PVT INTEL Security 2

see main private intel military

no merri

note revolve door from MI 5/6, mossad, cia

SEE PALANTIR THIEL SURVEILLANCE CAPL BROLIARCHY ~ PRIVACY AI

SEE SITE OPEN SRC INEL OSINT

also psy-ops

SEE INDIG PPL

see erik 2 blackwater HAITI DRONES DISASTER CAPITALISM

tigerswan

bak 719

musk pvt sec carry weapons in white house

INST PEACE PVT CONTRACTOR WENT STRIGHT TO GUN SAFE? MICHAEL LEWIS BLOCKERS BK

-=-=

boguslaw

10 26

https://www.wired.com › story › us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism

US Law Enforcement Warns of 'Anti-Tech Extremism' as AI ... - WIRED

May 26, 2026As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.

no lnx

in the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

fBI Hired Social Media Surveillance Firm That Labeled Black Lives Matter Organizers “Threat Actors”

Ken Klippenstein

A new Senate report calls out the FBI for lying to Congress about its social media monitoring, pointing out the FBI’s hiring of ZeroFox.

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/14/dominican-sugar-central-romana-fanjul-domino/

921

no link

oIL COMPANY OFFICIAL OVERSEEING CRACKDOWN ON PIPELINE RESISTANCE CUT TEETH AT AMAZON AND EXXON

In the small world of corporate security, officials like Enbridge’s Troy Kirby take counterinsurgency practices from one megacompany to another.

Alleen BrownAlleen Brown

September 17 2021,

Policing the Pipeline

Part 15

When the oil company Enbridge sought to build its Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, it faced opposition from Indigenous-led water protectors. The company moved to coordinate with local police as they cracked down on the resistance.

EXPAND ALL PARTS

THE HEAD OF security for the oil transport company Enbridge built his résumé managing Exxon Mobil’s response to community protests in Nigeria and helping oversee Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center, a division that has monitored environmental groups and union organizers.

Now, at Enbridge, Troy Kirby oversees efforts to combat a protest movement aimed at stopping construction of the company’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Enbridge’s security operation has drawn criticism for its efforts to influence the police response to the Indigenous-led movement, whose members are known as water protectors.

“These are the people that specialize in the dark arts. Maybe it’s a bit more banal than we might imagine, but these are the spooks.”

Enbridge’s response to the water protectors is part of a pattern of megacorporations working to quell resistance to their environmentally harmful activities. Enbridge’s close cooperation with police, including payments and intelligence sharing, has been deemed by academics and water protector critics as emblematic of corporate counterinsurgency — a suite of tactics, ranging from public relations campaigns to surveillance and support for armed force, designed to win over communities to controversial profit-making projects.

“You have companies that have entire departments dedicated to making sure you stay in your place, that you don’t resist, that you don’t talk about it, and you most certainly don’t act on it,” said Alexander Dunlap, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who has written extensively about how corporations utilize counterinsurgency tactics to quell movements against environmental degradation. “These are the people that specialize in the dark arts. Maybe it’s a bit more banal than we might imagine, but these are the spooks.”

Policing the Pipeline

An Enbridge spokesperson said the company supports the rights of individuals to protest lawfully and peacefully. “Security teams use a ‘people first’ concept to ensure public safety — their mission is to observe, respond, and report safety issues,” said Juli Kellner, a communications specialist for the company. Kellner did not make Kirby available for an interview.

As this story was being reported, Kirby’s Amazon job description was deleted from his LinkedIn page.

AS SOPHISTICATED CORPORATE security efforts have burgeoned, lucrative positions lure specialists from company to company, linking together the practices of megacorporations. Kirby, for his part, started at Enbridge in 2019 after a three-year stint as Amazon’s head of corporate security throughout the Americas, according to LinkedIn. Part of his role included overseeing the online giant’s Global Security Operations Center. Internal Amazon documents dated to the year Kirby left, obtained by Vice, provide clues. According to the report, security personnel with the center used Facebook and Instagram to monitor environmental groups as well as union organizers.

In Poland, operatives working for the private security company Pinkerton were sent to an Amazon warehouse to investigate reports of employee misconduct, Vice reported. Pinkerton got its start in the late 19th century, using undercover operatives and agents provocateurs to bust unions. The firm is now a subsidiary of the private security giant Securitas — one of the companies providing security for Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota.

Before Amazon, Kirby spent 16 years doing security work for Exxon Mobil. For at least four years, he worked for Exxon in Nigeria — where there is a history of energy company complicity in human rights abuses. During his time in Nigeria, Kirby was an adviser on “strategic security countermeasures,” which involved managing so-called crises, including pirate attacks and kidnapping, as well as “community protests,” according to a section of his LinkedIn page that has since been deleted.

As in Minnesota, the work in Nigeria included collaborating closely with public agencies. Kirby’s LinkedIn page said he “Established a Nigerian based security network with private and public sector security leaders” and was involved in “Oversight of host government security forces.”

The Exxon Mobil security operation was heavily militarized and focused in part on Exxon’s offshore oil operations. Kirby described designing a “Security Maritime Operations center including a fleet of 17 military-grade security vessels.”

FOR CRITICS OF corporate counterinsurgency, Kirby stands as just one example of corporate officials steeped in highly militarized security efforts abroad bringing those practices back home.

“To corporate entities like Energy Transfer and Enbridge, water protectors and land defenders are perceived as ‘security threats’ endangering shareholders’ profits.”

“It’s telling, but not at all surprising, that the head of security for Enbridge has trained in the so-called Third World to deal with high-stakes security issues impacting corporations in Africa and the Americas,” said Natali Segovia, an attorney and the legal director for the Water Protector Legal Collective. The collective is representing opponents of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline, who argue that aggressive law enforcement tactics used near the Standing Rock reservation were influenced by the contract security firm TigerSwan, run by special operations military veterans. “To corporate entities like Energy Transfer and Enbridge, water protectors and land defenders are perceived as ‘security threats’ endangering shareholders’ profits,” Segovia said.

Kirby appears to have put some of the lessons he learned with Exxon Mobil in Nigeria into practice on Enbridge‘s project in Minnesota. Under Kirby’s watch, Enbridge pays law enforcement for pipeline-related police activity. The company’s security team members have set up trainings for local law enforcement and have been invited to attend public safety officials’ intelligence sharing meetings, where information on individual pipeline opponents has been discussed.

[Related

Minnesota Law Enforcement Shared Intelligence on Protest Organizers With Pipeline Company]

In advance of Line 3 pipeline construction, Kirby planned meetings with local law enforcement officers to discuss Enbridge’s approach to responding to opposition. When a local sheriff expressed concern over whether law enforcement agencies would be reimbursed for pipeline-related expenses, Kirby reassured him that the security head had influence over the appointment of the public official who would approve reimbursement requests, according to the sheriff. As the sheriff recalled in an email, Kirby told him “he would be involved to ensure we are taken care of, one way or another.”

It’s Kirby’s colleague Brian Aldrich, Enbridge’s Line 3 security lead, who has worked more routinely on the ground in Minnesota. Aldrich, according to an email sent to state officials, served with the Marines before working for large security firms including Control Risks and Gavin DeBeckerand Associates. He also has an Amazon connection — providing personal security for the corporate giant’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos himself.

===

rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did intial study bush 41 that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors

Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.

In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.

Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”

But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.

“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”

At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.

The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]

The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.

A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”

U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.

By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.

“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]

And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.

The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.

The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.

Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.

When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.

Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.

The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.

Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.

Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

no lnx

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/27/enbridge-line-3-pipeline-police-training-intelligence/

a corp can substitute video for a live cop in tresspass law?!

intercept 921 eileen brn?

POLICE RESPONSIBLE FOR public safety surrounding the construction of an oil pipeline in Minnesota have repeatedly denied having a close relationship with Enbridge, the company behind the controversial energy project. According to records obtained by The Intercept through public information requests, however, Enbridge has provided repeated trainings for officers designed to cultivate a coordinated response to protests.

By the time construction on Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline, began last December, a working relationship had been established between Enbridge and police officers. A public safety official even invited the company’s Line 3 security chief to regular intelligence sharing meetings. In one case, the official passed along intelligence to Enbridge’s security chief for Line 3: a list of people who attended an anti-pipeline organizing meeting.

Line 3 opponents have long raised concerns about payments made to law enforcement by Enbridge to cover pipeline-related policing. A special account set up by the state of Minnesota has distributed $2.3 million in Enbridge funds to public safety agencies so far.The records shed new light on the level of close coordination between law enforcement agencies and the Canadian oil company to police the Indigenous-led movement to stop Line 3.

:{

“Local law enforcement has become the brutal arm of a Canadian corporation.”

}:

“Local law enforcement has become the brutal arm of a Canadian corporation,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of the pipeline. “It’s highly inappropriate for law enforcement to target people based on First Amendment activity, collect identity information and then deliver that information to their political opponents.”

The effort to halt the Line 3 pipeline is the latest flashpoint in the movement to end development of new fossil fuel infrastructure amid a growing climate crisis. In Minnesota, members of the Indigenous-led resistance, known as water protectors, have turned to tactics that directly disrupt construction, sometimes trespassing on private property, blocking roads, or locking down to pipeline company equipment.

"Community police and sheriff deputies are responsible for public safety,” Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner told The Intercept. “Our security call the police when a disturbance occurs. Officers decide when an individual is breaking the law — or putting themselves or others in danger.”

How law enforcement responds to the protest movement is a matter of training and discretion.The documents obtained by The Intercept suggest that Enbridge has stepped in to influence officers’ choices.

Water protectors point to the close working relationship between Enbridge and law enforcement to explain escalating police tactics, with rubber bullets and other “less-lethal” weapons deployed in recent weeks.

Plans to Coordinate

Emails between Enbridge and members of the Northern Lights Task Force — a group consisting of sheriffs and public safety officials coordinating plans for expected protests against Line 3 — describe several joint training exercises and other coordination meetings set up by the energy firm. The largest of the trainings was in Bemidji, Minnesota.

In October 2020, according to emails, Enbridge organized an all-day training at the company’s Bemidji Emergency Operations Center. According to an email sent a day before the event, dozens of Enbridge employees, public safety officials, including local sheriffs along the pipeline route, and an FBI agent were invited to attend. A primary goal for the event: “Coordination between Line 3 project team and L.P.” — an acronym that typically refers to “local police.”

Indigenous Water Protectors Face Off With an Oil Company and Police Over a Minnesota Pipeline

The email sent out ahead of the training included a series of “Incident Briefing Maps” laying out scenarios where Enbridge and law enforcement might need to coordinate a response. The various scenarios had something in common: They all involved protests.

The list of scenarios — which were drawn up by the Response Group, a controversial crisis management firm that works for the energy industry — laid out four possible events: demonstrators blocking traffic, the breach of a construction site, “swarming” of a pipeline hub while streaming on social media, and project opponents locking themselves to the gate of an Enbridge office.

Training participants would be asked to come up with a plan to respond to each of the scenarios, as well as to develop an “Information and Communication Strategy” to keep government agencies, the public, and the media informed of what was happening, according to a list of exercise objectives. Enbridge planned to discuss providing local law enforcement with a project radio, according to an email describing the exercise.

It wasn’t the first conversation of its kind. In advance of a smaller version of the exercise, back in April, members of the Northern Lights Task Force filled out a questionnaire for Enbridge. The public safety officials noted that it was a “priority” for law enforcement to obtain access to Enbridge security camera feeds. It also referenced the possibility of placing an Enbridge liaison inside the two law enforcement emergency operations centers, as well as a law enforcement liaison in Enbridge’s emergency operations center.

The Northern Lights Task Force’s communications team did not answer a detailed list of questions. Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida, a member of the task force, said his office never received a project radio nor saw other agencies with one. Guida said that the scenarios served to show law enforcement how Enbridge runs its emergency operations center. “It was for Enbridge to learn. We didn’t get trained by Enbridge,” he said, adding that law enforcement might carry out a similar exercise with a bank. “We assisted them and told them this is how we do it, you do your own thing.”

It’s not clear how many officers attended the trainings offered by Enbridge. Clearwater County Sheriff Darin Halverson was copied on the invite and RSVP’d that he would attend an additional Enbridge security exercise as well as a “sensitive security information” meeting. He told The Intercept that he did not attend any of the gatherings.

Sharing Intelligence

By the time construction on Line 3 began, a comfortable working relationship appeared to have been established between Enbridge and some of the public safety agencies invited to the company’s meetings. Public officials repeatedly expressed interest in exchanging information on pipeline opposition with Enbridge.

In December 2020, a St. Louis County sheriff’s deputy distributed language to be used by officers issuing dispersal orders during protests against Line 3 and also sent a list of potential charges that could be applied to pipeline protesters. Another officer responded, noting that it would be legal to arrest water protectors even if they trespassed without a law enforcement officer present. “Hopefully Enbridge security would be videotaping when able,” the officer said. Other documents affirmed that Enbridge security would be wearing body cameras.

The Northern Lights Task Force, the group of public safety officials, occasionally suggested that Enbridge should be excluded from planning, the documents show. In November 2020, Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, copied Enbridge public information officers on an email about the task force’s public messaging strategy. Another sheriff advised that the corporate representatives did not belong in the group: “It is not a good idea to have Enbridge employees in our group, but they would certainly be good contacts to have to know what info is being put out,” wrote Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake. (Guida told The Intercept he copied Enbridge on the email so that law enforcement and the company could avoid mixed or duplicate messages.)

In other cases, public safety officials actively sought out Enbridge security to assist with law enforcement officers’ efforts, inviting an Enbridge representative to share space and attend meetings. St. Louis County Emergency Management Coordinator Duane Johnson copied Enbridge’s security lead for the Line 3 project on an email inviting first responders to work out of the law enforcement emergency operations center as they monitored intelligence on a potential direct action the next day. “There is considerable intel on something brewing tomorrow. Let me know if you’d like to come over and work out of the EOC tomorrow just in case something pops,” the official wrote, referring to the emergency operations center.

In another email, Johnson requested that Enbridge’s Line 3 security lead attend regular intelligence meetings. “We have missed you on our 0900 intel meetings. Is there another time that would work better for you?” asked the emergency management coordinator in a January 2021 email. “It would be nice to have someone from your company on.”

The Enbridge security officer was kept in the loop. The next day, Johnson copied him on another email, forwarding a list of names of water protectors who had attended a “Line 3 Organizing Meeting” the night before.

“It was all I really got from last night,” Bruce Blacketter, emergency management director for the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, wrote to Johnson in the forwarded email. “Well, this and a slight ‘back of the head’ headache from the musical performances and guided breathing/stretching exercises.”

St. Louis County did not respond to a request for comment, and the Fond du Lac Band declined to comment.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/louis-dejoy-2652858940

raw dc rept

After the failed union vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, the critical postmortems ignored a reality that may result in another election: Amazon cheated.

And Louis DeJoy, the Trump-era holdover dismantling the U.S. Postal Service, helped.

A May 7 labor board hearing will consider a request for a new vote sought by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Its complaint details a campaign of intimidation to pressure employees to reject the union.

The Labor Board has a long history of looking the other way when given evidence of cheating by employers in union elections. But this time may be different because of who helped cheat --- from local on up to national officials.

The Jeff Bezos company installed drop boxes to collect votes on company property. Amazon placed these boxes despite being told by the National Labor Relations Board staff not to do so.

The drop boxes were placed with the connivance ofthe service led by DeJoy. Former President Donald Trump installed this high-rolling donor to worsen mail delivery during the fall presidential election Trump was hellbent to win. Less mail, less votes; less votes, less competition.

Here, we use the pejorative verb connivance because the drop box installed inside Amazon's Bessemer parking lot did not carry any postal insignia.

Amazon can leverage the Postal Service because Amazon has made itself crucial to USPS finances.

The Postal Service generated nearly $4 billion in revenue from Amazon in 2019 and counted an eye-popping $1.6 billion of that in profit. The volume of business Amazon delivered grew bigly last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This reliance on Amazon for highly profitable business likely explains why, beyond his well-documented anti-union animus, DeJoy would help Amazon fight the union.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

A pro-union worker, Jennifer Bates, told reporters last month that colleagues at the Bessemer Fulfillment Center were reluctant to deposit ballots in the mysterious drop box that suddenly appeared in the parking lot.

Workers Feared Amazon

"Some of the people are afraid to put them in there," Bates said. "The 'yes' voters feel that Amazon will probably try to steal their ballots."

Labor lawyer Brandon Magner tweeted: "If Amazon did install these mailboxes, or if they exercise control over the mailboxes, such as having a key to the ballot box, that would clearly merit setting aside the election if the union were to lose."

During the voting, which lasted from Feb. 8 to March 29, Amazon demonstrated just how crucial controlling the Bessemer warehouse parking lot — and what went on inside it — was to the company.

'Coercion and Intimidation'

The union made the following claims:

Amazon hired police officers to patrol the parking lot and surveil interactions between employees and union organizers. The constant presence, according to the union's protest filing, "created an atmosphere of coercion and intimidation thereby interfering with the right of employees to a free and fair election."
The company used local government officials to change policies governing employees exiting the workplace.Amazon got the timing on a traffic light located outside the facility changed so union organizers wouldn't have much time to approach departing workers.
Workers were forced to sit through hours of mandatory indoctrination meetings. These sessions, often used by companies to scare workers into believing their jobs will disappear if they vote for a union, are often effective with workers who have not yet experienced the benefits of collective bargaining.

Without a union, individual workers have no power. And while some who voted against the union told journalists after the vote that Amazon paid them well, the issue is whether it should pay them even better along with improving their benefits and work rules.

Record Profits

Last year, Amazon reported a profit of $24.2 billion before taxes, up from $13.9 billion in 2019 and almost 10 times its 2016 pretax profit.

Amazon pays little in federal income tax. In 2020 its "effective federal income tax rate of just 9.4%, less than half the statutory corporate tax of 21%." So said Mathew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year when Amazon announced its latest financial success.

Amazon has been so successful that a dollar invested when it first sold stock in 1997 has now grown to $2,300, making it one of the most fantastically profitable investments even in this era of high profits in high tech.

While the company doesn't want to share more of its gains with the blue-collar Americans whose labor makes its profits possible by quickly fulfilling orders, it does lavish money on its executives. One reason to favor the top is that the way Amazon pays executives provides a stealth financial and tax subsidy.

Costly Stock Options

The company showered so many valuable stock options on its highest-paid people that the tax savings alone came to more than $600 million last year, Gardner calculated.

Stock options save companies on corporate income tax. The companies get to deduct their value even though the cost is borne by existing stockholders. The stockholders' share of the company is diluted by the new shares given to executives. In other words, it's a tax deduction that costs the company nothing.

Options are also a form of compensation that cost the company nothing, unlike the hard cash it must pay out to rank-and-file workers like those at the Bessemer warehouse.

What's most troubling about this union election is that a federal government corporation worked with management against the workers. That's a troubling sign of authoritarianism.

Remember Amazon worked inconcert with the service to install the dropbox to collect ballots on company property. The service acted after staff at the Labor Board, the federal agency tasked with protecting the rights of American workers in the private sector, told them they couldn't do it. But just as it pressured workers, Amazon pressured the service into pleasing Bezos, the richest person in America.

No Answers

Dave Partenheimer, a postal public relations manager, would not talk about who ultimately gave the go-ahead to install the dropbox in the Amazon warehouse parking lot.

Partenheimer declined to say whether the service knew that the Labor board already denied Amazon's request for such a dropbox. He also declined to identify who ultimately approved installation.

Instead, Partenheimer reiterated an earlier statement about a "Centralized Box Unit [CBU] with a collection compartment" being "suggested by the postal service as a solution to provide an efficient and secure delivery and collection point."

The Labor board isn't talking about the dropbox either, at least not while it considers the 23 separate objections filed by the Retail Store, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The Labor board spokeswoman, Kayla Blado, declined to comment on whether the Postal Service has the authority to supersede her agency's decisions. She would not even confirm that the agency did, in fact, deny Amazon's request to have a ballot drop box installed on its property.

