic bugs. Hacking computers.
Tapping phones and voicemail. Planting false information. Trailing
family members. Threatening reporters. Hiring cops, CIA officers and
combat veterans to do all these dirty deeds—and counting on little
pushback from law enforcement, mainstream media or Congress.
These are some of the ways that many of America’s largest corporations have spied on nonprofits for years, according to a
detailed new report from
the Center for Corporate Policy tracing decades of corporate espionage
where tactics developed for American intelligence agencies have been
imported by a long list of corporate giants for use against
progressives.
“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto,
Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King,
McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BEA, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON have
all been linked to espionage against non-profit organizations, activists
and whistleblowers,” the report said, noting that its targets are
“environmental, anti-war, public-interest, consumer, food safety,
pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice,
animal rights and arms-control groups.”
“There’s so many different
tactics,” said Gary Ruskin, the center’s director and the report’s
author. “It’s so important to talk about the effects on our democracy
and privacy. Civic groups can’t work if they’re surrounded by serious
espionage activities. And citizens don’t lose their rights to privacy if
they disagree with corporations.”
Compared to Europe, where some
of the same corporate players—and their staff or hired guns—have landed
in court, been shamed in the media and even given jail terms, spying
against non-profits has flourished with little legal consequence in
America. The Justice Department almost never investigates. Nor does
Congress look at the practice, which clearly would be illegal with its
break-ins, thefts, threats, slander and racketeering.
“If
corporate espionage is done with impunity, or near impunity, it invites
more corporate espionage,” Ruskin said. “The Department of Justice needs
to investigate and prosecute where warranted, and Congress needs to
hold hearings.”
AlterNet counted a dozen dirty tactics and trends
used by corporate spies, whether inside “security” or
“threat-assessment” staff, or a mix of outside public relations and law
firms and other covert operations specialists. These trends start at the
most basic level, like pretending to be a volunteer, but escalate to
cyber warfare and even blackmail.
1. Posing as volunteers.
For
most of the 1990s, Greenpeace was repeatedly targeted due to its
campaign to phase out the use of chlorine in making plastics and paper.
In 2008, investigative reporter James Ridgeway reported on a trove of
documents obtained from an ex-employee of a private security firm,
Becket Brown International. The papers described how BBI planted
“undercover operatives” in many environmental groups, with a heavy
emphasis on Greenpeace. BBI wanted everything and anything about its
anti-corporate strategies.
In late 2010, Greenpeace sued BBI’s
backer—Dow Chemical—in federal district court, citing anti-racketeering
law. Its suit noted that “Mary Lou Sapone, a BBI consultant and
experienced infiltrator of nonprofits, posed as a prospective volunteer”
at its Washington, D.C. headquarters. BBI knew the office layout, key
codes to open doors, and much more, the suit said. “BBI procured and
held highly confidential Greenpeace records, including, for example,
confidential personal, financial and employment records—which could only
have been secured from Greenpeace’s offices.”
Greenpeace was not
alone in being infiltrated by corporate spies. “From the mid-1990s
through much of the 2000s, Mary McFate was a prominent volunteer for
gun-control groups,” the Center For Corporate Policy report said.
“She
ran for a seat on the board of directors of the Brady Campaign to
Prevent Gun Violence, and worked closely with other national gun-control
organizations, such as the Violence Policy Center. She was director of
federal legislation for States United to Prevent Gun Violence. She was
deeply knowledgeable about the plans and actions of these and other
national gun conteol groups. They, however, did not know that her other
identity was Mary Lou Sapone, who since the late 1980s had been paid by
corporations to spy on citizens groups.”
Sapone, according to BBI
documents cited by the report, had billed the National Rifle Association
“nearly $80,000” for 11 months of work during this time.
2. Dumpster diving.
What
corporate spies could not gather by walking into meetings and offices
as volunteers, they got by dumpster diving—stealing bags of trash and
sifting through them. Greenpeace’s lawsuit said that BBI and others
raided the dumpsters outside its Washington offices more than 120 times.
