> Quackwatch 'Guerrilla' Tactics
> Quoth Stephen J. Barrett, writing in AMA News on August 25, 1975,
> describing the Lehigh Valley Committee Against Health Fraud:
> "By working "undercover" using assumed names and box numbers, we've
> gotten all sorts of information and publications other groups, like
> the medical societies, haven't been able to lay their hands on.
> ...Really, we're a bunch of guerrillas - we're not a large group,
> there are about 40 members, but we're the only such group in the
> country."
http://www.prwatch.org/node/7208
A Bad Week for Cor****ate Spies
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 15:46.
If Cara Schaffer contacts you, be wary. Take emails and online
comments from "activist2008" and "stopcor****ategreed" with a grain of
salt. Londoners, be on the lookout for Toby Kendall, a.k.a. "Ken
Tobias." And activists everywhere should think twice before putting
do***ents in the recycling or trash bins.
Over the past week, re****ters and activists outed three different
cor****ate spying operations. As John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
wrote
in their 1995 book "Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!": "Movements for
social and political reform have often become targets of
surveillance. ... The public relations industry has developed a
lucrative side business scrutinizing the thoughts and actions of
citizen activists, using paid spies who are often recruited from
government, military or private security backgrounds."
Last week's revelations show that these underhanded tactics are very
much in use today. And they don't just impact the groups being
infiltrated. By privileging cor****ate interests, effectively giving
them the first and last word on an issue, they distort vital public
debates.
Picking on the Pickers
The Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) advocates for
better working conditions and fairer pay for the state's low-wage
farmworkers. The plight of many tomato pickers is so dire that it's
attracted the attention of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions, which invited CIW's co-founder to
testify at a hearing this week.
CIW has won two high-profile campaigns, convincing Taco Bell and
McDonald's to pay tomato pickers one penny more per pound. These
victories did not come easily. McDonald's resisted by joining the
less-
than-independent "Socially Accountable Farm Employer" program and
pressuring a labor researcher to release a preliminary, error-filled
re****t on tomato picker wages, as the Center for Media and Democracy
re****ted previously.
CIW action outside Burger King headquartersCIW is now petitioning
Burger King to give the same penny-a-pound raise. The fast feeder
refused, and CIW began being "vilified online and in e-mails that can
be traced to the Miami headquarters of Burger King," re****ts the Fort
Myers News-Press. The emails and comments were posted under the names
"activist2008" and "stopcor****ategreed."
Then a college student started taking a strange interest in CIW
conference calls. Cara Shaffer contacted a student group allied with
CIW and said she wanted to start a farmworker alliance group on her
campus. But Shaffer isn't the student she claimed to be. She heads
Diplomatic Tactical Services, a Florida-based security firm that
offers such "labor relations" services as "covert surveillance" and
"undercover operations."
Shaffer has refused to explain her involvement with CIW. A Burger
King
spokesperson "says he knows nothing about any Burger King effort to
spy on the Immokalee groups," re****ts the News-Press. The not-so-
slick
spokesperson added, "I have no idea what should be secret about
helping farmworkers."
In Plane Sight
The London-based group "Plane Stupid" campaigns against air****t
expansions, out of concern at airplanes' significant greenhouse gas
emissions.
"After last year's Camp for Climate Action, new activists began
turning up to London Plane Stupid meetings," recounts the group's
website. "Most were perfectly normal people angry at the expansion of
Heathrow air****t. But one newbie didn't fit in with the rest -- Ken
Tobias."
To test their suspicions, the group gave Tobias false information.
When the aviation industry responded and newspapers re****ted on "the
ludicrous idea of a Climate Camp in Hyde Park," Plane Stupid knew
they
were being spied on. Soon after, they were able to identify "Ken
Tobias" as Toby Kendall, an employee of the "risk management" firm
C2i
International.
C2i's website "puts 'aerospace' at the top of a list of industries
for
which it works," notes the London Times. Heathrow's owner, BAA, said
it "had no contact with the named individuals but was subject to an
unsolicited pitch by C2i. We rejected their invitation to enter into
an arrangement with them."
Tra****ng the Greens
From 1995 to 2001, the Maryland-based firm Beckett Brown
International
(BBI) offered a range of security and intelligence services to
government and cor****ate clients. BBI frequently "produced
intelligence re****ts for public relations firms and major
cor****ations
involved in environmental controversies," re****ts Mother Jones
magazine.
BBI's insider information greatly helped the Ketchum, Nichols-
Dezenhall, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin firms defend their
environmentally-challenged clients. In a September 2000 email, one
BBI
employee wrote, "Received a call from Ketchum yesterday
afternoon. ...
It seems Taco Bell turned out some product made from bioengineered
corn. The chemicals used on the corn have not been approved for human
consumption."
On behalf of Kraft, Ketchum asked BBI for "pre release information"
about environmental groups' response to the "glow-in-the-dark taco"
news. BBI immediately began planning to go through the trash of three
activist groups fingered by Ketchum: the Center for Food Safety,
Friends of the Earth and GE Food Alert. BBI had previously provided
Ketchum with information about a private strategy session involving
35
environmental groups, as well as re****ts on "tightly held" plans for
future Greenpeace campaigns.
BBI frequently used dumpster-diving to collect information -- at
least
once against progressive PR firm Fenton Communcations, which counts
environmental groups among its clients. In December 1999, a BBI
employee staked out David Fenton's home, noting "the time of the
morning garbage pick-up and that he returned to the office to 'sort
material' and 'analyze,'" according to Mother Jones.
Fair Play
While BBI (later called S2i) no longer exists, its principals
currently work for at least three other security firms: Chesapeake
Strategies, the Annapolis Group and Global Security Services. And
cor****ate espionage continues, as the Plane Stupid and CIW incidents
show.
"Inside information gives companies a strategic advantage," wrote
Amsterdam-based investigative re****ter Eveline Lubbers in the 2002
book "Battling Big Business." Lubbers helped uncover an eight year-
long scam by a Dutch security firm, where one of its employees posed
as an activist. He collected discarded paperwork from at least 30
different activist groups, saying he would sell it to recycling
plants
and give the proceeds to charity. Instead, the do***ents were
carefully reviewed and often used against the groups.
Lubbers has seen cor****ate spying not only undermine activist
campaigns, but also destroy groups. Even "non-confidential do***ents
can reveal plenty about a group's activities when combined with other
data," she warned. "Stolen files can give insight into an
organization's goals and its chances of success, information about
its
financial position, the size of its following or the strength of its
alliances."
She suggests that activist groups take precautions, like locking file
cabinets and changing computer passwords. It would also help if
companies were held accountable for undermining civil society --
perhaps by having some of their own confidential information made
public.
Diane Farsetta is the Center for Media and Democracy's senior
researcher.
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