DeJoy Strikes Again

The persistent controversy about the dropbox and the Bessemer vote overall, however, parallels the madness that surrounded mail-in ballots during the last presidential election. DeJoy ordered the removal of mail sorting machines in the run-up to the vote, while the rest of the Trump administration whined about the supposed inability of the Postal Service to properly deliver ballots.

Trump also complained throughout his four years in office that the Postal Service was subsidizing Amazon. This was to advance his attacks on the aggressive reporting by The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, but whose newsroom he has never influenced according to the top editor and reporters working there.

We now know that the prices Amazon paid generated outsize profits for the Postal Service, exposing yet another Trump lie though only a few Americans, like DCReport readers, know this.

Fought Mail-in Votes, Then Didn't

At first, Amazon fought hard to block mail-in voting. It dismissed the potential dangers of in-person voting during the pandemic. Then it reversed course and challenging the ability of the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots in a timely fashion. Taken together it was a classic case of Amazon talking out of both sides of the company's mouth.

Lisa Y. Henderson, the Labor board's acting Region 10 director, dismissed the company's contradictory arguments in January and ordered that balloting be conducted by mail.

How the Labor board rules, and whether the long list of federal rules that hobble union organizing, will be addressed by President Joe Biden's administration. Decisions will be crucial to whether Americans as a whole prosper, or we continue to create inequality through policies that tilt heavily to the side of business owners and investors.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

The Economic Policy Institute's Unequal Power Project, for instance, notes an "inherent imbalance in bargaining power between employers and employees" that creates "a lack of freedom in the workplace."

Pro-union workers at Amazon's Bessemer Fulfillment Center remained undaunted after losing the initial vote, declaring, "This battle has just begun."

"I'm not discouraged, Linda Burns told reporters after losing the vote by a more than 2-to-1 margin. "This is the beginning. [Jeff] Bezos, you misled a lot of our people. We're going to fight for our rights."

Co-worker Emitt Ashford said if the Labor board does order a new election, "We would see a change in the tide now that people have the information."

"We would win," he said.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not anti-scraping laws

Clearview AI (previously) is a grifty facial recognition company that sells untested, secretive tools to police departments, claiming that they can identify people from security camera footage by matching the pictures those scraped from big social media sites. Read the rest

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/erik-prince-recruited-ex-spies-to-help-infiltrate-activist-groups-hostile-to-trump-agenda-report/

OMFG

no lnx

Erik Prince recruited ex-spies to help infiltrate activist groups ‘hostile’ to Trump agenda: report

Written by Common Dreams March 8, 2020

An explosive New York Times report revealed Saturday thatnotorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations “considered hostile” to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

—Derek Martin, Allied Progress

Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. Through a spokesperson, he declined the Times‘ request for comment on the piece, which is based on interviews and documents obtained by the newspaper, including internal Project Veritas emails.

“Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family,” the Times noted. “Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.”

The results of the Times‘ investigation were described by readers on social media as “chilling,” “stunning,” and “insane.” Jacobin magazine assistant editor Alex Press declared, “My paranoid fantasies are all true!” In response to a tweet about the reporting, author and activist Naomi Klein simply wrote, “Read.”

The consumer watchdog group Allied Progressresponded with a statement Saturday night, calling on the House Oversight Committee to conduct an immediate investigation into what DeVos knew about Prince’s activities.

“There’s not a lot of dots to connect here,” said Allied Progress director Derek Martin. “Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

“We already know Secretary DeVos is no friend of public education, but if she gave the go-ahead to enlist former intelligence officers to steal documents from public education advocates that she disagrees with, it steps well beyond policy disagreement and into criminal territory,” Martin added. “If Secretary DeVos was in any way involved, it will confirm that she stops at nothing to undermine public schools.”

According to the Times:

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former CIA officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians, and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation—detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union—has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

The Times reported that it is unclear whether Seddon was involved in the Spanberger operation and the former British intelligence officer—who is married to American diplomat Alice Seddon—did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.

James O’Keefe of Project Veritas told the Times that his group is a “proud independent news organization” and “no one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate.” Although he declined to discuss the details of the report, he also claimed that various sources are “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes, and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

Past targets of Project Veritas have included the nonprofit healthcare organization Planned Parenthood, the political group Disrupt J20, and recently, David Wright, a 20-year veteran political correspondent at ABC News. Project Veritas has also recorded undercover video of a Times editor and approached the Washington Post with a false story about Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama.

The Project Veritas operative inside AFT Michigan was Liberty University graduate Marisa Jorge, according to the Times. O’Keefe and Seddon used the code name “LibertyU” for Jorge when discussing the operation over email. Jorge, who also reportedly infiltrated the Spanberger campaign by posing as a volunteer, did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment. The federal lawsuit that AFT Michigan brought against Project Veritas is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

In a statement to the Times, AFT president Randi Weingartensaid: “Let’s be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy—and they got caught. We’re just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage.”

Weingarten added on Twitter Saturday, “They didn’t succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers’ voice.”

The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill—who released the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army in 2007—wrote on Twitter Saturday that with this piece, the Times “pushes the 2017 story from [The Intercept‘s Matthew Cole]? forward about Erik Prince attempts to infiltrate liberal groups via Project Veritas.”

Last year, Cole published an article for The Intercept titled “The Complete Mercenary: How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback.”

Noting that Trump gave Project Veritas thousands of dollars through his foundation and met with O’Keefe shortly after announcing his run for president, Cole reported:

It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

Cole acknowledged the Times reporting on Twitter Saturday and highlighted a summary of it tweeted by The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer:

Currently, the Times noted, “Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws.”

Former FBI assistant director and current NBC News national security contributor Frank Figliuzzi shared the Times report on Twitter Saturday and commented that “there are likely numerous criminal violations here.”

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/12/jordan-cove-oregon-pembina-pipeline/

at a CASINO in the small coastal town of North Bend, Oregon, dozens of law enforcement officers and corporate security personnel gathered for a two-day training on how to wage propaganda battles against protesters. The November 2018 event was organized by the National Sheriffs’ Association, one of the country’s largest law enforcement organizations, and hosted by the Coos County Sheriff’s Office, which has spent years monitoring opposition to the Jordan Cove Energy Project — a proposed liquid natural gas pipeline and export terminal that the Trump administration has named one of its highest-priority infrastructure projects.

The cost of the event, however — totaling $26,250 — was paid by Pembina Pipeline Corp., the Canadian fossil fuel company that owns the Jordan Cove project.

In fact, for nearly four years, Pembina was the sole funding source of a unit in the sheriff’s office dedicated to handling security concerns related to Jordan Cove — despite the fact that there is not yet any physical infrastructure in place to keep secure. The pipeline and terminal cannot begin construction without approval from theFederal Energy Regulatory Commission,which is scheduled to vote on whether to license the project in February. Yet between 2016 and 2020, the department’s liquid natural gas division, known as a “combined services unit,” spent at least $2 million of Pembina’s money. The energy company put the funding on hold in April 2019 but left open the possibility that the arrangement could be revived in the future. Pembina and the sheriff’s department are currently discussing how they may continue to work together, and Coos County Sheriff Craig Zanni said he expects the partnership to be renewed.

In addition to hosting the law enforcement training, the unit used Pembina’s funds to purchase riot control equipment, monitor the activities of Jordan Cove opponents, and coordinate intelligence-gathering operations with private security companies that also worked for Pembina.Local residents, environmental activists, and tribal members have staged rallies and sit-ins and participated in public hearings in opposition to the project, which they say would exacerbate the global climate crisis, damage vital waterways, and violate Indigenous sovereignty. Dozens of property owners could see their land seized via eminent domain.

Law enforcement agencies often receive funding for equipment via corporate-backed professional associations and private foundations — a practice that civil liberties groups have criticized as enabling private influence with little oversight. The arrangement between Pembina and the Coos County Sheriff’s Office was unusual, however, given the department’s scrutiny of activists engaged in First Amendment-protected speech in opposition to its corporate benefactor.

“It’s stunning. It’s the complete opposite of how the police have presented themselves in recent history — that they are neutral parties positioned above the political fray,” said Jeff Monaghan, a criminology professor at Canada’s Carleton University who studies police surveillance. “This is a public police force that has essentially opened up a private, corporately funded wing and, in doing so, is entrenching itself on one side of a very complicated political debate."

The Coos County partnership is an extreme example of a trend in policing that has gained momentum across the United States — particularly since thousands of protesters from around the world gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017in an effort to halt construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Corporations are developing creative means to funnel millions of dollars to local law enforcement groups, and this funding has often been paired with increasingly elaborate private security and propaganda operations.

An investigation by The Intercept and Type Investigations, based on more than 15,000 pages of documents obtained via open records requests from the Coos County Sheriff’s Office and the city of Portland, sheds light on the fusion of public and private interests working to monitor and stymie opposition to the Jordan Cove Energy Project. The documents also reveal new details about a network of private actors profiting off the suppression of protest movements nationwide, among them veterans of the Dakota Access pipeline campaign who have since contributed to the policing efforts around Jordan Cove.

The global consulting firm Teneo led Jordan Cove-related communications and intelligence operations on behalf of Pembina,producing regular reports on the activities of opponents and helping coordinate the efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and county sheriff’s offices, the records show.

At the November 2018 training paid for by Pembina, one workshop was led by employees of Delve, a Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm affiliated with the national Republican Party that worked alongside police during the Dakota Access pipeline protests.

Another was led by former consultants for TigerSwan, the defense firm hired to oversee security of the Dakota Access pipeline that came under fire for its militaristic approach to protesters. The two former consultants enlisted to train Oregon law enforcement had previously attempted to organize pro-pipeline counterprotests, according to leaked audio recordings, encouraging dangerous tactics and at one point dangling the prospect of anonymous donations from oil companies.

“Pembina and other corporations are trying to build out the infrastructure now to lock us, as a planet, into using big reserves of fossil fuel,” said Brendan McQuade, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine and author of a recently released book on police fusion centers. “The most distressing element of these documents is that they show the police both locally and nationally lining up, in a rigid way, behind corporations carrying out fossil fuel extraction.”

Purchasing Police Power

First proposed in 2005, the Jordan Cove Energy Project has become one of the longest-running battles in the country between the fossil fuel industry and opponents of new hydrocarbon energy infrastructure. If built, the project would transport 438 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year from the Jonah Field in Wyoming, the Piceance Basin in Colorado, and the Uinta Basin in northern Utah. The 233-mile Pacific Connector gas pipeline would snake beneath five major rivers as it pumps natural gas to a new export terminal at Coos Bay, where the gas would be chilled and liquefied before being carried to Asian markets on massive tankers.

[map]

In 2016, landowners in the pipeline’s proposed path successfully lobbied the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which provides permits for the construction of natural gas infrastructure, to deny an application to build the project. The agency asserted that developers had not proven the need for it. Pembina reapplied a year later, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

Since then, Trump has appointed individuals to the five-member commission who are more in favor of fossil fuel projects than their predecessors, including Neil Chatterjee, who previously served as energy policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. A decision by the FERC is expected on February 13.

In the meantime, grassroots environmental groups have helped rally tens of thousands of people to submit comments opposing Jordan Cove to state and federal permitting agencies. The Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, Tolowa Dee-ni’, Siletz, and Round Valley tribes have all passed resolutions opposing the project.

On a misty morning in August, Larry Mangan, a retired Bureau of Land Management biologist, stood on the shores of Coos Bay overlooking the proposed site of the Jordan Cove export terminal. The land on which he and his wife, Sylvia, have lived for more than 30 years is in one of the proposed paths of the Pacific Connector pipeline, and a portion of it is threatened with eminent domain.

“This project would be a disaster not just for us, but for our entire area,” Maghan said. “It’s almost unthinkable that our local police force would be so invested in it.”

The LNG division of the Coos County Sheriff’s Office was established in December 2015. At the time, the Jordan Cove project was owned by the energy infrastructure company Veresen, which Pembina acquired in 2017. Coos County Sheriff Zanni said the department expected Jordan Cove to create an array of security needs. Coos Bay is popular with anglers, crabbers, and recreational boaters who would share the space with giant LNG carriers, and he believed the terminal could become a target for terrorism.

According to county expenditure records, the Pembina-funded sheriff’s unit spent at least $1.2 million on salaries, benefits, and overtime between 2016 and 2020. The sheriff’s office also used money from Pembina to acquire equipment and technology that would allow deputies to monitor environmental activists and respond forcefully to potential protests. Last year, the department spent $48,250 of Pembina funds on an acoustic sound cannon and paid for repairs to a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected tactical vehicle — a type of armored vehicle first developed for the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan that police have also used in the streets of Ferguson and at Standing Rock. The department also purchased social media archiving software and a drone.

The sound cannon was a response to what happened at Standing Rock, according to Zanni, who said he wanted a “more humane way” to deal with protesters that would avoid physical confrontation. As for the MRAP, the armored vehicle the department had obtained via the federal government’s surplus military property program was in a state of disrepair. Zanni said the vehicle had “technically nothing” to do with Jordan Cove. “It’s called leveraging for the better of the community,” he added.

Zanni described the sheriff’s office as “severely underfunded.” The department used to rely on proceeds from timber harvests on federal land to pay its bills, but that funding dropped dramatically in recent decades.

When Pembina discontinued funding in April, the sheriff’s office had enough remaining money for the unit to finish out the year. In December, the department was forced to absorb four deputies whose salaries had been paid for by the company (a fifth deputy retired). Pembina did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson for the company told local press that it had adjusted its spending while awaiting permits to build.

The sheriff’s department met with the company in January to review the unit’s expenses and discuss a future agreement. A follow-up meeting has been scheduled for the coming weeks. “We’re going to move forward, basically,” Zanni said.

He pointed to the 2005 Energy Policy Act as justification for the unit.The federal law requires fossil fuel companies to come up with a cost-sharing plan with public agencies that have “responsibility for security and safety” at LNG export terminal sites. Zanni shrugged off the fact that the export terminal has not been approved or built yet. “As businesspeople, they’re pretty confident they’re going to get permission to do that,” he said of Pembina. “My argument is I need the resources before it’s going to be built.”

But, if the agreement is renewed, it may be invalid under Oregon law. In 1998, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a similar arrangement in Klamath County, Oregon, where the sheriff’s department had entered into an agreement with the timber corporation Weyerhaeuser to provide security services on the company’s land.

“Providing specialized law enforcement services to Weyerhaeuser has no logical relationship to a sheriff’s statutory responsibility to ‘Defend the county against those who, by riot or otherwise, endanger the public peace or safety,’” the court ruled. “We are persuaded that a sheriff lacks the express or implied authority under Oregon law to enter into an agreement to provide security services for private entities.”

“The court was pretty clear in saying that Oregon law sets out the general authority for governing bodies, and these types of contracts between corporations and police agencies don’t fit into that general authority,” said Kelly Simon, a staff attorney at the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Contracts like this that are biased and create special-interest groups in government bodies — they are not authorized because the police’s authority is to protect the public fairly and equally.”

Zanni said the Coos County Sheriff’s Office has had contracts with federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management as well as private timberland owners that occupy areas that the office otherwise wouldn’t have the resources to patrol. “Our contracts specifically say if there’s a law enforcement public safety need for that officer, we don’t care what you’re paying us for, he’s going to go handle that,” Zanni said.

Public-Private Surveillance

Given that the Jordan Cove pipeline and export terminal haven’t been approved or built yet, the Pembina-funded unit of the Coos County Sheriff’s Office spent a considerable portion of its time and resources monitoring opponents of the energy project, according to email exchanges between law enforcement officers and Pembina employees.

Coos County Sheriff’s Deputy Bryan Valencia, whose work was funded by Pembina, operated the email list of the Southwestern Oregon Joint Task Force, an intelligence-sharing group that included officers from the FBI and Bureau of Land Management, as well as state and local law enforcement. The task force, which was set up to monitor “the extremist agenda in southern Oregon,” according to Zanni, circulated posts from activists’ social media accounts and campaign emails sent by grassroots environmental groups such as Southern Oregon Rising Tide, Rogue Climate, and 350 Eugene.

In January 2019, Valencia distributed information to the email list about pipeline opponents who had indicated on Facebook that they would attend a demonstration and permitting hearing in North Bend.

“As of this afternoon there are 98 people RSVP’d to attend the rally and Department of State Lands Meeting,” Valencia wrote. “There are another 384 showing ‘interested.’ Most of the names are recognized as residents spread across the other three pipeline counties. There are a few recognized local names associated with previous rallies.”

“There is no criminal nexus at this time,” Valencia acknowledged.

Indeed, the heightened law enforcement scrutiny occurred even though project opponents have mostly refrained from disruptive protests in favor of lobbying, public comment hearings, and peaceful demonstrations.

The most dramatic action came on November 21, when dozens of people occupied Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s office in Salem, demanding that she make a statement opposing Jordan Cove. Brown spoke to the protesters but declined to issue a statement. “I’m not putting my finger on the scale one way or another,” Brown said. After more than nine hours, state police arrested 21 people, but the district attorney declined to file any charges.

Jordan Cove opponents said the surveillance was disturbing but unsurprising. “This should clarify for anyone who still doubts which side the cops are really on and who they are invested in serving,” said Holly Mills of Southern Oregon Rising Tide.

“We want to know what’s going on, what’s being planned, and if there’s potential for someone to jump in and create a problem,” Zanni responded. “There are radicals on the protest side;there are also radicals on the other side. Extremists of any sort are dangerous.” As an example, he pointed to protests and counterprotests 200 miles away in Portland involving left-wing anti-fascists and the right-wing hate group the Proud Boys.

Overall, however, he acknowledged that extremists are “not a big element of Jordan Cove’s opposition” and underlined that he is not for or against the project.

But whether or not Zanni took a side, the Pembina funding supported surveillance of pipeline opponents. Valencia spent about 10 percent of his time monitoring social media while he was part of the LNG unit, Zanni said. After the Pembina funds ran dry, the deputy was transferred to the corrections division and his intelligence-gathering ceased along with the department’s work with the extremism task force.

Throughout its collaboration with Pembina, the Coos County Sheriff’s Office was also receiving a steady stream of intelligence from Teneo. The security and public relations firm founded by former aides to Bill and Hillary Clinton helped orchestrate public relations for Pembina while also employing its “risk advisory” division — led by former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton — to keep tabs on Jordan Cove opponents, according to emails, intelligence reports, and notes from agency planning meetings.

Teneo personnel provided daily and weekly reports to Pembina on pipeline opponents’ activities, which the energy company’s in-house security officer routinely shared with the sheriff’s office. A January 2019 intelligence report, for example, featured screenshots of activists’ social media feeds and cited a “flood” of letters to the editor and op-eds opposing the project. “These compelling storylines will facilitate local groups’ fundraising and outreach efforts to national groups, bolstering the resources at their disposal while also risking the inclusion of national groups willing to pursue more dangerous tactics that would threaten JCP and Pembina,” the memo stated, encouraging “active communication efforts to counter their narrative.

Teneo representatives also met directly with members of the sheriff’s office “to compare notes on monitoring activists” and informed the department that they would begin having “eyes on the ground” at local events pertaining to Jordan Cove.

The company appears to have become integrated into law enforcement operations.In February 2019, Teneo helped organize a meeting featuring representatives of theNational Sheriffs’ Association, the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association, and local sheriffs from counties the pipeline would pass through to coordinate their operations. The next month, at a multiagency planning meeting regarding Jordan Cove organized by the FBI’s Portland division, Teneo delivered an intelligence briefing to the officers and agents in the audience.

“It’s become very normal for private corporations to be on the same team as law enforcement entities and feeding information,” Carleton University’s Jeff Monaghan said. “But in this case, the private entity is actually the one coordinating the fusion of different law enforcement entities. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

In one instance, Teneo Managing Director Jonathan Wackrow asked Coos County Staff Sgt. Doug Strain to classify information the sheriff’s office gathered related to Jordan Cove as “protected critical infrastructure information” bysharing it with the Department of Homeland Security and the Oregon TITAN Fusion Center — part of a national counterterrorism intelligence-sharing network. Doing so would prevent public disclosure of the sheriff’s intelligence-gathering activities based on the 2002 Homeland Security Act,Wackrow wrote.