What was especially notable about these raids is that a local
Washington police officer was part of BBI’s team, flashing his badge to
gain access to dumpsters kept behind locked fences. BBI also had
Baltimore police on its payroll.
Greenpeace wasn’t alone in having
its trash targeted by corporate spies. The report lists other
environmental groups, as well as David Fenton, who started a PR firm
that represents progressives. His home was watched by BBI and had its
trash stolen after midnight, the report said, adding that his firm’s
office also was broken into a decade ago, “during which boxes of files
and two laptops were stolen. The culprits were never caught.”
3. Tapping phones and voicemail.
Greenpeace’s
anti-racketeering suit—most of which was thrown out by a federal
court—also talked about other firms spying for Dow Chemical. One was a
company run by ex-National Security Agency officials, TriWest
Investigations, which procured “phone call records of Greenpeace
employees or contractors,” the report said, add that cellphones given to
Greenpeace employees were also tapped. “BBI’s notes to its clients
‘include verbatim quotes attributed to specific Greenpeace employees.’”
4. Casing offices, stealing files.
These
first three tactics—posing as volunteers, stealing trash and
wiretapping—allowed a team of corporate spies, including the supposedly
credible PR firm, Ketchum, to steal all kinds of documents about
different Greenpeace projects. The corporate espionage report says the
same tactics also were used “on behalf of Kraft,” to “provide
intelligence about organizations opposed to genetically engineered
food.” The report notes these tactics were not confined to Washington,
but were also used against activists in Louisiana opposing petrochemical
plant pollution, immigrant farm workers in Florida working for a Burger
King supplier, Northern Californians opposing a new garbage dump, and
nursing home activists in Maryland.
5. Impersonating activists.
As
businesses moved online, so did the practice of breaking into websites
and servers. In January 2011, the computer security firm HBGary Federal
claimed that it identified the leaders of the hacker collective
Anonymous. In response, the collective broke into the firm’s e-mail and
other accounts and put the contents online. In those files were details
of how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had been working to discredit its
nonprofit critics.
Unlike Greenpeace’s dumpster-diving foes,
HBGary and two high-tech firms, Palantir Technologies and Berico
Technologies—which both have multi-million-dollar contracts with U.S.
military and intelligence agencies—created a plan to infiltrate U.S.
Chamber Watch, which monitors the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They
proposed creating false documents—basically, bait—to see if the watchdog
group would use them, as part of an effort to discredit it. The
corporate consultants’ memos also discussed creating a “fake insider
persona” at another progressive group, Change To Win, to release its
forgeries. “Both instances will prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be
trusted,” its memo said.
7. Hacking and disrupting computers.
The
trio of coporate spies, who call themselves "Team Themis," also
“proposed to wage electronic warfare against U.S. Chamber Watch and its
allies,” the report said. The team boasted of its capacity to place
“malware” and “custom bots” in Chamber Watch’s computers. These and
other details about Team Themis’ proposal were cited in a bar
association ethics complaint filed against lawyers working with the
corporate spies, the report said.
8. Trailing family members.
The
high-tech team of thugs also boasted of following family members of
public-interest activists and journalists, according to their proposals
unmasked by Anonymous. “Other e-mails show that HBGary Federal
investigated the critics of the U.S. Chamber of commerce, including
their spouses, children, religious activities and personal lives—and
even gethered photos of them,” the report said, citing additional
reporting on its strategy from the
New York Times and ThinkProgress.org.
“They
propose to ‘use the following tactics to mitigate the effect of
adversarial groups,’” it said. “These tactics include: ‘Discredit,
Confuse, Shame, Combat, Infiltrate, Fracture’ They propose using these
tactics against the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, Velvet
Revolution, Move To Amend, JTMP (Justice Through Music Project), U.S.
Chamber Watch, Brad’s Blog, Joe Trippi, Brave New Films, New Left Media,
Agit-PoP, Courage Campaign and the Ruckus Society.”
These were
not empty threats. In early 2011, while substituting for a nationally
syndicated talk radio host, Mike Malloy, and aggressively talking about
the Chamber’s anti-activist campaign, Brad Friedman’s BradBlog website
was
knocked offline for several days. His personal information was also displayed in Team Themis’ proposal.