“We need to formalize this information and ensure that all of the information is labeled as [protected information],” wrote Wackrow, who is also afrequent law enforcement commentator on CNN.

Monaghan expressed alarm that a statute passed in the wake of September 11, ostensibly to protect U.S. infrastructure against attacks by groups like Al Qaeda, would be repurposed this way. “The utilization of that statute is being directed by aprivate corporation working for a resource company,which is actively directing surveillance activities of a public police agency,” he said. “Clearly, this is not about terrorism, it’s not about national security — it’s about domestic policing.”

According to Zanni, Teneo overstepped its role, and the sheriff’s office eventually stopped working with the security firm. He said Teneo attempted to direct the department’s activities. “They wanted us to be subservient to them and they were going to show us how to do security for them,” he said. “Not in my county.”

Teneo did not respond to requests for comment.

“Paid Protesters” and Propagandists

In setting up the November 2018 training for Oregon law enforcement, Strain, the Coos County staff sergeant, reached out to the National Sheriffs’ Association for help. “It is quite likely that we’re going to have Extreme protest here in Coos County and I am hoping to get ahead of the game on the educational media that we could put out,” he wrote. “I would appreciate contact information so we could discuss Options.”

The association’s executive director put Strain in touch with Mark Pfeifle, a former national security official in the George W. Bush administration who worked closely with law enforcement on a campaign to discredit activists during the Standing Rock uprising. Pfeifle introduced Strain to Nate Johnson (who also goes by the name Nick Johnson), one of the former TigerSwan consultants. “We worked with his team to produce videos — documentaries and vignettes — highlighting the challenges at DAPL,” Pfeifle wrote. The National Sheriffs’ Association enlisted Johnson andRobert Rice, another former TigerSwan consultant, to lead a workshop on “how to engage with the public, track protest leaders and groups, and what to not do on social media to take charge of the message early on,” according to a training proposal.

During the Dakota Access pipeline fight, Johnson and Rice had created Facebook pages, videos, and websites aimed at inciting local anger against demonstrators — all without revealing their ties to TigerSwan, the security firm working for Dakota Access parent company Energy Transfer. But newly obtained audio recordings show that the consultants’ work on behalf of energy interests went beyond online agitating — they also encouraged community members to take action against pipeline opponents on the ground.

It’s a tactic that would raise serious questions of constitutionality if police were to deploy it, according to the ACLU’s Simon, since organizing a countercampaign to suppress a political protest would undermine free speech rights. But private companies typically don’t have the same obligation to uphold First Amendment protections.

In August 2017, Rice and Johnson met with a group of North Dakota residents who had spoken out against protesters in support of local police. Audio of the meeting was provided to The Intercept and Type Investigations under the condition that the names of attendees not be disclosed.The Standing Rock camps had been forcibly evicted more than five months earlier, but Rice sought to convince the group that there was still more work to be done.

“It is not outside the realm of possibility to, like, start a nonprofit. We came up with an acronym a couple weeks ago — it was Moms Against Violent Activists,” Rice said. “I’m sure a lot of companies would throw money at this.”

He had an idea of who might fund such an endeavor. “I’m completely speculating, but you could probably, if you did it right, you could probably get anonymous donations from interested parties. Cough — oil — cough,” Rice said. “You’d be famous, and you’d be like, ‘Wow, we started the Moms Against Angry Violent Activists and Fuck Antifa.’ And Fox News will be like, ‘Oh, we want to talk to you!’”

At one point during Rice’s presentation, one of the attendees interjected. “Can I ask: Do you have a vested interest?”

“I don’t have a vested interest other than enjoying the shenanigans,” Rice replied.

The attendee asked more explicitly. “Do y’all work for TigerSwan?”

“That’s a fair question, to which my answer will be, as it was from day one, I am not employed by TigerSwan. I have not ever been employed by TigerSwan,” Rice said. However, he added, “I do have a relationship with TigerSwan.” Rice explained that he had acted as a technology and social media adviser to TigerSwan and had a company email address. “If you were to call TigerSwan and ask whoever answers the phone, ‘Does Robert work there?’ They’d probably say no, but they’ll know who I am, because I do go over there.”

The community members came away unimpressed. “It was almost like he wanted us to go agitate the protesters,” one person who attended, who declined to be named because they did not want to be associated with Rice, told The Intercept and Type Investigations.The attendee said Rice spent a few hundred dollars on beer and pizza for the group, which only made the encounter feel more “sketchy.” “All of us that met with him were really confused and just didn’t want any part of it.”

An internal TigerSwan document from September 2016 states that Rice was developing an “information operation” to confront pipeline opponents, and three former TigerSwan contractors confirmed that Rice had worked for the security firm during their time there. Rice had his own office in TigerSwan’s building and was there several days a week, according to two of the sources. “He had a significant presence at TigerSwan for a guy that didn’t work for TigerSwan,” one of the contractors said, adding that Rice routinely attended meetings with senior staff. One of the contractors said Johnson worked with Rice in the TigerSwan office at times. Johnson is also credited as “camera and editor” on a documentary criticizing the Standing Rock movement, which was produced by a pro-Dakota Access pipeline organization Rice founded.

Neither Rice nor Johnson responded to requests for comment. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer also declined to respond.

The same month that Johnson and Rice gave their presentation in North Dakota, a Facebook page called PA Progress began posting about opponents of Energy Transfer’s Mariner East 2 pipeline in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, portraying them as cynical profiteers with a penchant for violence. In particular, the page sought to “expose” the Gerhart family, who had invited activists to camp out in trees on their property in the pipeline’s path to slow down construction. A video posted by PA Progress spliced together chaotic footage of unrelated riots, while an actor posing as a local community member noted that the Gerharts were “actively recruiting other anarchists to the area.”

[video posted on the PA Progress Facebook page on August 8, 2017, featured an individual identified as “Josh Baker” criticizing anti-pipeline organizers in Pennsylvania. Video: PA Progress]

Bothered by the tenor of the Facebook posts, Grant Stewart, a local resident, arranged a phone call with the page’s administrator, “Nate.” Stewart had seen online conversations about disrupting the tree-sit, and someone had posted a photo from the Gerharts’ driveway. He wondered what kinds of actions PA Progress was promoting. Stewart took careful notes on the exchange, which he shared with The Intercept and Type Investigations.

Nate encouraged Stewart to drive past the Gerharts’ home and capture video footage, which he promised to post on the Facebook page. Anything that could be reported to police, he assured, could help bring an end to the tree-sit. According to Stewart, when he asked what Nate thought about shining headlights on the protesters to intimidate them, Nate replied that a more effective tactic would be to make noise by setting off fireworks or M-80s — or firing gunshots.

A week later, Paste magazine published an article linking Nate Johnson to the PA Progress page. Nate “fell off the face of the earth,” as Stewart put it, and the Facebook page came down soon after. But the posts on PA Progress had already prompted threats of gun violence against Elise Gerhart and her family. “It’s outrageous that police themselves would hire someone who is responsible for the kinds of dangerous online hit pieces that targeted me and my family, simply because we stood up for ourselves and our land against a dangerous pipeline,” Gerhart said in an interview.

Law enforcement officers from across Oregon attended the November 2018 training that Johnson and Rice conducted in North Bend, a roster acquired via open records request shows. Security personnel for Pembina and the Oregon-based timber corporation Roseburg Forest Products were also on hand. The new details about Rice’s and Johnson’s previous operations raise questions about the kinds of tactics that public safety officers consider appropriate and are learning to deploy. The National Sheriffs’ Association, which organized the event, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Opposing Jordan Cove

If the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approves the project, Pembina could begin preliminary construction — including tree felling along the pipeline route — this spring. To complete construction of the pipeline, however, the company will have to obtain a number of permits from Oregon state agencies.

In May, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality ruled against granting Jordan Cove a Clean Water Act permit, dealing the project a major setback. Last month, Pembina abruptly withdrew an application to remove sediment from Coos Bay to make way for the terminal after the Oregon Department of State Lands denied its request for a deadline extension. Although some project opponents celebrated,other analysts have speculated that the company may be hoping federal approvals will provide leverage to convince the state to get on board.

The Trump administration is already seeking changes that would allow the federal government to override state permits. In April, Trump signed two executive orders designed to speed up oil and gas pipeline projects. One of the orders instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to review a section of the Clean Water Act that requires corporations to obtain the approval of state governments for pipeline construction. In effect, the order could eliminate the authority of state environmental agencies to decide the fate of projects like Jordan Cove.

“Too often badly needed energy infrastructure is being held back by special-interest groups, entrenched bureaucracies, and radical activists,” Trump stated in announcing the order. The EPA’s review is still pending.

Meanwhile, Jordan Cove opponents will likely step up their efforts to pressure Brown and other members of her administration to use their authority to force the project’s cancelation. Owen Walker, a member of Southern Oregon Rising Tide, said the occupation of the governor’s office grew out of mounting frustration with her unwillingness to live up to her rhetoric on the urgency of the climate crisis.

If Governor Brown cares about climate change as much as she claims to, there’s no reason she shouldn’t oppose Jordan Cove LNG today. Governors in New York and Washington have come out publicly against similar fracked gas projects,” Walker said. “It’s time for Governor Brown to be a climate leader by opposing this project.”

Another participant in the demonstration at Brown’s office, Thomas Joseph II of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, was among those who protested the Dakota Access pipeline. He and others from the Klamath River basin in California and Oregon camped near Standing Rock for six months, running a free kitchen and participating in direct actions. “Part of our stand was to learn by firsthand experience how to defend your community against a pipeline,” he said. The Pacific Connecter pipeline is slated to pass under the Klamath River, the lifeline of a number of West Coast Indigenous nations, including the Hoopa.

Joseph said the alignment of public and private security forces against Jordan Cove opponents does not intimidate him. “We know their tactics. We know their thought process,” he said. Fossil fuel companies and law enforcement agencies may be sharing resources and information gleaned from past protests. But he suggested that, at the end of the day, protesters are learning from their previous struggles as well. “If they think we’re going to do the same thing we did at Standing Rock,” Joseph said, “that is their fault.”

not sure this fits

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-a-right-wing-disinformation-network-keeps-republicans-steeped-in-lies/

no lnx

How a right-wing disinformation network keeps Republicans steeped in lies

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 30, 2019

While Democrats continue to wring their hands over the 2020 presidential primary, Donald Trump and his enablers decided a long time ago that the eventual nominee would be Joe Biden. That explains the pressure the president put on Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens, a move that led to his impeachment.

But just as we saw with the attempts to smear Hillary Clinton in 2016, the disinformation campaign about the Bidens will continue unabated in an effort to drive up negative impressions of the former vice president. Nicholas Grosman has documented the origins of one of those campaigns that is underway.

Hunter Biden is currently involved in a paternity suit in Arkansas. The New York Post recently ran an article titled, “Private-eye firm claims Hunter Biden is linked to multiple criminal probes.” Here’s the lead paragraph.

Hunter Biden is the subject of multiple criminal investigations related to “fraud, money laundering and a counterfeiting scheme,” it’s claimed in court documents filed Monday in his Arkansas paternity case.

The documents they are referring to were filed by a Florida-based private-eye firm, D&A Investigations, and were almost immediately dismissed by the judge because they had nothing to do with the paternity case. Nowhere in the documents did D&A name the agencies behind the purported criminal probes of Biden.

Grossman did what the reporters at the New York Post apparently couldn’t be bothered to do: he googled D&A Investigations and found their web site. The home page lists “active investigations.”

D&A opened an independent investigation (Transparency) in August 2016 into Hillary R. Clinton (HRC), Jeffrey Epstein & the Democrat National Committee (DNC) claims of: Russia broke into the DNC.

At the time, William J. Clinton (WJC), HRC, John Podesta, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry were in collusion with Rogue Officials in the British Isles, Hong Kong, Iran, Russia, the Ukraine, United States, et al, to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

In other words, the firm is dedicated to spreading conspiracy theories—particularly those that originate as Russian propaganda.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Brent Langdon, responded to the filings by saying that D&A was engaged in “a scheme by a non-party simply to make scandalous allegations in the pending suit to gain some quick media attention.” As confirmation, the charges were never substantiated and were almost immediately dismissed, and yet they’ve caught fire on right wing media.

Two days after the article in the Post, the story showed up on Fox News under the title, “Hunter Biden is subject of criminal probes, says PI firm hinting at more incriminating details.” Other than repeating what had already been reported and using the opportunity to rehash the claims about Burisma, they added that D&A told them “to expect an additional filing soon, and hinted that more incriminating details concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings would soon come to light.”

The story was then picked up by OAN and made its way to RealClearPolitics. At this point, the title simply reads: “Court Filing Shows Hunter Biden Earned $156 Million From Ukraine Corruption.” We can assume that social media feeds are now inundated with these false claims.

It is worth noting that this attempt to spread disinformation is so blatant that reputable news organizations are simply ignoring it. But as Grossman writes, “to figure out what to do about disinformation, first we need understand how it works.” This case gives us an example of how that happens. Either news organizations like the New York Post, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics are complicit with a firm like D&A Investigations or they aren’t interested in verifying information when it reinforces their biases. As a result, they spread disinformation and lies.

That is how Trump is able to maintain his 40+ percent support in the polls. Republicans have a propaganda network that keeps them steeped in lies. Back in 2016, mainstream media gave credence to those lies about Hillary Clinton in the name of balance.Beyond offering a mea culpa for their complicity, reporters should do their part to expose the propaganda network for what it is. This story would be a good place to start.

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/08/energy-transfer-tigerswan-bribery-conspiracy-charges/

pIPELINE GIANT ENERGY TRANSFER AND ITS PRIVATE SECURITY CONTRACTORS FACE BRIBERY CHARGES IN PENNSYLVANIA

Alleen Brown

December 8 2019, 10:25 a.m.

SECURITY PERSONNEL WORKING for Energy Transfer, one of the largest and most controversial oil and gas pipeline companies in the U.S., have been charged with bribery and criminal conspiracy for allegedly recruiting, hiring, and hiding payments to Pennsylvania state constables.

According to a complaint filed December 3 by Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan, Energy Transfer illegally hired 19 constables to guard the Mariner East 2 natural gas pipeline, which has faced opposition from residents over the project’s ecological impact, explosion risks, and violations of their property rights. The constables were encouraged to wear their uniforms and badges and carry their guns, in what Hogan described as an intimidation tactic.

While it is not uncommon for companies to hire uniformed off-duty police officers to provide security services, in Pennsylvania, constables are elected officials barred from private security work. Furthermore, they are required to report outside income of more than $1,300. None of the seven who met that threshold did, according to the complaint. And in what appeared to be an attempt to hide the illegal activity, Energy Transfer paid the constables via a series of subcontractors, in many instances using handwritten checks that were not claimed for tax purposes.

Hogan charged an Energy Transfer security manager, two contractors for the security firm TigerSwan, and two former state troopers for involvement in what his office called a “buy-a-badge scheme.”

“We do not believe these charges have any merit,” Energy Transfer spokesperson Amanda Gorgueiro told The Intercept in an emailed statement. “The Pennsylvania constables in question were hired by an independent, Pennsylvania-based security firm to help maintain the safety of our worksites. Local law enforcement never expressed any objection to this security plan when it was discussed and implemented.”

TigerSwan did not reply to requests for comment.

omg

IARC in Lyon for its fiftieth anniversary.

The strange Mr. Watts

Prowling among scientists and international civil servants, the man was seeking details about the functioning of IARC, its funding, its monograph program, and so on. A few months later, at the end of October 2016, the man reappeared—this time at the annual conference of the Ramazzini Institute, a renowned and respected cancer research organization based near Bologna, Italy. Why on Earth the Ramazzini? Perhaps because the Italian institute had announced a few months earlier that it was going to conduct its own carcinogenicity study on glyphosate.

Christopher Watts– that’s the man’s name – asked questions about the independence of the institute and its funding sources. Because he used an e-mail address that ended “@economist.com,” those he approached did not question his affiliation to the prestigious British weekly, The Economist. To the scientists who did ask for details, he said he worked for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a consultancy which is a subsidiary of the British press group.

The EIU confirmed that Mr. Watts had indeed produced several reports for them but was “unable to confirm in what capacity he attended” the two conferences. “During that time, he was working on a story for The Economist, which ultimately was not published.” Oddly enough, the weekly’s newsroom replied “there’s no one of that name on our staff.”

The only thing that seems clear is the name of a company that Mr. Watts created at the end of 2014: Corporate Intelligence Advisory Company. According to the administrative documents, the personal address of Mr. Watts is located in Albania. He did not wish to answer questions from Le Monde.

Intrusive and bureaucratic guerrilla warfare

see cyber chapter ggl doc:

Thesis: private intel/ security is the convergence of Public Relations, Oppo Research, private security, private and public law enforcement, MIC, hedge fund [Stratfor, In Q Tel], Silicon Valley, crisis-risk management…NB pvt can basically break law, or at least is not bound by laws cops are; Ivory/ threatnened with trespassing while trying to get to EPA HQ in oil spill eg; tigerswan etc collecting evidence so cops can prosecute [also JOK];

draws on intercept

line 3 enbridge

https://truthout.org/articles/police-are-using-private-security-firms-to-target-anti-pipeline-organizers/

Concerned about massive anti-pipeline protests like those seen in North Dakota in 2016, Minnesota law enforcement is keeping tabs on opponents of the Line 3 tar sands project.

HONOR THE EARTH VIA FACEBOOK

Minnesota police, according to records obtained by The Intercept, have spent more than a year gearing up for a militarized standoff with those opposed to Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline, even borrowing from the playbook of North Dakota law enforcement, which launched a brutal response to the Indigenous-led demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016.

The documents detail preparations for what Minnesota police expect could compare to the massive anti-pipeline mobilization at Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, where law enforcement unleashed concussion grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons on protesters.

The:{ :(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:Line 3 project, which Calgary-based Enbridge says is its largest ever, would replace a cracked and corroded crude oil pipeline installed in the 1960s with a 1,031-mile pipeline that would run from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to a Wisconsin shipping hub. If constructed, it would cut through Native American reservations and treaty lands in Northern Minnesota, jeopardizing fresh water resources and wild rice beds that local Indigenous peoples consider their “primary economic, nutritional, and cultural resource.”

As The Intercept outlines,

In 2017, Enbridge began construction on the tiny portion of Line 3 that cuts into Wisconsin. Local police reports describe two security firms, Raven Executive and Security Services and Securitas, keeping tabs on protesters and reporting their activities to law enforcement. It was the protests in Wisconsin that sparked the multi-state coordination led by Minnesota. The state’s fusion center developed a reputation as “the keepers of information for the Enbridge protests,” as one sheriff’s analyst put it, receiving information on Line 3 opponents from police departments in at least three states. While fusion centers were originally established to facilitate counterterrorism intelligence-sharing, they have increasingly played a role in monitoring, interpreting, and criminalizing political activity.

State officials claim the fusion center monitors protesters to prevent crime and violence, but SUNY Cortland sociology professor Brendan McQuade, who is writing a book on fusion centers, described the activities revealed in the records as part of a broader, alarming trend.

“What the police aren’t mentioning is that people will likely be living lives of terror and privation by the end of the century due to climate change, and it’s these battles right now that will decide whether that happens,” he noted. “Instead, they are casting even entirely nonviolent actions as threats to so-called critical infrastructure.”

One Line 3 opponent, Honor the Earth executive director Winona LaDuke, was reported to the fusion center because she was suspected of owning property that may be used to house protesters. “I don’t understand why I’m being looked at as a criminal when a corporation is proposing to destroy my water,” she said. “I am not a criminal, I am a water protector.”

Attorney Tara Houska, a member of the Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation and the national campaigns director of Honor the Earth, is another key organizer against Line 3.

“It’s clear that Enbridge is doing everything they can to have a very highly skilled force of security and law enforcement at their fingertips to do what they can to stop any resistance to Line 3,” Houska, who also took part in the struggle at Standing Rock, told The Intercept. “And if anything, it seems like what they’re doing is much more coordinated than what we saw in North Dakota.”