9. Adding blackmail to disinformation campaign.
In
late 2010, Julian Assange, then the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks,
announced he was poised to “take down” a big U.S. bank by revealing a
corruption scandal. Bank of America thought it was the target, and
received a Team Themis proposal that included spreading “disinformation”
about WikiLeaks, creating forged documents “and then call out the
error,” and a cyber attack against its “infrastructure,” the report
said. But the Team Themis proposal also suggested making “an implicit
threat to ruin the career of Glenn Greenwald, a prominent journalist, if
he continues to support Wikileaks.”
Equally disturbing, the
U.S. Department of Justice apparently told Bank of America’s top lawyer
that the bank contact the law firm working with Team Themis, Hunton
& Williams, “according to an e-mail chain viewed by the
Tech Herald.
If this is true, it raises questions of… how much Justice Department
officials knew of and even supported corporate espionage against
WikiLeaks and its allies,” the Center for Corporate Policy report said.
10. Posing as journalists.
Another
side of the corporate espionage universe is posing as a reporter to
quickly gather information about activists. In 2010, Kroll, which is a
private investigations firm, tried to recruit a journalist, Mary
Cuddehe, as a “corporate spy for Chevron,” the report noted. It “offered
her $20,000 to pose as a journalist while conducting interviews to
undermine a study of health effects of the [330-million gallon] oil
spill [around Lago Agrio, Ecuador]” by Texaco (which was aquired by
Chevron). She turned down the money and instead wrote an article about
the experience for the
Atlantic.
11. Hiring cops, ex-spooks and veterans.
There
are other dimensions to corporate espionage against nonprofits. One is
relying on members of the national security establishment—notably ex-CIA
or NSA employees—as well as moonlightling local police, and
Iraq-Afghanistan war veterans to do the spying, the report said. Many of
the proposals for anti-activist campaigns tout these credentials,
citing ex-military resumes as they seek fees ranging from hundreds of
thousands to several million dollars. “Even active-duty CIA operatives
are allowed to sell their expertise,” it said. “Corporations are now
able to replicate in miniature the services of a private CIA, employing
active-duty and retired officers from intelligence and/or law
enforcement.”
12. Little pushback from law enforcement.
Hiring
cops, spooks and vets to do corporate dirty work leads to one more
trend enabling corporate espionage to flourish. That is a lack of
accountability or legal consequence for espionage that clearly breaks
domestic law, such as stealing documents, wiretapping, etc. In France or
England, where some of these same actvities have come to the attention
of authorities, those responsible have been prosecuted and some
perpetrators have even gone to jail. Not so in the U.S.
“Hiring
former intelligence, military and law enforcement officials has its
advantages,” the report notes. “First, these officials may be able to
use their status as a shield. For example, current law enforcement
officials may be disinclined to investigate or prosecute former
intelligence or law enforcement agents… In effect, the revolving door
for intelligence, military and law enforcement officials is yet another
aspect of the corporate capture of federal agencies, and another
government subsidy for corporations.”
What Americans Don’t Know
As
detailed as the Center for Corporate Policy report is, author Gary
Ruskin says most of the information was obtained “by accident.” It
wasn’t freely given. It was the result of lawsuits, a handful of
whisteblowers, mistakes by those hired to do the corporate espionage,
boasts in trade press and other somewhat random sources.
But even
so, there is a dark playbook that comes into view. Nonprofits are
scrutinzed for vulnerabilities. Computers are hacked. Documents are
copied or stolen. Phone calls and voice mail are secretly recorded.
Personal dossiers are compiled. Disinformation is created and spread.
Websites are targeted and taken down. Blackmail is attempted. Just as
bad, Ruskin says, the Justice Department and Congress look the other
way.
“The entire subject is veiled in secrecy,” his report says.
“In recent years, there have been few serious journalistic efforts—and
no serious government efforts—to come to terms with the reality of
corporate spying against nonprofits.”
Steven Rosenfeld covers
democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A
Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).
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