Houska was among the Line 3 opponents who recently met with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Washington, DC to discuss the serious threats the project poses to treaty territories.

draws on intercept

line 3

https://truthout.org/articles/police-are-using-private-security-firms-to-target-anti-pipeline-organizers/

tigerswan dapl:

https://www.**revealn**ews.org/article/paramilitary-security-tracked-and-targeted-nodapl-activists-as-jihadists-docs-show/

As people nationwide rallied last year to support the Standing Rock Sioux’s attempts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, a private security firm with experience fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan launched anintrusive military-style surveillance and counterintelligence campaign against the activists and their allies, according to internal company documents.

Its surveillance targets includedeveryone from Native American demonstrators to the actress Shailene Woodley, along with organizations includingBlack Lives Matter, 350.org, Veterans for Peace, the Catholic Worker Movement, and Food and Water Watch.The records label the protestors “jihadists” and seek to justify escalating action against them.

The activities of the company spanned, but were not limited to, the four states through which the pipeline passes: South Dakota, North Dakota,Iowa, and Illinois.The documents also show that its surveillance efforts continued after the breakup of the Standing Rock camps this winter, including at ongoing pipeline protests in southeastern Pennsylvania, Iowa, and South Dakota.

The internal documents from the firm, called TigerSwan, take the form of situation reports, or “sitreps,” prepared between September and April for its employer, Texas-based pipeline developer Energy Transfer Partners. The records detail a range of tactics that experts from the American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild, and Electronic Frontier Foundation say would likely be illegal if conducted by law enforcement.

A private security company probably doesn’t face the same prohibitions, legal scholars say, but the close collaboration between TigerSwan and local, state, and federal authorities detailed in the firm’s internal reports raised red flags with them. Several legal experts described the contractor’s tactics as highly disturbing and perhaps unprecedented.

“It’s like a big brother society, with aprivate corporation— with even less restraints than the government — totally interfering with our right to privacy, free speech, assembly, and religious freedom,” said prominent civil rights attorney Jeff Haas, who works with the National Lawyers Guild and represents several of the nearly 800 people arrested while opposing the pipeline.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/01/afghanistan-civilian-private-security/581263/

no lnx

A Security Company Cashed In on America’s Wars—And Then Disappeared

Sabre International Security employed guards for the Canadian embassy in Kabul. When a bombing left many of them dead or wounded, the company vanished.

Ryan Garcia

ABIGAIL FIELDING-SMITH, CROFTON BLACK, AND THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM JAN 29, 2019 GLOBAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY RYAN GARCIA

This article was supported by The Masthead, The Atlantic’s membership program. Learn more.

Man Bahadur Thapa had his doubts about the safety of the travel arrangements. Taliban spies were everywhere in the Afghan capital, and the bus transporting him and the Canadian embassy’s other guards, all Nepalese and Indian, was unarmored. But Thapa was used to pushing worries to the back of his mind. After all, he thought, the British company he worked for was trustworthy. So, as he did nearly every day, the 50-year-old boarded a yellow and white minibus and rode through the Kabul dawn to his shift.

Thapa’s memory of that day—June 20, 2016—stops about two minutes into the journey. He woke up 13 days later in the hospital, his body riven with shrapnel. A bomb had ripped through the bus, killing 13 of his fellow Nepalese and two Indians.

His family had seen the blast on the news, but didn’t find out he was wounded until a doctor treating him thought to pick up his patient’s phone. As Thapa lay in a hospital bed, his son-in-law, who speaks English, emailed the guard’s employers, a well-established company called Sabre International Security, with urgent questions: How would the critical surgery Thapa needed be paid for? What would happen to him afterward, given that he clearly wouldn’t be able to work for a long time? Apart from one brush-off email, no one responded. That might have been the last that anyone in the West heard of the guards’ plight if a Nepali labor-rights expert helping the families hadn’t asked an American lawyer he knew to take a look at the case.

Matthew Handley specializes in getting compensation for vulnerable workers in war zones, and has taken on military-contracting giants like the company formerly known as KBR Halliburton. This case, however, was different: When Handley Googled Sabre, he couldn't even find a company website. There seemed to be no way of getting in touch with anyone.

Afghan security forces inspect the aftermath of the bombing that struck the minibus Thapa was traveling in. (Omar Sobhani / Reuters)

“It was one of the most extreme examples of a company and all indicators of its presence just really disappearing,” he told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

It has been more than a decade since a group of contractors killed more than a dozen people in central Baghdad, drawing attention to the emergence of a global private military industry. The world has since gotten so used to companies assuming traditional state functions that the Donald Trump administration is now considering handing over the Afghan War to them. But as the strange, seemingly overnight disappearance of one of its major players shows, the industry doesn’t yet appear to be significantly constrained by rules and norms. As Handley would discover, Sabre’s corporate history had as many red flags as it did prestigious contracts. And this was not even the first time the company had done a vanishing act.

Hired guns are, as the cliché goes, the world’s second-oldest profession. For much of history, they were how wars were fought. But by the 19th century, nation-states with their own armies had emerged as the dominant model, and mercenaries were squeezed out of the picture. The few companies that remained tended to operate in the shadows.

All this changed after 9/11 and, in particular, with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Pentagon needed to respond quickly to the chaos engulfing the country. The easiest and least politically costly way of freeing up more troops to fight was to hire contractors to do everything else—namely, protect diplomats, bases, and cargo. From 2003 to 2008, the United States spent a total of $5.3 billion on security firms in Iraq. New companies sprang up to profit from the opportunity, among them Sabre International Security.

These firms were hired to protect assets, not engage in fighting. But as a company called Blackwater demonstrated when its guards shot 14 civilians dead in a Baghdad square in 2007, the lines can easily blur in a war zone. After the Blackwater scandal, the industry and its government clients scrambled to introduce voluntary professional standards. Soon, the U.S. was winding down its presence in Iraq, and public concern about the privatization of war faded.

The private-security industry, however, did not—it evolved. Some firms were consolidated into larger entities through a process of buyouts and mergers. Many changed their focus to more discreet, profitable areas, such as cybersecurity and intelligence. Others carried on fulfilling the market for so-called hard-security services, which got a boost from new government clients such as China, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates. The usefulness of contractors as a low-profile way of waging war was meanwhile noticed in other countries like Russia, where new firms started to grow.

The sector still has no binding regulations, though. It doesn’t even have an agreed-upon definition of a private military or security company. Experts struggle to estimate the industry’s annual earnings, so it’s hard to say how much it has expanded. “It has grown more organic and wild, like an untended garden,” Sean McFate, a former private military contractor who has written a book on the sector, told The Bureau. “The industry has grown up, and the U.S. has gone away and stopped paying attention. It’s crazy now—Vegas meets military action.”

In 2004, a veteran of the British Special Air Service (SAS), Thomas McDonald, set up a firm in Iraq called Sabre International Security. McDonald—who is more widely known by his middle name, Frank—has a rather forbidding reputation, reinforced by the fact that he is missing part of a finger on one hand. McDonald had little business experience, one former colleague recalled. Like others The Bureau spoke with who worked for or did business with Sabre, they did not want to be identified, fearing retribution for breaking the code of silence that prevails in the industry. McDonald himself did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Briton started a security firm with an Iraqi partner named Namir El Akabi, whom he had met at a Baghdad social event. The Iraqi businessman took a 77.5 percent stake in Sabre’s Iraq operation, according to court documents. The two men were very different: El Akabi was the scion of a well-off Iraqi émigré family who had returned to Iraq after the U.S. invasion and started a string of companies in construction and logistics. A smooth talker with a plump, lightly stubbled face, El Akabi was portrayed in the media as an Iraqi success story.

Sabre picked up a slew of contracts to guard U.S. military bases and, later, several other sites, including the Iraqi Parliament, the airport for the southern holy city of Najaf, and the facilities for Russian energy firms. Many of its guards were brought in from poor countries. Former Gurkhas—mostly Nepalis or Indians who have fought in the British or Indian armies—were in particularly high demand among contractors in Iraq because of their reputation for toughness and bravery. Security companies “were hoovering up anyone who claimed to be a Gurkha,” says James Sinclair, a lawyer who was working in the Middle East at the time for FSI Worldwide, a recruitment firm that promotes ethical hiring practices. “If you could hold a gun and looked vaguely Nepalese, that was good enough, especially given the attrition rates.”

Profits were substantial in the early years of the occupation. “Everyone was filling their boots,” Sinclair told The Bureau. “It was a bonanza.” In an official assessment of U.S.-government spending on security contractors in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, Sabre appears as the sixth biggest beneficiary, netting nearly $300 million.

By 2012, conditions had become more challenging for security contractors, not least because the American military had withdrawn the vast majority of its forces. Sabre in particular found itself on the wrong side of Iraq’s then–prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. Iraqi employees started to hide the fact that they worked for Sabre, worried about their safety. Then Maliki announced, in 2013, that his own son had been dispatched to arrest El Akabi for running an unauthorized security company and other offenses. In a December 2018 telephone interview with The Bureau from Iraq, El Akabi denied that an arrest warrant had been issued for him, insisting that Maliki’s comments were false. He told The Bureau that he had not been charged or arrested, and provided a document stating that he had not been convicted of any crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, which he said came from the Iraqi interior ministry (the authenticity of this document could not be confirmed). He admitted, however, that 2012-13 was a time of difficulty for Sabre in Iraq.

“My reaction was, Shit, I’m in big trouble.”

At around this time, McDonald bought a company, Near East Security Services, and transferred Sabre’s assets to the new firm, according to testimony in a subsequent court case. (El Akabi told The Bureau that this happened without his knowledge). One former Sabre employee told The Bureau that this new company was effectively Sabre under a different name. “They rented a company name, an Iraqi company, and shifted all the contracts to this” one, the former employee explained. “We established the new company. Where [has] Sabre gone? Nobody knows!”

An American firm called Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions was among those that went looking. Torres had partnered with Sabre on Pentagon contracts, but in 2011 the two firms started fighting over money in the U.S. courts. After four years of litigation, Torres’s chief executive, Jerry Torres, wanted to settle with El Akabi, according to court documents. The two eventually got together in Jordan in June 2015, and according to Torres’s court testimony, El Akabi threw him a curveball. “Good luck collecting,” Torres reported him as saying, “because Sabre does not exist.”

After the El Akabi meeting, Torres sent a trusted employee, Ashur Elisha, to Iraq to investigate. If Sabre had in fact disappeared, as El Akabi claimed, then the expensive lawsuit could be dismissed and the American company might even get a previous goodwill payment reimbursed. What happened next illustrates just how murky the world of private military contracting can be.

Elisha, who spent weeks on the ground, concluded in a court statement that Sabre had been banned from operating in Iraq and that company assets had indeed been transferred to Near East Security Services. But after he returned to Jordan, Elisha received a call from a stranger who wanted to meet. According to Elisha’s statement filed in the court proceedings, when the pair eventually sat down, Elisha was handed a document. It was a statement retracting his findings that Sabre no longer existed in Iraq. Elisha said that the stranger—who was identified in court testimony as Hatem Atrakchi—was “very polite.” He asked whether Elisha would sign the document, for which he would be given an unspecified “service fee.”

“My reaction was, Shit, I’m in big trouble,” Elisha said. He didn’t sign the statement, and decided instead to leave the country for his own safety.

Sabre’s lawyer in the U.S. court where the Torres case was being fought out, Timothy Mills, stated in court documents that he had no involvement in Atrakchi’s approaching Elisha. A declaration filed by one member of Sabre’s management team confirmed that the approach was made without Mills’s knowledge, and also denied that Elisha had been offered a fee. For several months, Sabre’s representatives battled on with the argument that the company did exist. In his interview with The Bureau, El Akabi conceded that Sabre was effectively a “shell company” after 2012, but was adamant that it did still legally exist and that court testimonies on behalf of Torres had misrepresented the situation. In 2016, the court deadlock broke: Mills abruptly withdrew from the case, citing in court documents “an unprecedented breakdown” in communication with his client. It’s not clear what this meant—the explanation made available to the public was redacted because of client confidentiality. New lawyers eventually settled the case out of court, and a blanket of silence descended on Sabre in Iraq.

...

https://www.securitydegreehub.com/most-powerful-private-security-companies-in-the-world/

30 MOST POWERFUL PRIVATE SECURITY COMPANIES IN THE WORLD

Fear may be a strong motivator in uncertain times. Governments can only stretch so far, meaning some people are more than willing to pay private security companies to go the extra mile in protecting their loved ones. Firms operating in crisis zones around the world require protection as well, which has created a need for more vigilant and military-minded security service providers. Sometimes, these companies also assist governments and armed forces, providing highly trained armed personnel and logistical support. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it’s difficult to put a price tag on peace of mind. Read on for 30 of the most powerful private security companies in the world.

Originally going under the name Blackwater USA, American private military company ACADEMI was established in 1997 by ex-U.S. Navy SEAL Erik Prince. Blackwater was awarded its first government contract in 2000, and in order for the company to fulfill it, more than 100,000 sailors were trained for action. Blackwater was heavily – and controversially – involved in the Iraq War. In 2009 Prince stepped down as CEO, and the firm, by then known as Blackwater Worldwide, was rebranded Xe Services LLC. In 2010 private investors took over, and the company became ACADEMI in 2011. According to its official website, ACADEMI offers “stability and protection to people and locations experiencing turmoil.” And it works with “federal, state and local government clients, global commercial customers, numerous law enforcement and intelligence organizations and agencies and allied governments worldwide.”

ICTS INTERNATIONAL

Former Israel Security Agencyand El Al Israel Airlines security personnel formed Israeli private security company ICTS International N.V. in 1982. The firm’s head offices are in Amstelveen in the Netherlands. According to its website, ICTS International “provides advanced, comprehensive security solutions for the aviation and homeland security sectors, with an emphasis on transportation security in general, and railroad and mass transport security in particular.” Set up in 2005, I-SEC International Security BV is the company’s airport and airline security wing. Towards the end of the 1990s, ICTS International created a computer technology called Advanced Passenger Screening, which is utilized by the majority of major U.S. airlines. Based on passenger information, the algorithm calculates the likelihood of passengers posing some kind of threat. In 2008 ICTS International’s revenue totaled $98.8 million.

NORTHBRIDGE SERVICES GROUP

Registered in the Dominican Republic, but with offices in Kentucky, Ukraine and the U.K., Northbridge Services Group is a private military contractor that claims to provide “highly confidential and effective security related services designed to address the needs of governments, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, the corporate sector and prominent individuals.” Northbridge’s current CEO and president is ex-U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and Vietnam veteran Robert Kovacic, who took up his post in 2003. The company’s key services include security advisory and training, operational and intelligence support, and strategic communications. Northbridge also supports law enforcement agencies in the realm of terrorism, narcotics, organized crime, poaching, smuggling, maritime defense and the protection of natural resources. In 2003 the company made headlines when it controversially offered to capture beleaguered then Liberian president Charles Taylor for a fee of $4 million. In 2012 Northbridge’s revenue totaled $50.5 million.

TRIPLE CANOPY

Triple Canopy is a private security, risk management and defense contracting company based in Reston, Virginia. Former U.S. Special Forces soldiers established the firm in Chicago in 2003, and a significant number of Triple Canopy’s employees are former special ops personnel and police officers. According to its official website, the company “provides mission support, security and training services to government agencies and multinational corporations worldwide.” Triple Canopy employs no less than 5,500 staff, and its clients include NGOs, telecommunication companies, oil and gas businesses, mining firms and financial organizations from all around the world. The company’s chain of command counts former Delta Force soldiers, consultants and analysts among its number. Triple Canopy rose to prominence in 2004 in Iraq, and one of its Iraq defense contracts is valued at $1.5 billion.

PROSEGUR

Prosegur is a multinational private security company with 150,000 staff spread out over Europe, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. The firm was established in 1976, and its head office is located in Madrid. Its service areas comprise manned guarding, home security, fire defense, and security technology and consulting. Prosegur is Spain’s biggest private security firm, and in 1987 it made history as the first company of its kind to be listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange. In 2011 the firm earned $233.748 million. With a task force of over 4,700 armored vans, Prosegur is well known for its cash-in-transit services, which it outsources to banks around the world. The company’s technology services include CCTV monitoring, access control, and “anti-intrusion and perimeter detection.” Meanwhile, guarding provisions feature armed and unarmed guards as well as K-9 units and VIP protection.

AEGIS DEFENCE SERVICES

Aegis Defence Services is a British private military company established in 2002 by former Sandline International director and British soldier Tim Spicer. The firm has foreign offices in Iraq, Kenya, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bahrain and the USA. It also had a hand in the establishment of the British Association of Private Security Companies. The company is involved with NGO, aerospace, and government and diplomatic sectors, as well as oil, gas and mining industries. Currently, Aegis has a $293 million contract with the U.S. government to provide protection and assistance during the restructuring of Iraq. In 2011 the company also secured a $497 million contract to protect the U.S. Embassy situated in Kabul, Afghanistan.

GK SIERRA

Founded in 2007, Washington, D.C.- and Portland-based private military company GK Sierra started out producing secure communication technology for the U.S. government. Two years later, the firm, which is a wing of Genoa-Knowlton, Inc., started offering investigation and intelligence options among its services. At present GK Sierra gathers intelligence for the CIA. As well as having a Tel-Aviv office,the company is said to employ high-ranking Mossad operatives, which has led to accusations that it is in fact part of the Israeli Intelligence Service – allegations that GK Sierra has emphatically rejected. The company’s specialties include corporate investigation and intelligence, digital forensics, and encryption technology, while it is also purported to have “direct action” operatives on the ground in various countries around the world.

KBR is a private military, engineering and construction company based in Houston. It was formed in 1998, when Halliburton subsumed Dresser Industries and amalgamated Dresser subsidiary The M. W. Kellogg Co with its own subsidiary Brown & Root. KBR has worked in countries like Cuba, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Currently, its American workforce in Iraq numbers 14,000, and it is also said to have the biggest U.S. government contract there – beating out all other Iraq-based companies. In 2008, KBR declared that it was buying Alabama’s BE&K in a deal said to be worth $550 million. In 2011 KBR earned $540 million. And today it employs more than 27,000 people in over 70 countries across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Middle East. Over the years, the firm has, however, been involved in its share of controversies – from allegations of sexual assault lodged by female employees, to paying off Nigerian officials for government contracts.

CORPS SECURITY

Formerly known as the Corps of Commissionaires, Corps Security is a British security company that officially speaking reports to Queen Elizabeth II. Established in 1859, it is said to be the world’s oldest security firm, and today it has a team of about 3,000 security personnel plus a dozen offices throughout the U.K. The company’s specialty is corporate security – including event protection, electronic surveillance, and consulting. According to its official website, Corps Security is “the leading supplier of specialist security solutions.” Dressed, upon request, in the company’s iconic Commissionaire Uniforms, Corps Security’s event protection unit secures high-profile sporting sites like Wembley Stadium and has a presence at important annual affairs such as the London Lord Mayor Show. Other services include manned guarding, CCTV surveillance, alarm response and key holding.

DEFION INTERNACIONAL

Headquartered in Lima, Peru, Defion Internacional is a private military company that supplies specialist security staff who are mostly recruited from Latin America. These personnel are often then contracted out to other companies; in fact, Defion Internacional first became known when it trained recruits to work with Triple Canopy in Iraq. Defion Internacional has bureaus in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Iraq and Dubai, and the firm specializes in training bodyguards, drivers, and logistics and administrative personnel. Latin American security staff stationed in the Middle East have been described as “guns for hire.” Moreover: “A Peruvian in Baghdad will not panic if he has to face a blast or a blackout because he has already experienced that on the streets of Lima,” Defion Internacional administrative manager Alejandro Fernandez has explained.

ICTS EUROPE

Established as an independent company in 1999, ICTS Europe describes itself as “a global expert in the provision of leading edge security solutions for the transportation and public safety industries.” It offers rail, corporate and energy protection services, but its specialty is airport and airline security. And in addition, ICTS Europe has K-9, technology and “global solutions” capabilities. The firm currently works with more than 250 rail, education, business, health, aviation and public sector groups in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. ICTS Europe’s website claims that it is positively regarded in the aviation sector for its “forward thinking approach to problem solving and… capability to think outside the box when addressing unique operational challenges.” The company’s clients include Air France, Emirates, Etihad Airways, British Airways, and major airports like London’s Gatwick and Heathrow. In 2012 it brought in $479.072 million in revenue.

CHUBB FIRE & SECURITY

English brothers and lock makers Charles and Jeremiah Chubb established the company now known as Chubb Fire & Security in 1818 – the same year they patented their Chubb detector lock. The firm introduced its first safe in 1835; then in the 1870s it expanded to the USA. At the time, the country was suffering from violent bank robberies, so Chubb responded by producing a time lock to be attached to the doors of vaults and safes. In 2000 Chubb sold its lock division and switched its focus to security systems. Since 2003 the firm has been owned by U.S. multinational conglomerate United Technologies Corporation, and it is today based around the world. In the U.K., services include mobile patrols, remote surveillance and response, and key holding. Meanwhile, South African extras comprise armed response teams, electric fencing, and a special Chubb911 24-hour emergency hotline. In Australia, the company also offers a cash-in-transit service.

ANDREWS INTERNATIONAL

Established in Los Angeles in 1988, Andrews International is a California-based private security firm with offices across America. It also boasts branches in Mexico, Honduras and Colombia and has operatives in Canada and India. Andrews International provides armed and unarmed security guards for businesses as well as offering specialist government and defense department solutions. In 2009 it bought Canadian global security giant GardaWorld’s U.S. and Mexican guarding services for a sum exceeding $44 million. Andrews International describes itself as “one of the premier professional providers of a comprehensive range of superior security and risk mitigation services.” It adds that its security personnel protect “national landmarks, major tourist attractions, industrial sites, educational and financial institutions, healthcare facilities, and other locations where security stakes and client expectations are high.”

ASIA SECURITY GROUP

Asia Security Group is a somewhat mysterious seeming Afghanistan-based private security company that, according to its LinkedIn profile, offers “a range of consultancy and manpower support services to government and corporate clients to improve capability and ensure security.” The company has branches in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad and Kandahar and boasts a team of licensed armed troops, promising “comprehensive security solutions tailored to your business needs, while mitigating risks, across Afghanistan.” Asia Security Group has worked with the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, guarding supply convoys in war-torn parts of the country. The company’s personnel have also joined up with U.S. private military firm DynCorp. Services include security, risk assessment and management, and “business development.”

ERINYS INTERNATIONAL

British private security firm Erinys International has a head office in Cyprus as well as branches in the U.K., South Africa, and the Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. The company operates within the mineral extraction, oil and gas, public, and NGO markets, and it also boasts an infrastructural development division. In each of these areas, it helps clients to appreciate risks they may face no matter how “remote and challenging the environment.” Erinys International was launched in 2001 by former British soldier Jonathan Garratt. Erinys South Africa was added in 2002, and the company has had a presence in a number of locations in Africa and the Middle East. In 2003 the firm worked with the Iraq Ministry of Oil, training and supplying a 16,000-strong “Oil Protection Force” guarding 282 sites.

TSU PROTECTION SERVICES

Former South Africanpoliceman and Special Forces officer Chris Beukes founded TSU Protection Services in 1999, and it now claims to be one of South Africa’s top private security firms. “I realized that whilst there were lots of security companies across the country, very few were specializing in executive protection and the higher risk services, largely due to the lack of trained staff in these areas,” explained Beukes. “As a police officer the pay was adequate but not great, so I decided to launch TSU Protection Services to meet the gap in the market.” Now, with a force of highly trained operatives, the company serves high-profile businesses and other clients. Its specialties include armed personal escorts, executive protection and support, crowd control, and maritime security.

INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGENCE LIMITED

International Intelligence Limited is a British firm that focuses on counter-espionage and investigations. It was formed in 2002 by ex-aide to the British Royal Family Alex Bomberg. The company offers private investigation, technical surveillance counter-measure, intelligence, counter-intelligence, counter-surveillance and counter-espionage services, among others. Employees comprise former law enforcement, military, financial investigation and intelligence personnel. And specialist services include financial forensics, computer forensic analysis and satellite tracking. International Intelligence Limited has operated in the private, corporate and commercial sectors, as well as with government agencies, embassies and different police forces.

UNITY RESOURCES GROUP

Australian firm Unity Resources Group was founded in 2000, and although its personnel are largely Antipodean, the company’s head office is in Dubai, UAE. Unity Resources Group offers crisis, risk, security, logistics, aviation, executive and medical services. It describes itself as “a trusted and reliable solutions provider of land, sea and air services in complex, challenging and fragile environments where dependable infrastructure may not be present.” The firm has offices in Europe, Australasia, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East and Central Asia, and it employs more than 1,200 people. Unity Resources Group provides event security, security in high-risk zones, asset security and guarding, and more. In 2007 some of its operatives were involved in a controversial incident in Baghdad in which two civilians were killed, but the firm defended the conduct of its employees.

SENACA GROUP

The Senaca Group is a wide-ranging private security firm. Based in Ireland, the company includes Senaca EU and Senaca Canada and conducts operations around the world. Subdivisions comprise Senaca Guarding, Senaca Cash Management Services, Senaca Training, Senaca Tech, and private security company Integrated Risk Management Services. The firm works within the oil and gas, transport and logistics, financial, tourism, government, health, property, maritime, energy, NGO, and policing sectors. Integrated Risk Management Services offers guards, patrols, corporate security, alarm response and key holding, while Senaca Cash Management Services specializes in the transportation of money. At the same time, Senaca Tech affords a range of surveillance and “access control solutions” technology. Ex-Irish Army Special Forces major Jim Farrell and security veteran Terry Downes co-founded the Senaca Group in 2009. They also co-founded Integrated Risk Management Services in 2005.

PINKERTON GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Spy and detective Allan Pinkerton founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago in 1850. Nowadays, Pinkerton Government Services “offers a full range of cleared protective services designed to meet the specific requirements of the U.S. government.” It provides regular security services such as guards, fire fighting and emergency medical technicians, as well as specialized resources like sniffer dogs. In 2003 Pinkerton was acquired by Swedish security giant Securitas AB, and it is in the process of switching its name to Securitas Critical Infrastructure. Pinkerton has a lot of history: the company was tasked with tracking down notorious criminals such as Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, at one time worked with Abraham Lincoln, and has received mention on TV shows such as Boardwalk Empire.

THE BRINK’S COMPANY

Although based in Virginia, The Brink’s Company has a network that dots the global landscape: the firm operates in over 100 countries, with a staff of roughly 70,000. Perry Brink established Brink’s City Express in Chicago in 1859 and began using a horse-drawn wagon to move customers’ suitcases from local railroad stations to hotels. In 1891 the company made its first cash-in-transit delivery, transporting half a dozen bags filled with silver dollars. These days, Brink’s is perhaps best known for its fleet of armored vans, which it uses to help see to the needs of governments, mints, banks, jewelers and other businesses. It also offers ICD and airport security, guarding, and logistical and cash management services. In 2011 Brink’s brought in $3.9 billion in revenue.

CACI INTERNATIONAL

CACI International was founded in Santa Monica, California in 1962 as the California Analysis Center, Incorporated. In 1967 the acronym was switched to signify the Consolidated Analysis Center, Incorporated; and the acronym itself became the company’s formal moniker in 1973. Although based in Arlington, Virginia, CACI International has more than 120 branches and employs around 15,000 people throughout the U.S. and Europe. The firm’s area of expertise is information technology, and it provides, in its own words, “information solutions and services in support of national security missions and government transformation for intelligence, defense, and federal civilian customers.” CACI International plays a role in assisting with matters concerning global threats and the readiness of America’s armed forces. In 2012 the company’s revenue was $3.8 billion.

BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON

U.S. tech consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton has head offices in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Edwin G. Booz, James L. Allen and Carl L. Hamilton founded the firm in 1914, and fast-forward to 2012 and its revenue reached $5.859 billion. Booz Allen Hamilton’s areas of service include engineering, management consulting and technology, but it also operates as a defense contractor. The company works with civilian and government institutions, and its website describes its main goal as providing “trusted consulting and professional services in an increasingly complex and growing world.” As far as civilian agencies go, the firm serves the financial, policing, transport, Homeland Security, and government health and management sectors, among others. It also works with the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, as well as defense organizations, space agencies and intelligence groups.

CONTROL RISKS

Based in London, England, but with 36 offices around the world, Control Risks is an international professional services and consulting firm dedicated to “helping organizations manage political, integrity and security risks in complex and hostile environments.” Control Risks began as a division of insurance firm Hogg Robinson in 1975 and then became independent in 1982. As major companies around the world began working in lesser-known areas in the 1990s, Control Risks focused on developing its intelligence and investigation services. In its website statement, the company boasts that it provides “strategic consultancy, expert analysis and in-depth investigations through to handling sensitive political issues and providing practical on the ground protection and support.” Following its work in Iraq securing oil company assets, Control Risks generated $223.32 million in revenue in 2010.

GARDAWORLD

Canadian firm GardaWorld claims to be the “largest privately-owned security company in the world.” The company’s headquarters are in Montreal, Quebec, but it employs around 45,000 people across North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. GardaWorld secures individuals and resources in at least 140 cities and protects 28 North American airports. Its international protective services department aims to safeguard “clients in complex and emerging markets.” Meanwhile, the company’s cash management services process $5 billion a day. In August 2013 GardaWorld acquired G4S’ Canadian cash management division in a deal thought to be worth around $110 million. And in December 2013 GardaWorld agreed upon a 12-year cash management deal with Bank of America valued at $1.4 billion. At the end of April 2012, GardaWorld’s quarterly revenue totaled some $300 million.

DYNCORP

The history of Annandale, Virginia-based private military contractor DynCorp stretches back to 1951, when Land-Air, Inc. was obtained by California Eastern Airways to form what would become California Eastern Aviation, Inc. In 1962 the company was renamed Dynalectron Corporation, which was renamed DynCorp in 1987. DynCorp’s services include security, aviation support, intelligence, and contingency ops. The firm’s yearly revenue exceeds $3 billion, and over 96 percent of that figure is generated by U.S. government contracts. DynCorp has provided support for the U.S. forces in countries like Peru, Colombia, Somalia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Bolivia, Angola and Haiti. The company was also called in to help with recovery action in Louisiana and the surrounding regions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

ALLIEDBARTON

AlliedBarton is a Pennsylvania-based private security company that was established in 1957. Staffed by over 55,000 employees, who are divided among 120 offices around the USA, AlliedBarton is the biggest U.S.-owned security officer business in America. The company focuses on various different areas, including higher education campuses, commercial property, aerospace and defense sites, housing, malls, healthcare facilities, and chemical industries. Through its “Hire Our Heroes” program, AlliedBarton recruits former members of the armed forces, reservists and their relatives to bolster its staff of “highly trained security personnel.” In November 2013 Victory Media included AlliedBarton on its 2014 lists of Top Military Friendly and Military Spouse Friendly companies to work for. The firm specializes in “local response” and “national support.” In 2012 its annual revenue exceeded $1.9 billion.

ADT Corporation was founded in 1874 and today is one of America’s leading alarm and security monitoring companies. Based in Boca Ranton, Florida, the company operates in 35 countries around the world, supplying alarms, monitoring equipment and peace of mind to homes and small businesses. In South Africa, ADT provides armed response teams and around-the-clock surveillance. Originally known as American District Telegraph, ADT started out as a telegraph delivery business. Then from 1910, under new leadership from AT&T, it started to switch focus to other fields such as fire and intruder alarms. In 2011 ADT boasted an estimated 6.4 million clients and yearly turnover of $3.1 billion. And in 2012 it split from Swiss parent company Tyco International and commenced trading on the New York Stock Exchange as an independent company.

SECURITAS AB

Established in Helsingborg, Sweden in 1934, Securitas AB is a worldwide security company with head offices in Stockholm. In 2012 the company had around 300,000 workers spread out over 53 countries and an annual revenue of over $10 billion. Securitas AB’s services include guards and patrols, investigations, home alarm systems, loss prevention, security consulting and guard dog supply. Its three chief departments are Security Services Europe, Security Services Ibero-America and Security Services North America. To facilitate its cash in transit service, Securitas AB operates specialist vehicles with metal safes as well as a fleet of bulletproof jeeps. It also specializes in securing sporting, business and recreational events.

G4S describes itself as “the world’s leading global security and outsourcing group,” specializing “in outsourcing of business processes in sectors where security and safety risks are considered a strategic threat.” The British multinational security giant was set up in 2004 when London-based company Securicor amalgamated with Danish business Group 4 Falck. Currently, G4S employs more than 620,000 people, which makes it the third biggest employer in the private sector globally. In 2012 G4S turned over well over $12 billion. The company offers a range of services, including the supply of security personnel, monitoring equipment, response units and secure prisoner transportation. G4S also works with governments overseas to deliver security.

2010

no lnx

The Nation

BLOG

Firm Tied to Israeli Special Forces Wants US Security Contracts in Jerusalem, Iraq, Afghanistan

As the Obama Administration continues the military privatization agenda, a CIA-connected firm and an Israeli-run company named Instinctive Shooting International are looking to cash in.

By Jeremy ScahillTwitter APRIL 29, 2010

The Obama administration has continued the Bush-era reliance on private contractors to sustain the US occupation of Iraq and the US operations in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Obama has surpassed Bush’s reliance on contractors with current contractor levels surpassing 100,000 Defense Department contractors deployed. In Iraq, Obama has maintained the long-standing ratio of one contractor to every US soldier.

General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan/Pakistan, said recently that he believes the US has “created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be.” He added: “I think it doesn’t save money. I actually think it would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved, increase the number of military if necessary.”

Despite such proclamations, the pattern of dependence on contractors is continuing unabated—and not just within the Department of Defense.

On April 20, the US State Department posted a solicitation for armed private security contractors to deploy in “critical or higher than critical threat areas” globally under its Worldwide Protective Services program. Among the firms that have held these contracts are Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy and Armor Group.ArmorGroup was exposed last year by whistleblowers for a range of misconduct at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Among the actions revealed by the Project on Government Oversight were hazing rituals involving nudity and heavy drinking that at times included personnel urinating on each other. The whistleblowers alleged that ArmorGroup personnel created a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Last December, following POGO’s revelations, the State Department said it was phasing out ArmorGroup.

In its solicitation for contract bids, the State Department says it will hire as many as six “qualified US firms” for “anticipated and unanticipated personal protective, static guard, and emergency response” functions. The contracts are slated to last one year with the potential for four, year-long options.

To qualify for the contracts, security companies must have a total annual value of at least $15 million in security contracts and must possess a valid “Final Secret Facility Security Clearance.” After the contracts are awarded, the State Department says that it will then sponsor the contractor for “Top Secret Facility Clearance.” In addition, bidding companies must have at least two years of experience operating in “austere and hostile environments overseas” such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq and experience in “operating long term personal protective security details for executive level dignitaries.” The solicitation indicates that the work will include “a static guard and emergency response team requirement in Baghdad, Iraq, a static guard and emergency response team requirement in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a personal protective security service requirement in Jerusalem.”

Among the companies listed as “interested vendors” to bid on the contracts are the predictable list ofindustry giants: L-3 Services, SAIC, USIS, Northrop Grumman, and DynCorp. Blackwater, which has been a prime contractor under the WPS program since the beginning of the Iraq invasion, does not appear to be bidding on the contract. If that remains the case, it could represent the end of an era in the mercenary business. In a sea of heavy-hitters, two lesser-known firms in particular that have expressed interest in the contracts jump out: Instinctive Shooting International and Evergreen International Aviation.

Hiring Instinctive Shooting International for any type of armed contract in a Muslim country, particularly to operate in Jerusalem with a stamp of US government legitimacy, should be cause for serious concern and Congressional inquiry. Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) was founded by Hanan Yadin, a former member of the Israel National Counter-Terrorism Agency and a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to his bio [PDF], Hanan “received advanced training at the Israeli Anti-Terror Academy and served as an instructor at the Israeli Military Intelligence Academy. As part of a Special Ops unit he executed high-risk missions against terrorist’s cells. Hanan is an expert marksman and has completed advanced training in crisis response, Krav Maga (the Israeli unarmed fighting system), urban warfare and tactical operations.”

I encountered ISI operatives, all former Israeli soldiers, manning an armed check-point in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, in 2005, its website described ISI’s personnel as “veterans of the Israeli special task forces from the following Israeli government bodies: Israel Defense Force (IDF), Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, Instructors of Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, General Security Service (GSS or ‘Shin Beit’), Other restricted intelligence agencies.”

Today the website has changed dramatically. Its main graphic is of US soldiers wearing American flag patches, wielding automatic weapons in what appears to be Iraq. “After 9/11, ISI was able to bring to bear all of its resources, expertise and experience to work with U.S. military and government agencies in gaining a deeper understanding of radical Islam and provide proven tactical techniques to improve counter-terror operations,” according to the website. This would hardly be ISI’s first US government contract. It has received many training and security contracts since its founding in 1993. According to the company, it is currently under a five-year contract with the US Army that began in November 2009.

Evergreen has had long-standing ties to the CIA. “In 1980 an Evergreen plane flew the recently deposed Shah of Iran from Panama to Egypt, hours before the Panamanian government was due to receive an extradition request from the new government in Tehran,” according to SourceWatch. “Giving rides to dictators is something of a specialty for the company – it also allowed El Salvador’s President Duarte to use its helicopter, which was officially in the country to help repair power lines. And according to a series of articles in The Oregonian in 1988, Evergreen’s owner and founder Delford M. Smith ‘…acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States.’”

Evergreen is perhaps best known more recently for offering—unsolicited—its security services to Oregon county clerks ahead of the 2008 elections. “During this crucial election Evergreen Defense and Security Services has recognized the potential conflict that could occur on November 4,” an email from company president Evergreen president Tom Wiggins to election officials stated. “Never has there been a more heated battle in the race for president and voters seem more involved and determined to achieve their respective goals. EDSS proposes to post sentries at each voting center on November 4 to assure that disputes among citizens do not get out of control. All guards will be unarmed but capable of stopping any violence that may occur, and detaining troublemakers until law enforcement help arrives.” The offer was suspect on several fronts, not the least of which being that Oregon has no polling places and votes by mail.

According to State Department documents, among the projects up for bidding are:

—Private security teams in Jerusalem. The solicitation calls for 46 personnel, including 36 “security specialists” and team/shift leaders for armed details.

—Embassy guards and an Emergency Response Team in Kabul. The solicitation calls for 219 personnel, including a 142-member embassy guard force and 49 “emergency response” personnel.

—Embassy guards and an Emergency Response Team in Baghdad, Iraq. The solicitation calls for 551 personnel, including 357 “armed guards” and an Emergency Response Team consisting of 30 protective security specialists and four “designated defense marksmen.”

The US embassy in Iraq, according to the documents, requires the greatest number of contractors. This is likely because the embassy there is the largest of any embassy of any nation in history.

The State Department has a conference for prospective bidders scheduled for April 27-28 in Arlington, Virginia. Attendance is mandatory for interested companies.

Jeremy ScahillTWITTERJeremy Scahill is the author of the best-selling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. Nation Books released his second book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, in 2013. He is the writer, with David Riker, and a producer of the documentary feature film Dirty Wars, released by IFC Films in 2013.

intercept

In response, Tahoe hired International Security and Defense Management, a private security firm run by a U.S. Special Forces veteran, to assemble a security plan. The company hired Golan Group, founded by former Israeli special forces officers, to carry it out.

Muñoz was one of few women who stood front and center at the anti-mine actions. “They realized I was one of the leaders,” she said.

Advocates for land defenders have observed a pattern in the cases of violence they’ve investigated in San Rafael and across Guatemala. “They start to portray human rights defenders as terrorists,” said Maria Reyes, who worked closely with Escobal opponents as an official with Protection International. Extractive industries push the narrative that “thisisn’t a peaceful protest, but rather a blockade that is violating the rights of others.” [THEREFORE VIOLENT?!]

“There’s an escalation that begins with the act of defamation,” Santos explained. “It can reach such a level that it ends in the ‘civil death’ of the human rights defender — when they are captured and brought to prison — or with their physical death, when they are assassinated.”

By the end of 2012, events around the mine were escalating. Protests erupted as Tahoe installed high-voltage lines to power the project.A cement plant and a storage facility were set on fire. Then, in January, two security guards were killed in a confrontation with armed men. The resistance movement denied responsibility for the violence and property damage, suggesting that agents provocateur might have been responsible. The mine’s head of security claimed that surveillance cameras weren’t working at the time, and the identity of the perpetrators never emerged. Two months later, four Xinca leaders, including the president of the Xinca parliament, were kidnapped after participating in a referendum on the mine. One of them was killed.

Meanwhile, Tahoe’s pressure campaign on the Guatemalan government was paying off. The National Security Commission decided that unrest against any mine should be considered a matter ofnational security, according to a report by Plaza Pública, and an opaque interagency group made up of environment, energy, and national security officials was formed to monitor such projects.

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-private-contractors-have-created-shadow-nsa/

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether top Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy sold access to the president’s inaugural team to foreign clients, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Investigators are probing whether Broidy, who was appointed deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after raising money for Trump during the 2016 campaign, was paid millions by foreign prospective clients for “special access” to Trump’s 2017 inauguration, according to the report. Selling access to foreign donors could violate campaign finance, lobbying and money-laundering laws.

...angola, romania

Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to ... - The Intercept

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/29/family-separation-protests-surveillance/

3 days ago - LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, a Virginia-based firm, gathered ... Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to Monitor Family Separation Protests ... Day Protests' across the US on June 30,” the analyst's email read. ... the administration was instead spying on them for expressing themselves.” ...

...The calls for action were mounting. It was mid-June, and the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which saw thousands of migrant children separated from their parents, was producing waves of outrage. By the end of the month, hundreds of protests were planned in towns and cities across the country. As the plans moved forward, others took notice.

In the days leading up to the protests, a private intelligence company that works with the Department of Homeland Security was monitoring the activity on the ground. Documents shared with The Intercept by the American Immigration Council, obtained through a freedom of information request, show thatLookingGlass Cyber Solutions, a Virginia-based firm, gathered information on more than 600 demonstrations across the country, information that was then shared with DHS and state-level law enforcement agencies.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe War on Immigrants]

Tracking Facebook accounts affiliated with the protests and disseminating the intelligence to law enforcement fusion centers nationwide, the operation drilled down on physical locations where demonstrations were planned: a high school in Sebring, Florida; a church in Carbondale, Illinois; the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City; a Denny’s in Carlsbad, California; and “the old Kmart parking lot” in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. All were logged by street address and the time of the planned demonstrations.

A “Threat Analyst” in Reston, Virginia, sent the finished intelligence to a “LookingGlass Shared Services” address on June 28, two days before the protests were set to begin.

“LookingGlass has compiled a spreadsheet forState Fusion Centers detailing over 600 planned ‘Family Separation Day Protests’ across the US on June 30,” the analyst’s email read. “These originated from Cyber Threat Center (CTC) and are broken out by City and State; they provide physical location and the Facebook event ID.”

The following morning, the headquarters of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis disseminated the information to its staff, which was later circulated among Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel.

In a statement, LookingGlass Chief Marketing Officer Joy Nemitz told The Intercept, “As a matter of company policy and confidentiality, we do not comment on matters pertaining to clients or work performed and refer all queries to the company in question.” A DHS official, speaking on background, described the information LookingGlass collected as “unsolicited.”

“The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) works with federal partners, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and state and local law enforcement through the National Network of Fusion Centers to assess threats and analyze trends in activity,” the official said in an email. “In this particular instance, a private sector entity shared unsolicited information it collected through publicly available channels with DHS I&A on protests that were scheduled to take place near Federal facilities. Throughout the summer of 2018, the Department was at a heightened state of security due to ongoing protests outside of Federal facilities and physical threats to DHS employees which did result in a least one arrest.”

The official added: “When DHS I&A receives this type of information, we are required to share it consistent with DHS policy to ensure stakeholders have appropriate situational awareness regarding personnel, facilities, suspicious activities, emerging threats, incidents, operations, and operational capabilities affecting the Department or the Homeland Security Enterprise.”

Jess Morales Rocketto, co-chair of Families Belong Together and a lead organizer of last year’s protests, condemned the monitoring of the demonstrations. “Those protests represented the best of democracy,” she told The Intercept. “It’s especially concerning given that these protests were basically thousands of moms and their kids, thousands of families, and that the Trump administration’s response to that was to put them on a watch list.”

The emails confirming the protest surveillance were released in an ongoing freedom of information battle that the American Immigration Council, or AIC — in collaboration with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in Need of Defense, Women’s Refugee Commission, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP — is waging to pry documents surrounding family separation from the government.

“We’ve been getting them in drips,” Emily Creighton, deputy legal director at the AIC, said of the documents beginning to surface as a result of the litigation. “We have been told in litigation that ICE, DHS, and CBP have hundreds of thousands of responsive records.”

For immigration attorneys working with families directly impacted by the administration’s “zero tolerance” regime, news of protests being monitored makes an ugly situation even worse.

“The public rightly expressed outrage when they learned of the Trump administration’s shocking policy of ripping children away from their parents,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in a lawsuit challenging family separation, told The Intercept. “They’ll again be outraged to learn that, rather than focusing resources on reuniting these families, the administration was instead spying on them for expressing themselves.”

Intel for Profit

As an operation, LookingGlass Cyber Solutions appears to fit squarely in the larger universe of for-profit intelligence providers pitching services to law enforcement in a post-9/11 world.

In 2015, the company acquired Cyveillance, “a leader in open-source threat intelligence” that, according to the firm’s website, “delivers an open source intelligence-led approach to security through continuous, comprehensive monitoring and analysis of millions of online data sources to protect client information, infrastructure, and employees from physical and online threats.” Records indicate that Cyveillance previously provided contract work for the U.S. State Department.

In a jargon-heavy brochure, LookingGlass describes its “DHS Cybersecurity Shared Services Program for State Fusion Centers” as a combination of services and platforms designed to provide “insight and technical indicators to support a range of activities from high-level situational awareness to actionable recourse.” The company touts the expertise of its analysts and their ability to provide “deep-dive analysis, technical indicators, and situational awareness reporting,” while highlighting the role of its Cyber Threat Center as “an aggregator of global news, social media, and physical security events aligned to an organization’s area of interest.”

“CTC can be configured to provide analysts with cyber news matching topics of relevance and physical incident alerts in user-defined proximity ranges around a given point on the map,” the company reports. “Since global events can have impacts at local levels, analysts utilizing CTC will benefit from the data collection breadth of global sources from the surface web and Deep and Dark Web.”

Stood up in the wake of the September 11 attacks as another node in the war on terror, the fusion centers that companies like LookingGlass cater to have long been the target of criticism.

In a withering 2012 report, congressional investigators found that “DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” The report was particularly hard on DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — the office that saw fit to distribute LookingGlass’s monitoring of family separation protests.

“This document shows that DHS accepts and distributes surveillance of protest activity on social media, including to fusion centers, which have a track record of monitoring innocent and constitutionally protected conduct,” Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept, after reviewing LookingGlass’s work product.

“It also demonstrates the reach of surveillance contractors and the products they’re peddling,” Handeyside added. “We need to know a lot more about these products and how the government is using them.”

Targeting Critics of the President

In the last two years, law enforcement agencies executing the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have cracked down on critics of the president’s policies.

In Arizona, the U.S. Border Patrol and Trump administration attorneys have aggressively targeted humanitarian volunteers providing food, water, and medical aid to migrants trekking through the desert with criminal prosecutions. And in the San Diego-Tijuana area, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol, and counterparts in Mexican law enforcement have run a sweeping intelligence-gathering operation targeting immigration attorneys, journalists, and activists working with, and around, migrant caravans.

The monitoring of last year’s family separation protest now adds a private intelligence firm to the mix.

“This is a chilling revelation, but follows an even scarier trend of constant government surveillance and policing of immigrant communities, and targeting of activists and journalists,” Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center working on the FOIA litigation that led to the latest revelations, said in an email to The Intercept. “The new records unveil how the administration views voices of dissent as a threat to its disinformation campaigns. Congress should be asking questions about why DHS resources are going towards efforts to target opposition to hateful anti-immigrant policies.”

Morales Rocketto, the organizer with Families Belong Together, agrees. Within the immigrant rights community, Morales Rocketto said, it is well-known “that the administration has been harassing some of the most vocal activists, lawyers, and journalists.”

“The DHS inspector general should investigate this,” she said. “Congress should demand answers about this, because the government should not spy on Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights.”

no lnx vid

Blackwater founder pitches plan to privatize Afghanistan war

Erik Prince makes the case for replacing U.S. troops with private contractors in Afghanistan.

The founder of the private security firm Blackwater is pushing for a plan to deploy a group of mercenaries in Venezuela to support the people’s efforts to topple Socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro, according to a report.

Erik Prince is said to have been advocating for the Venezuelan plan for the last several months, seeking political support and investment from powerful pro-Trump figures and wealthy exiles from the Latin American country.

TATA & PRINCE: PRECEDENT FOR SYRIA, AFGHANISTAN PULLOUT LIES WITH WWII-ERA FLYING TIGERS

According to Reuters, Prince suggested during meetings in the U.S. and Europe that a private army of 5,000 would be deployed in support of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido.

The State Department didn’t respond to Fox News’s request for comment about the report.

But a person familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking told Reuters it’s unlikely the White House would support Prince’s plan. A spokesman for Prince, meanwhile, insisted that Prince “has no plans to operate or implement an operation in Venezuela.”

Trump warns Moscow over troops in Venezuela, says 'all options are open'Video

The reported push in Venezuela comes following amid a failed attempt to convince Trump to outsource the Afghanistan War to private contractors that Prince said could do more and for a lower cost than the thousands of U.S. military troops currently stationed in the country. Blackwater is now named Academi. Prince's new company is Frontier Services Group.

“History supports presidential authorization for the use of private military contractors during transition operations to help the U.S. and its allies achieve strategic aims. Now is the time to begin the transition, secure our vital interests, and husband our precious resources,” an op-ed co-authorized by Prince read back in January.

DRUG TRAFFICKING KEEPING MADURO IN POWER IN VENEZUELA, ANALYSTS SAY

But Trump reportedly followed the advice of his cabinet members such as former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and decided not to pursue the plan.

Yet when it comes to Venezuela, Prince claims that the private troops would also facilitate the change in the country as it would likely help to cause a so-called “dynamic event” that would end the stalemate that existed for over four months now, with the socialist regime still in place, according to Reuters.

Guaido has largely been recognized as the legitimate leader of the Venezuela, with most Western countries throwing their support behind him, but his rule hasn’t yet been accepted by the military and security agencies, which remain loyal to Maduro.

GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Such situation caused an impasse, with no side having full claim to legitimacy and Maduro continuing to rule the country by force.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

looking glass june 2016 spy on protestors

OMFG

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/17/libyan_humanitarian_crisis_worsens_as_over

...GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the role of Erik Prince and his former mercenary organization, Blackwater, in Libya?

ANAS EL GOMATI: Well, it’s really the UAE’s role that is behind this. I think, in 2010, theUAE, Mohammed bin Zayed, gave over half a billion dollars to the Frontier Services Group, which is now led by Erik Prince, formerly of Blackwater. And since then, allegedly, according to Western print media, Erik Prince, alongside the UAE, established an air base, a military base, a drone base, in eastern Libya between 2014 and '16.Now, this is well documented by the U.N. Panel of Experts on the Security Council, where the year that Libya was supposed to be delivered an enduring peace, a sustainable peace, a concession by both sides in the civil war, in 2016, when they announced the beginning of this new chapter in Libya's history and delivered this Government of National Accord in Tripoli, was the very year that the UAE violated the arms embargo in Libya in unprecedented levels but also began to establish the final touches and final pieces of this air base in eastern Libya called al-Khadim. Now, it possesses a massive arsenal of drones, Wing Loongs, which are Chinese kind of mimics of the American Predator F1 drone, but it also houses at least two Air Tractors, which are kind of industrial—industrial kind of aircraft that have been kitted out with air-to-surface missiles. And at the very least, this kind of move—I mean, it’s very, very difficult to pin down, so that’s whyI’m using the word “alleged,” because I don’t want to get sued. But at the very least, there have been many, many investigations that have pinned this to Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group.

At least in the last two years, that arsenal of drones and Air Tractors have been used to support Khalifa Haftar’s ground offensives in Benghazi and in Derna, that have displaced around 100,000 people in Benghazi but have also led to 1,700 people being imprisoned in Derna. And many of those ground invasions, many of those military assaults, are now being investigated by the ICC for war crimes. So, I think it’s that kind of tacit and underlying kind of discreet military assistance that the UAEprovided, that the French provided in Benghazi, that has not only bolstered Khalifa Haftar in the east of the country but has been the platform and the pretext for this latest offensive in Tripoli.

And we should remind ourselves that thi

...

:{==

https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/rise-china-s-private-armies

[pix: Special forces of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – which links China and Russia with Central Asian countries and India and Pakistan – take part in joint military excercises]

The increasing use of private security companies and military contractors has changed the conduct of war in recent years. In Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and other fault lines across the world, small teams of elite operators – in units consisting of 15 men or fewer – are outperforming conventional troops. Increasingly arms and power are held in private hands, instead of the state. As a result, the authority of the state can be undermined and trust between governments broken.

Central Asia is now emerging as a front line for operations by private security companies. The region will be a central transport conduit for China’s regional development project, the Belt and Road Initiative, which promises to revive connections between the East and West. Increased interest by Chinese private security companies in the region, if unregulated, would damage regional stability and cooperation.

Chinese private security companies grew up after 11 Chinese builders working on a World Bank project in Afghanistan were shot dead by the Taliban in 2004. Before 2006, when a new external security affairs department was established, Chinese embassies had little back-up if citizens were attacked or needed to be evacuated.

While the Chinese government has been hesitant to send police forces to protect its interests abroad, China’s expanding footprint in Africa and other unstable areas around the world has spurred demand for private security. Between 2006 and 2010, the government had to rescue 6,000 citizens from countries including East Timor, Chad, Lebanon, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Thailand and Haiti. In 2011, conditions in Libya and Egypt meant 48,000 Chinese citizens had to be evacuated.

Mounting costs and obstacles in coordinating evacuation efforts may have led the Chinese government to re-evaluate its security strategy for people working abroad. Early experiments with hiring western security contractors were disappointing, which only served to increase the demand for homegrown security firms. Importantly, the impetus to create these Chinese security firms was driven by market incentives, not political mandate.

Beijing Security Service and Hua Xin Zhong An Security Service, two of the first security enterprises to spring up, offered basic security provision for clients operating in mainland China, with limited interests in Africa. By 2010, a new breed of security firm had emerged offering highly trained special operations forces to protect Chinese personnel in state-owned Chinese oil and gas companies or banks working in such places as Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. These included Shandong Huawei Security Group, the first Chinese security firm to open an overseas office, and DeWe Security Service, a firm operating in 37 countries that played a vital role in evacuations from African war zones. Boutique security firms such as Ding Tai An Yuan Security have found new markets addressing specific security challenges unique to the Belt and Road Initiative.

Africa has been the main region of operation for these Chinese firms, but as the Belt and Road project expands through Central Asia, the energy and resources of those firms will probably be redirected there.

Hybrid species on the march

Over the past 15 years, the Chinese private security industry has modernized the services offered to clients, who remain mostly Chinese. Until 2014, these firms were all funded and manned by Chinese nationals. The emergence of Frontier Services Group (FSG) has seen a radical change. Headed by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and founder of Blackwater, this Hong Kong-based company is the first Chinese-funded, American-operated private security group. The organization, previously known as DVN (Holdings) Limited, was originally an aviation and logistics company providing additional security and training services. Its corporate structure is unique in China. Many of its senior management, including Prince as chairman, are non-Chinese – specifically retired American military specialists. With Chinese backing, Prince stated that he could ‘pursue [his] vision for Africa and globally in a transparent manner and with the most respected partners’. Indeed, many of his firm’s clients are Chinese private companies or state-owned enterprises with interests in infrastructure, oil and gas, and mining in Africa.

From the beginning, FSG has made efforts to distinguish itself from Blackwater, the private military company now renamed Academi, whose reputation was tarnished by the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. FSG has enjoyed success with logistical projects in Africa and has hired legal advisers and auditors to provide transparent annual reports for public scrutiny. In 2016, FSG became a service provider for companies participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, and began setting up offices in Myanmar, Laos and Pakistan. Future offices are planned for Thailand, Cambodia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

‘Most security challenges stem from clashes between the locals and workers and the fear that an influx of Chinese will affect demographics’

In late 2017, FSG revealed an expanded range of services – including an offer to the Afghan government of the use of its aircraft for close-support combat operations. In 2018, Prince offered the US government use of his private contractors to bring the 17-year Afghan conflict to an end. His proposal argued that traditional troop deployments could be substituted by 6,000 contractors and 2,000 US Special Forces, cutting the annual cost of the war from $68 billion to $5.5 billion.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has developed closer relations with Central Asia through cooperative security arrangements. The framework of the Shanghai Five group, comprising China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan, successfully resolved border disputes between its members and was later expanded into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to create a platform for cooperation on counterterrorism and security. In recent years, China’s economic interests have entered the picture; for example, its oil and gas interests in Central Asia are growing year on year and are challenging the dominance of Russian energy groups Gazprom and Lukoil. One example of a Chinese project is the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline, that travels across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, Chinese state-owned enterprises have invested heavily in energy, infrastructure and logistics, helping to connect China to Middle Eastern markets and beyond. Chinese projects and workers continue to pour into the region, and new security challenges will naturally rise. The question is how will Chinese companies choose to resolve these new challenges? Western observers believe that private security firms can protect Chinese interests in Central Asia as they have in Africa. However, Central Asian observers would disagree: unlike many African states, the countries of Central Asia possess effective troops who can deal with security threats, because stability is their principal foreign policy concern. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, for example, are ranked among the top 50 most powerful armies in the world, according to Global Firepower.

Most of the security challenges facing Chinese companies stem not from the inability of Central Asian countries to provide basic security, but from clashes between the local populations and workers and the deeply rooted fear that an influx of Chinese workers might affect demographics.

Examples were the clashes between locals and workers in 2014 at two oil refinery construction sites owned by Chinese construction company Zhongda Group in Kyrgyzstan, one at Tokmok and the other in nearby Kara-Balta. The Kyrgyz government intervened successfully in both instances to deport some of the unruly Chinese workers.

The latter type of security challenge was seen in Kazakhstan in early 2016, when thousands of protesters rallied against land reforms proposed by the Kazakh government in the oil cities of Atyrau and Aktau, because they feared the new rules would permit Chinese investors to buy Kazakh land. In some cases, security challenges take the form of terrorist attacks, such as the suicide bombing of the Chinese embassy in Bishkek by locals linked with Uyghur separatists that injured three local embassy staff.

...

---

https://books.google.com/books?id=IOQjNuxMrOEC&dq=Cam+Simpson+private+intel+security&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry

Front Cover

P. W. Singer

Cornell University Press, Jun 16, 2011

https://www.c-span.org/video/?446055-9/author-discussion-war

JUNE 10, 2018

Author Discussion on War

Journalist Monte Reel reported on the U-2 spy plane program of the Cold War-era and Cam Simpson recounted the capture and killing of defense contractors working for the U.S., during the Iraq War.

brotherhood of spies U2

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-girl-from-kathmandu-cam-simpson/1126699090?ean=9780062449719

shocking story of the massacre of a group of Nepalese men working as Defense contractors for the United States Government during the Iraq War, and the widow who dedicated her life to finding justice for her husband and the other victims—a riveting tale of courageous heroes, corporate war profiteers, international business, exploitation, trafficking, and human rights in the age of global capitalism that reveals how modern power truly works.

In August of 2004, twelve men left their village in Nepal for jobs at a five-star luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan. They had no idea that they had actually been hired for sub-contract work on an American military base in Iraq. But fate took an even darker turn when the dozen men were kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists. Their gruesome deaths were captured in one of the first graphic execution videos disseminated on the web—the largest massacre of contractors during the war. Compounding the tragedy, their deaths received little notice.

dem in chains

koch network spy on jrnl" upping the transaction costs for the other side" 232

early FAR hodaI

From out of the AM radio static, from out of the Internet ether, comes a voice like gravel, a bulldog barking out warnings to a nation under siege. This Austin, Texas-based “infowarrior” shouts through the streets, up to the fat cat drones and clones of the International Banker’s Cartel lodged deep in the overstuffed leather chairs of the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Reserve, Capitol Hill. His voice booming and crackling through the New World Order halls of power in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), atireless seeker of the TRUTH against a blossoming police state and One World Government—this is Alex Jones.

Jones, radio and Internet talkshow host of the Alex Jones Show, documentarian, author and producer of websites like Infowars and Prison Planet, is the undisputed heavyweight king of conspiracy theory coverage, a niche he has successfully carved out in an enabling corporate media environment.

Jones’ coverage of the state of the nation revolves around one central theory: Agents of the New World Order, operating through several private think tanks and policy development groups (the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group), the United Nations and treasonous enclaves within the federal government (particularly the Treasury, Federal Reserve and FEMA), are working to establish a One World Government by engineering the total collapse of the American republic and the imposition of a police state.

This message reaches millions of listeners worldwide, through 68 AM, FM and satellite radio stations that either broadcast the weekday Alex Jones Show or carry the two-hour weekend edition. While Jones is a veteran radio broadcaster, he has become especially adept at propagating his message of impending doom via the Internet. Jones calls on his followers to spread his films and links to his stories lest they should disappear forever, claiming that corporations such as Google and its subsidiary, YouTube, are actively blocking and censoring access to his websites and documentaries.

“We’re winning the infowar and they’re cheating!” proclaimed Jones in an Internet censorship advisory video posted on YouTube (8/7/08).

Of course they’re cheating! They want tyranny! They want dehumanization! If every listener out there who’s on the website will just start copying our stories, emailing them out to everybody, posting them on their sites…. We have to let the New World Order know we’re not going to put up with this!

As noted by David Knowles of AOLNews (10/6/10), such tactics boost his websites’ Google rankings and draw more readers and viewers to his content; Jones’ documentary, The Obama Deception—with well over 8 million views through YouTube alone—is one of the top-viewed films through Google Video. The irony of using YouTube to attack YouTube in order to boost views on YouTube is apparently lost on his viewers; the Orwellian puppetmasters at Google seem to have created the ideal platform for Jones’ “infowar.”

According to Heidi Beirich, director of research and special projects at the hate group-monitoring Southern Poverty Law Center and contributing editor of the group’s Intelligence Report, Jones is a galvanizing force in the complex of domestic “militias” and other extremist groups the SPLC calls the “Patriot Movement.”

“This guy is conspiracy central,” Beirich says of Jones. “He’s had a hand in promoting every kooky anti-government theory I can think of: The economy is gonna crater, martial law is coming, Obama’s gonna steal your guns—you name it, he’s involved in it.”

Although Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment, he regularly fires back at his detractors, SPLC chief among them. SPLC says Jones is a dangerous media “enabler” of potentially violent fringe groups; Jones says SPLC is instrumental in drafting “Patriot” domestic terrorist watch lists for the Department of Homeland Security.

Like many of Jones’ conspiratorial assertions, there is a kernel of truth buried in this claim. According to Beirich, the single largest bloc of subscribers to SPLC’s Intelligence Report, a quarterly publication with approximately 50,000 subscribers, are law enforcement personnel.

However, says Beirich, it’s not true that “there is some secret plan where we work behind closed doors with the FBI…. We provide information; we provide [Intelligence Report] to the Department of Homeland Security, we provide them to anybody—to you, whoever.”

Another kernel of truth: On July 5, 1987, a Miami Herald article on the covert activities of Lt. Col. Oliver North at the National Security Council reported that a “secret contingency plan” had been drafted by FEMA under North’s guidance.

According to the Herald, the plan “called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.”

In Jones’ hands, this true and troublesome history is transformed into regular hyperbolic warnings that martial law is set to be imposed at any moment, with federal agents hunting down patriotic Americans for internment inFEMA-operated concentration camps which have been established clandestinely nationwide.

One recent story Jones and allied media sources point to as definitive proof of the New World Order’s coming clampdown is the attempted “mercenary takeover” of the sleepy town of Hardin, Montana.

On September 10, 2009, the economic development branch of the Hardin government announced that it had signed a 10-year contract with a purported private paramilitary group known as the American Private Police Force (APPF) to operate a vacant private jail on the outskirts of the town.

When APPF personnel arrived in Hardin on September 23, driving black Mercedes SUVs with “City of Hardin Police Department” decals bearing the double-headed eagle crest of Montenegro, wild rumors began to circulate through Internet conspiracy circles that Obama had handpicked the small town for a trial run in martial law and forced H1N1 vaccinations at the hands of foreign mercenaries.

On September 29, Jones interviewed fellow conspiracy journalist Steve Quayle and publicized an anonymous email that a Hardin resident had allegedly sent to Quayle describing a town under siege by machine gun-toting mercenaries. Jones then hopped a plane and commenced live broadcasts from Hardin that spanned the better part of a week in early October.

Less than a week after Jones’ coverage blitz, APPF pulled out amid allegations that the whole scenario was the work of a California conman, Montenegro-born Michael Hilton, out to defraud the town and California-based investors in the venture.

Indeed, details of Hilton’s past fraud convictions, APPF’s lack of history as any sort of defense contractor and other facts casting a dubious light on the legitimacy of the firm had been provided to the local and national press by a watchdog group that monitors private prison development around the county, the Private Corrections Working Group (PCWG), long before Jones’ arrival in Hardin.

According to PCWG field organizer and researcher Frank Smith—who, along with PCWG vice president and Prison Legal News associate editor Alex Friedmann (Prison Legal News, 12/09) and the local AP bureau (10/1/09), had broken the story of Hilton’s shady past—the local media had been so uninterested that the situation rapidly deteriorated into a conspiracy free-for-all. (The main local reporter covering the story, the Billings Gazette’s Becky Shay, subsequently took a job as APPF’s spokesperson.) The resultant information vacuum, says Smith, was ideal fodder for Jones’ vision of the American “red dawn.”

Smith says he is amazed to see that even after the thorough debunking of the whole APPF/Hardin scenario, Jones and other conspiracy theorists still reference the case as proof of a sinister New World Order plot—perhaps most notably with the March 2010 release of Jones’ film Police State 4: The Rise of FEMA, which portrays the Hardin debacle as a small town’s victory over the ever-present menace of the FEMA concentration camp plot.

“The subsequent bullshit that came up, with the vaccines, the gates to the city, the Hardin police force…. The press was so lax that Alex Jones and the Steve Quayles could take the story over,” said Smith. “It was Area 51. It was aliens hidden from us, evidence of flying saucers. If the press had been on their toes, the whole thing would have been over in one day.”

Beau Hodai is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Extra!.

Sidebar:

Selling Doom—but Really Selling Gold

One of the pillars of the reality subscribed to by Alex Jones is that the nation, through the machinations of the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury, is on the brink of a total takeover by the “International Banker’s Cartel.”

In this narrative, American paper money is a “fiat currency” valued and devalued at the whim of the cartel, with the goal of plunging the economy and population into turmoil—necessary steps on the path to enslavement under martial law.

Smart money, Jones declares, is in gold.

Jones’ radio show and Internet productions are distributed through Minnesota-based Genesis Communications Network (GCN), owned by Ted Anderson. Jones’ primary radio and Internet sponsor is Minnesota-based Midas Resources, a precious metals brokerage specializing in gold and silver coins—also owned by Ted Anderson.

In addition to sharing the same owner, Midas and GCN also share the same physical address; in fact, according to Anderson, GCN is essentially the advertising arm of Midas.

Midas Resources was formed in 1996 by Anderson, already a 17-year veteran of the precious metals business, who incorporated GCN the following year. The leap to radio, he says, was a natural progression.

“They actually work hand-in-hand,” said Anderson. “One fits like a glove. They’re partnership-type businesses; Midas Resources needs customers, Genesis Communications Network needs sponsors.”

Jones hosts Anderson on his show regularly to discuss the value of gold—though, says Anderson, the fact that Jones is such an ardent supporter of gold is incidental. According to Anderson, it is fair to characterize his relationship with Jones as symbiotic.

“Midas advertises and was producing programming before Genesis was ever incorporated,” said Anderson. “And then it just became a much better idea to have a talk radio network where show hosts could come and produce the shows.”

With the birth of that idea, Anderson approached Jones and offered him a job with the newly formed GCN: “We were sponsoring his show over at [Austin’s] KJFK [radio]… Then when we opened up the Genesis Communications Network, we invited Alex to do a national show here.”

As for the resultant union, by all appearances the Alex Jones Show has risen to the status of GCNflagship—promoted by GCN almost as heavily as Midas Resources.

“I would say that Alex Jones is more of a variety show that covers politics and is probably heavily into conspiracy,” said Anderson, describing Jones as a leader in his field. “I’d say politics, economics and conspiracy—he really doesn’t stick to one subject. Alex Jones is sort of just Alex Jones.”

–Beau Hodai

Anderson is the owner of Genesis Communication Network and Midas Resources.

[hide]

Midas Resources

"One of the world's premiere precious metals firms, parent company of The Genesis Communications Network, proud sponsor of the Campaign For Liberty and creator of the Ron Paul Air Corps.

"Midas Resources was founded in 1996 by Ted Anderson. Mr. Anderson spent many years as a precious metals broker working for large corporations before striking out on his own. In 1998, he launched the Genesis Communications Network (GCN) to promote the importance of investing in precious metals. In the last few years, both companies have grown, reaching millions of people every day with the message of liberty and security...

"Midas Resources has been a Torch Bearer Supporter of the Campaign For Liberty (C4L) since it's inception. We contribute to organizations that are fighting to bring back sound economic laws and the return of the U.S. dollar to the gold standard. We believe that we have a responsibility to our country and to the future generations to right the wrongs of the past and fight for liberty. Until the day that our great nation's constitution is restored, we will continue to support those organizations that are working hard to see that liberty prevails. We are also a supporter of Young Americans For Liberty (YAL) and many others." ^[1]

In the past, "Special offer: get a free year of The International Forecaster with the purchase of a gold franc coin from Midas Resources." [1]

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

References

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Midas Resources About, organizational web page, accessed October 7, 2013.

Categories:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/30/tigerswan-lisa-smith-security-license-louisiana-bayou-bridge-pipeline

The private security firm TigerSwan, known for its controversial military-style tactics against Dakota Access pipeline protesters, is appealing the decision to deny its application for a license to operate in the state of Louisiana, where Energy Transfer Partners is building the Bayou Bridge pipeline. In November, several environmental groups opposed to the Bayou Bridge pipeline attempted to intervene in this case, saying their members were particularly vulnerable to TigerSwan’s security and surveillance practices should it be allowed to operate in support of that oil pipeline, but today the Louisiana State Board of Private Security Examiners denied this request.

However, during this process, it came to light that the state board denied another security license application from a TigerSwan employee who failed to disclose her employment with the firm after TigerSwan’s application was rejected.

The board's deposition of this employee, obtained via a public records request, was included in the request to intervene in TigerSwan’s case by 350 New Orleans, Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, Gulf Restoration Network, L’eau Est la Vie (“Water Is Life”) Camp, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West.

“Given its track record, TigerSwan should not be allowed to come into Louisiana and use their military-style tactics to hinder the right of ordinary Louisianans to exercise their First Amendment rights,” Pamela Spees, attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is representing the groups, said in a statement. “The board did the right thing in denying them a license.”

TigerSwan Employee Tries to Set up New Security Firm in Louisiana

[pix convoy]

Part of the reason the board cited for rejecting TigerSwan’s case on July 17, 2017 was “they were denied licensure twice in [North] Dakota and are pending litigation,” according to the board’s executive director Fabian Blache III.

TigerSwan is being sued by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board for allegedly performing security work in the state without a license during and after the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.

On September 19, 2017, the Louisiana board deposed TigerSwan employee Lisa Smith, who had applied for a license to operate her brand-new private security firm, LTSA, LLC, in Lafayette, Louisiana. While she originally said she opened the company office in August, later in the deposition Smith corrected this to say it was actually July — the same month that TigerSwan’s application was rejected. Louisiana state records indicate that LTSA, LLC was registered on August 3, 2017.

In her license application, filed August 4, Smith, a resident of North Carolina, where TigerSwan is also based, submitted a resume which did not disclose her contemporaneous employment with TigerSwan.

Instead, she listed her employer as “Metlife MSOC,” which is the security operations center where the firm had contracted her to work. In the September deposition, she confirmed that TigerSwan paid her salary but that she reported for work at Metlife.

[doc]

In Lisa Smith's deposition on September 19, 2017, she denies her company LTSA was set up in relation to TigerSwan's denied license to operate in Louisiana.

During the deposition, the board asked Smith whether or not she had ever listed TigerSwan as her employer on her LinkedIn profile. She answered that she did not remember.

However, the board supplied an email with a screenshot of a Google search result showing a cache of her LinkedIn profile, which listed her as a “Watch Officer at TigerSwan/Metlife SOC.” Her current LinkedIn profile does not list her employment with TigerSwan, and while during the deposition Smith said her Metlife contract was already expired in September, her profile continues to list “Metlife-MSOC” as her present employer.

When asked by the board about why she decided to open a security firm in Louisiana, Smith replied: “The opportunities were good.” However, she denied LTSA had any connection with TigerSwan and its failure to secure a license in the state, and further said that while she had heard of “Bayou Bridge,” she said she did not know what it was or whether she would consider applying for work related to it in the future.

Smith also denied knowing someone named Brandon Nix. According to Blache, the state board's executive director, Nix was the agent who originally applied for TigerSwan’s license in Louisiana.

“We later learned that he was the person liaising with Lisa Smith’s registers office site to secure the keys to the property leased by her company LTSA,” Blache told DeSmog via email.

[doc]

In Lisa Smith's deposition, she denied her new security company, LTSA, had any connection to her employer TigerSwan.

The board turned down Smith’s request for a license on October 4, 2017. “Denial was based on material misrepresentations in the application and during the State Board deposition,” said Blache.

TigerSwan had two lawyers representing the firm present during Smith’s deposition. It is not currently employed by Energy Transfer Partners to do security work related to the Bayou Bridge pipeline, a 162-mile-long project which will carry to Gulf Coast refineries oil originally drilled in North Dakota. So far, that security work has been performed by the firm Hub Enterprises.

Neither Lisa Smith not TigerSwan responded to multiple requests for comment.

TigerSwan Connections in Louisiana

Even before the Louisiana board rejected TigerSwan’s application, the private security firm already appeared to be working its connections to the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

In February 2017, retired Major General James “Spider” Marks testified in support of this pipeline at a Louisiana Department of Natural Resources permit hearing and published an op-ed endorsing it in a local newspaper. In neither of these instances, however, did Marks disclose that he was chair of TigerSwan’s advisory board, not unlike the way Smith also failed to share her ties to the firm. (Marks is no longer listed on TigerSwan’s website.)

[video]

This seems to be a trend for Marks, who has a history of appearing on TV as a military pundit without disclosing his ties to military weapons companies.

TigerSwan appears determined to succeed in gaining access to perform security work in Louisiana.

As Julie Dermansky has previously reported for DeSmog: “A few days after TigerSwan’s permit was denied in Louisiana, the company filed an appeal and hired five lobbyists who work for the lobbying firm Southern Strategy Group.”

The firm is currently awaiting a hearing with the Louisiana State Board of Private Security Examiners appealing its denied application.

Louisiana Proposes Harsher Punishments for Pipeline Offenses

With implications for future protests against the Bayou Bridge pipeline, this week the Louisiana State Legislature introduced House Bill 727, which proposes as a criminal offense the “unauthorized entry of and criminal damage to a critical infrastructure.”

The bill seeks to include oil and gas pipelines and their construction sites among the definition of “critical infrastructure.” For those convicted of damaging this infrastructure when a threat to human life is “foreseeable” or the action “disrupts” the infrastructure's operations, the bill stipulates a sentence of imprisonment and hard labor for between six and 20 years, up to $25,000 in fines, or both.

It also includes separate “conspiracy” charges, with similar criminal penalties, except that the maximum possible fine is $250,000. The bill both amends the Louisiana criminal code, which currently deals only with “unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure” and creates the new crimes for damaging those facilities and conspiring to either illegally enter or damage them.

Several other states, including Wyoming, Iowa, and Ohio, have introduced similar laws in recent months which would criminalize the type of activities of past oil and gas pipeline protesters. Oklahoma already passed into law parallel legislation which has served as a template for other state proposals.

Some state lawmakers have specifically cited the Dakota Access pipeline protests as inspiration for these “critical infrastructure” bills and likened actions by pipeline protesters to “**terrorist activities.”**

no link many

Bayou Bridge Pipeline Opponents Say Louisiana Governor's Office Is Surveilling Them

By Julie Dermansky • Wednesday, March 7, 2018 - 16:43

Louisiana Bucket Brigade founder Anne Rolfes at a press conference protesting Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards' treatment of anti-pipeline activists.

Opponents of the Bayou Bridge pipeline accused Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards of meeting with representative of the oil and gas industry while refusing to meet with activists and communities affected by the pipeline’s construction. They further allege that the administration has instead placed them under surveillance, pointing to similar treatment of Dakota Access pipeline opponents in North Dakota in 2016. Their claims are based in part on emails and other public records released by the state.

The activists brought their grievances to the Democratic governor’s home and office on March 1, holding a press conference in front of the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge and then occupying the foyer to his office in the State Capitol for over an hour.

“The Bayou Bridge pipeline should be called the John Bel pipeline,” Louisiana Bucket Brigade founder and director Anne Rolfes declared at the press conference. In her view, “any accidents that will happen” related to the pipeline lead back to the Governor. He had the power to stop it, she said, but chose not to.

At the press conference, representatives from the HELP Association, 350 New Orleans, L'eau est La Vie (Water Is Life) camp, and the Center for Constitutional Rights also expressed disappointment in what they described as the state government’s cozy relationship with industry.

Louisiana Bucket Brigade read aloud emails about the Bayou Bridge pipeline from the Edwards administration and industry that were obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a New York-based legal and educational nonprofit.

Pastor Harry Joseph of Mt. Triumph Baptist Church in St. James, Louisiana

Pastor Harry Joseph of the Mount Triumph Baptist Church in St. James, where the pipeline will terminate, speaking at the press conference in Baton Rouge.

Security staff at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade press conference March 1

Security next to the press conference in Baton Rouge.

The governor, who voiced his support for the pipeline early on, has not commented on a federal judge’s recent ruling halting construction of the project through the Atchafalaya Basin, an environmentally sensitive National Heritage Area.

The pipeline is a joint venture between majority stakeholder Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, and Phillips 66 Partners, LP. Pipeline construction along its route from Lake Charles, near the Texas border, to St. James, about 60 miles west of New Orleans, began in January.

CCR attorney Pamela Spees grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, one of the communities affected by the pipeline. She said in a press release that the emails show how “the deck is stacked against people in Louisiana who stand in opposition to the ongoing destruction and harm caused by the Oil and Gas industry. The indications of monitoring and surveillance of local advocates and small organizations by the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness are particularly concerning. It is astounding that the resources of so many law enforcement agencies are trained on watching these organizations and communities trying to exercise their rights to be heard.”

In addition, Spees found it “deeply troubling that not one email released by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality contained any discussion of or expressions of concern by people in the agency about the alarming accident history of the companies involved in the Bayou Bridge project.”

CCR is still fighting to get other public records related to the Bayou Bridge pipeline, and has appealed two cases it lost. One is against Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC, in which the nonprofit sought records concerning the company’s use of eminent domain. And the other is against Louisiana’s St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office and Sheriff Greg Champagne for failing to release public records related to trips he and some of his deputies took to North Dakota to observe how law enforcement was responding to the Dakota Access pipeline protests.

“We saw a dangerous blurring of the lines between law enforcement and private corporations at Standing Rock,” Spees said. “Louisiana residents have a right to know what role local officials played in that situation and how it relates to events playing out closer to home.”

Surveillance of Opponents of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline

Dominic Renfrey, a representative with the Center for Constitutional Rights, informed me that Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC is employing the firm Hub Enterprises to provide security for the company, based on sightings at pipeline construction sites.

Energy Transfer Partners spokesperson Alexis Daniel told me, “The safety of our employees and the communities in which we live and work is our top priority. In order to ensure that, we do have security plans in place and we do communicate with law enforcement agencies as appropriate. Beyond that, we do not discuss details of our security efforts.”

CCR’s Renfrey also said that documents released last week indicate the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) “might be involved in surveillance.” The GOHSEP director sent an email about the Louisiana Bucket Brigade to state regulatory and law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the Department of Natural Resources, the Louisiana State Police, and the Louisiana National Guard. The agency also prepared a report about the L'Eau Est La Vie Camp, contrasting it to the resistance camps against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Hub Enterprises security personnel near a Bayou Bridge pipeline construction site

Hub Enterprises security personnel across the street from a Bayou Bridge pipeline construction site that activists shut down temporarily on February 26 during a direct action leading to the arrest of three protesters.

GOHSEP Communications Director Mike Steele told The Advocate that there’s nothing sinister about his agency’s role. “The agency keeps an eye on issues that may, at some point, draw big crowds requiring security, traffic control, or crowd control. Homeland security may have an ominous connotation,” he said, “but they aren’t spies.”

“It’s not surveillance. It’s letting these agencies know that these matters are ongoing,” Steele said.

There was plenty of security on hand at the March 1 press conference and impromptu visit to the governor’s office. Some of the security personnel were impossible to identify because they remained in vehicles with tinted windows.

Anne Rolfes tries to catch who is inside an apparent security vehicle

Anne Rolfes, founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, trying to figure out who was in an SUV monitoring the press conference across from the Governor’s Mansion.

Security inside the foyer of the Louisiana governor's office during an anti-pipeline protest

Security inside the foyer in front of the governor’s office.

The documents so far obtained by CCR don’t indicate that any state agency hired a private security firm to surveil opponents of the pipeline. However, if one did, it wouldn’t be the first time a government agency in Louisiana hired a private firm to supplement its resources.

Last year, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration hired Trident Response Group, a private security firm based in Texas, for risk assessment, surveillance, intelligence gathering, and extra security at sites where Confederate monuments were slated for removal.

Landrieu’s administration defended the move to hire a private security firm after documents from an open records request showed the city paid over $700,000 dollars to Trident in May while the city prepared to remove the monuments. While denying that the city spied on local groups on either side of the issue, the city has not been transparent about what services Trident provided.

Take ’Em Down Nola, the group pushing for the removal of the Confederate monuments, suggested that Trident may have hacked some of its members’ emails and social media accounts and possibly infiltrated the group.

Trident shares similarities with TigerSwan, one of the private security firms employed by Energy Transfer Partners in North Dakota, and Hub Enterprises. All three companies’ websites tout staff that include former military personnel.

TigerSwan’s license application with the Louisiana State Board of Private Security was turned down last year. The denial was based on the pending litigation against the company for allegedly operating in North Dakota without a permit.

Some Bayou Bridge opponents believe the company was working in Louisiana without a license before its application was turned down.

In February 2017, James “Spider” Marks spoke in favor of the Bayou Bridge pipeline at a permit hearing. He identified himself as a retired U.S. Army major general and president of a corporate advisory firm, but did not disclose that he also sits on TigerSwan’s board of advisors.

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade says that emails from GOHSEP reveal Louisiana officials are aligned with a growing national trend of surveillance intended to intimidate citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, a finding the group considers alarming.

“Since the Standing Rock camp opposing the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota was disbanded last year, 56 bills that heighten the risk and criminal penalties of dissent have been introduced across 30 states,” reads a press release from the organization. “Many of these bills seek to frame protests as ‘riots’ and activists as ‘terrorists‘ or ‘jihadists,’ in attempts to criminalize protected free speech activity.”

Several states have even gone as far as introducing or passing bills that critics say would specifically criminalize pipeline protests.

“The documents reveal an unacceptable disparity in the public agencies’ treatment of pipeline and industry representatives in contrast to the communities they're obligated to serve,” Spees said. She told me that CCR will continue to seek more information from Louisiana’s public agencies because the documents already obtained suggest there is more to the story.

Energy Transfer Partners spokesperson Alexis Daniel told me, “The safety of our employees and the communities in which we live and work is our top priority. In order to ensure that, we do have security plans in place and we do communicate with law enforcement agencies as appropriate. Beyond that, we do not discuss details of our security efforts.”

I asked Governor Edwards’ office what he would say to those who feel he is willing to meet and listen to representatives of the oil and gas industry but not the Bayou Bridge pipeline’s opponents, including those directly impacted by the project. Shauna Sanford, a representative from the governor’s office, said, “We don't have a comment at this time.”

dapl:

The activists who disarmed Thompson of an AR-15 as he was headed toward the main camp, Oceti Sakowin, face felony charges.

Thompson worked for Thompson-Gray LLC, listed under Silverton Consulting International by the Ohio Secretary of State, according to paperwork discovered inside his truck. The company was not authorized to work in North Dakota, and was owned by Charles Graham Clifton, a man who has at least three civil lawsuits filed against him.

. Other security firms working along the pipeline included Silverton, Russell Group of Texas, 10 Code LLC, Per Mar, SRC, OnPoint, and Leighton, documents show.

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-got-hurt-at-work-then-they-got-deported

...The previous year, Arias had been mowing the median of Highway 59 just over the Alabama line when his riding lawnmower hit a hole, throwing him into the air. He slammed back in his seat, landing hard on his lower back.

Arias received pain medication, physical therapy and steroid injections through his employer’s workers’ compensation insurance. But the pain in his back made even walking or sitting a struggle. So his doctor recommended an expensive surgery to implant a device that sends electrical pulses to the spinal cord to relieve chronic pain. Six days after that appointment, the insurance company suddenly discovered that Arias had been using a deceased man’s Social Security number and rejected not only the surgery, but all of his past and future care.

Desperate, Arias hired an attorney to help him pursue the injury benefits that Florida law says all employees, including unauthorized immigrants, are entitled to receive. Then one morning after he dropped two of his boys off at school, Arias was pulled over and arrested, while his toddler watched from his car seat.

Arias was charged with using a false Social Security number to get a job and to file for workers’ comp. The state insurance fraud unit had been tipped off by a private investigator hired by his employer’s insurance company.

With his back still in pain from three herniated or damaged discs, Arias spent a year and a half in jail and immigration detention before he was deported

...

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/16/standing_rock_sioux_chair_on_militarized

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/31/private_mercenary_firm_tigerswan_compares_anti

An explosive new investigation by The Intercept reveals how international private security firm TigerSwan targeted Dakota Access water protectors with military-style counterterrorism measures. TigerSwan began as a U.S. military and State Department contractor. It was hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. The investigation is based on leaked internal documents, which show how TigerSwan collaborated closely with law enforcement agencies to surveil and target the nonviolent indigenous-led movement. In the documents, TigerSwan also repeatedly calls the water protectors "insurgents" and the movement an "ideologically driven insurgency." We are joined by Alleen Brown, reporter with The Intercept and lead author of their story, "Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies," and by Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth. She is Ojibwe from Couchiching First nations

https://boingboing.net/2017/05/27/provocateurs-and-drones.html

Tigerswan, a secretive private mercenary company, was hired by Energy Transfer Partners to run campaigns against Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in five states, including states in which they were not licensed to operate -- the measures they deployed were developed as counterterrorism tactics, including

Tigerswan prepared reports that called the indigenous-led protests "an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component" and compared them to jihadi fighters. The reports were leaked by a Tigerswan contractor to The Intercept, who supplemented the with thousands of pages of documents secured through public records requests.

Tigerswan appears to have also run an online disinformation campaign, "creating and distributing content critical of the protests on social media."

Tigerswan conducted substantial infiltration and provocateur operations against the water protectors. These infiltrators engaged in "exploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts between peaceful and violent elements."

Perhaps one of the most striking revelations of the documents is the level of hostility displayed by TigerSwan toward the water protectors. TigerSwan consistently describes the peaceful demonstrators using military and tactical language more appropriate for counterterrorism operations in an armed conflict zone. At times, the military language verges on parody, as when agents write of protesters “stockpiling signs” or when they discuss the “caliber” of paintball pellets. More often, however, the way TigerSwan discusses protesters as “terrorists,” their direct actions as “attacks,” and the camps as a “battlefield,” reveals how the protesters’ dissent was not only criminalized but treated as a national security threat. A March 1 report states that protesters’ “operational weakness allows TS elements to further develop and dictate the battlespace.”

In one internal report dated May 4, a TigerSwan operative describes an effort to amass digital and ground intelligence that would allow the company to “find, fix, and eliminate” threats to the pipeline — an eerie echo of “find, fix, finish,” a military term used by special forces in the U.S. government’s assassination campaign against terrorist targets.

TigerSwan pays particular attention to protesters of Middle Eastern descent. A September 22 situation report argues that “the presence of additional Palestinians in the camp, and the movement’s involvement with Islamic individuals is a dynamic that requires further examination.” The report acknowledges that “currently there is no information to suggest terrorist type tactics or operations,” but nonetheless warns that “with the current limitation on information flow out of the camp, it cannot be ruled out.”

LEAKED DOCUMENTS REVEAL COUNTERTERRORISM TACTICS USED AT STANDING ROCK TO “DEFEAT PIPELINE INSURGENCIES” [Alleen Brown, Will Parrish and Alice Speri/The Intercept]

...

western goals fdn proto cointelpro Teller jane fonda TMI only victim

http://www.projectcensored.org/private-military-companies-in-service-to-the-transnational-capitalist-class/

Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than afew thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite of the world, dominate nation-states through international trade agreements and transnational state organizations such as the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund.

The TCC communicates their policy requirements through global networks such as the G-7 and G-20, and various nongovernmental policy organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group. The TCC represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.

The TCC are keenly aware of both their elite status and their increasing vulnerabilities to democracy movements and to unrest from below. The military empire dominated by the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) serves to protect TCC investments around the world. Wars, regime changes, and occupations performed in service of empire support investors’ access to natural resources and their speculative advantages in the market place.

When the empire is slow to perform or faced with political resistance, private security firms and private military companies (PMC) increasingly fulfill the TCC’s demands for the protections of their assets. These protection services include personal security for TCC executives and their families, protection of safe residential and work zones, tactical military advisory and training of national police and armed forces, intelligence gathering on democracy movements and opposition groups, weapons acquisitions and weapon systems management, and strike forces for military actions and assassinations.

The expanding crisis of desperate masses/refugees, alienated work forces, and environmental exhaustion means an unlimited opportunity for PMCs to engage in protections services for the global elite.

Estimates are that over $200 billion a year is spent on private security employing some fifteen million people worldwide. G4S is the largest PMC in the world with 625,000 employees spanning five continents in more than 120 countries. Nine of the largest money management firms in the world have holdings in G4S. Some of its more important contractors are the governments of the UK, the US, Israel, and Australia. In the private sector G4S has worked with corporations such as Chrysler, Apple, and Bank of America. In Nigeria, Chevron contracts with G4S for counterinsurgency operations including fast-response mercenaries. G4S undertakes similar operations in South Sudan, and has provided surveillance equipment for checkpoints and prisons in Israel and security for Jewish settlements in Palestine.

Another private military contractor Constellis Holdings—formerly Blackwater and Triple Canopy—is a leading provider of security, support, and military advisory services to the US government, foreign governments, multinational corporations, and international organizations. Constellis is managed by an all male board of directors including billionaire Red McCombs; John Ashcroft, the former attorney general; retired admiral Bobby Inman; and Jack Quinn, a leading Democratic advisor who served as chief of staff to vice president Al Gore and as counsel to President Clinton.

Hundreds of private military contractors now play an important role in TCC security in the evolving 21^st century neo-fascist corporate world. Capital will be free to travel instantly and internationally to anywhere that profits are possible, while nation-states will become little more than population containment zones with increasingly repressive labor controls. For these reasons, PMCs must be understood as a component of neoliberal imperialism that now supplements nation-states’ police powers and could eventually substitute for them.

The trend toward privatization of war is a serious threat to human rights, due process, and democratic transparency and accountability. The US/NATO military empire sets the moral standards for denial of human rights by using pilotless drones to kill civilians without regard for international law in various regions of resistance to empire. Labeling dead civilians as insurgents and terrorists, the complete lack of due process and human rights belies any standard of governmental moral legitimacy. This lack of moral legitimacy in turn sets standards for private military companies to operate with much the same malice in the shadow of the empire.

The globalization of PMC operations alongside transnational capital investment, international trade agreements, and an increasing concentration of wealth in the TCC means that the repressive practices of private security and war will inevitably come home to roost in the US, the European Union, and other first-world nations.

The 99 percent of us without wealth and private police power face the looming threat of overt repression and complete loss of human rights and legal protections. We see signs of this daily with police killings (now close to a hundred per month in the US), warrantless electronic spying, mass incarceration, random traffic checkpoints, airport security/no-fly lists, and Homeland Security compilations of databases on suspected resisters.

Each time we look past the crimes of the empire we lose a portion of our integrity of self. Ignoring repression becomes part of continuing compromise in our daily lives leading to a moral malaise and increased feelings of helplessness. We must stand up and demand democratic transparency and the international enforcement of human rights. Unless we collectively challenge the empire, we face a world that is evolving into a new dark age of neo-feudal totalitarianism unlike any previously known.

Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and president of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored. For a longer footnoted version of this report see:

Read the full study, as featured in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line, here.

7/15

hedges dlc: scahill on pvty sector takeover of secrity/intel, only 20 co-sponsor on bill ~; strengthened corp and weakened govt; pentagon pvtize 69% workers; 1.5::1 afghan p42 could go 3:1 soldiers, but less than 100 alQ; karzai bro gets cia $ tho heroin trafficker

...

ref Dana P intel study; 1200 govt orgs 1900 pvt co, 850K w/ top secret clearance `173

Corporate espionage takes many forms and is known by a number of names. At its most benign, it’s “competitive-intelligence,” which is the kind of information gathering that George Chidi describes in *Inc*. On the other end of the spectrum is the far more exciting—and illicit—line of work seen in Richard Behar’s 1999 story about the pharmaceutical industry. Here are five stories that delve deep into the murky world of corporate information gathering.

1. “Drug Spies” (Richard Behar, Fortune, September 1999)

This story about corporate spies fighting pirated drugs in the high stakes pharmaceutical industry reads like a summer action movie, complete with former Scotland Yard detectives, solitary confinement in a Cyprus prison and multinational drug giants.

2. “Confessions of a Corporate Spy”(George Chidi, Inc., February 2013)

George Chidi’s work is more social engineering than cloak-and-dagger, but this first-person piece from a competitive intelligence consultant offers fascinating insight into the less legally shaky subset of the corporate intelligence world. Bonus: the last third of the article functions as a how-to for aspiring information gatherers.

3. “The Secret Keeper” (William Finnegan,New Yorker, October 2009)

If there is a gold standard in the corporate intelligence world, it’s Kroll Inc., Jules B. Kroll’s namesake consulting group. Here the New Yorker profiles Mr. Kroll, who is “widely credited with having created an industry where there was none.”

4. “A Spy in the Jungle” (Mary Cuddehe, The Atlantic, August 2010)

Cuddehe was a freelance reporter with a busted rental car in a Cancún parking lot when a friend called with a “research” job:

…an offer from Kroll, one of the world’s largest private investigation firms, to go undercover as a journalist-spy in the Ecuadorian Amazon. At first I thought I was underqualified for the job. But as it turned out I was exactly what they were looking for: a pawn.

Her recollections, and reflections on why she chose not to take the job, are an interesting counterpoint to the New Yorkerarticle.

5. “The Pizza Plot” (Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, New York Times Magazine,December 2000)

Schwan’s knew that Kraft was going to roll out a new kind of frozen pizza, and that if they wanted to compete they would have to find out all sorts of specifics before the launch. This article, which is adapted from Penenberg and Barry’s 2000 bookSpooked: Espionage in Corporate America, is a dazzlingly fun look at just how Schwan pulled that off.

powerbase, uk?

Hakluyt

H cont.<ul style=" line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM////QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T/wDltzBKAAAAGklEQVR42mJgBAEGokgGBjBGBxBxsBqAAAMACHwALd5r8ygAAAAASUVORK5CYII=);"><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Heather_Millgate" title="Heather Millgate" style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Heather Millgate</a></li><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Mark_Huband" title="Mark Huband" style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Mark Huband</a></li></ul>

I<ul style=" line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM////QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T/wDltzBKAAAAGklEQVR42mJgBAEGokgGBjBGBxBxsBqAAAMACHwALd5r8ygAAAAASUVORK5CYII=);"><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Peter_Imbert" title="Peter Imbert" style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Peter Imbert</a></li><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Industrial_Research_and_Information_Services" title="Industrial Research and Information Services" style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Industrial Research and Information Services</a></li><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Inkerman_Group" title="Inkerman Group" style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Inkerman Group</a></li></ul>

J<ul style=" line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM////QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T/wDltzBKAAAAGklEQVR42mJgBAEGokgGBjBGBxBxsBqAAAMACHwALd5r8ygAAAAASUVORK5CYII=);"><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Justin_King" title="Justin King" style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Justin King</a></li></ul>

K<ul style=" line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM////QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T/wDltzBKAAAAGklEQVR42mJgBAEGokgGBjBGBxBxsBqAAAMACHwALd5r8ygAAAAASUVORK5CYII=);"><li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Kroll_WorldWide_Associates_Inc." title="Kroll WorldWide Associates Inc." style=" text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Kroll WorldWide Associates Inc.</a></li></ul>

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backup main 715 no links:

pvtintel715

this category refers to non-gov US orgs, but these hire ex mil and intel ppl, and do work for gov't; on what basis sep from service? Note that this is aspect of (horseman) privatization, whioch means we have less oversight and recourse (esp if it's hard to sue them)

see eco-terrorism and cointelpro (also opposition research, and now political intel)

note ruskin spooky biz 54 pp

Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy

http://www.blogcitylights.com/2013/07/23/qa-with-heidi-boghosian-author-of-spying-on-democracy/

2) In the book, you explain that since 9/11 there has been an upsurge in the level of private and public coordination of intelligence gathering, including data aggregation, and data reselling. Can you explain how these types of business arrangements work, naming some companies who are involved, and discuss some of the privacy risks are for citizens?

As our personal information is increasingly being collected electronically through daily transactions—banking, retail purchases, online activities, public records—this data has become, in effect, a commodity. It’s worth a lot both to businesses and to government intelligence agencies as they seek to track individuals and social movements critical of their policies. Data aggregators and data resellers are a specialized multi-billion dollar industry. Companies collect vast troves of data, often managing databases for banks and other institutions about purchasing histories, property ownership, health histories, browsing activity, and salaries. The risk is that erroneous information will be used without our knowledge, and that our information will be used for improper or discriminatory purposes.

As data is sold to marketers hoping to tailor advertising to consumers, the practices by which companies obtain the information increasingly infringe on privacy. As surveillance and analytics methods continue to become more and more sophisticated, most people are unaware that the information is being gathered in the first place. Profiles of our daily habits are easily assembled, and once that information is available in what are essentially electronic dossiers, they may be shared and used in ways that are inappropriate. Many of these records contain inaccuracies, but with no way to correct them.

No current laws in the US require that data brokers maintain the privacy of individual’s data unless used for credit, employment, insurance, housing or other similar purposes.

The Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into the practices of brokers, investigating how data is being collected, and is aware that most people don’t know of the existence of data brokers and what they do. Individuals should have notice of how the data is used, especially if information collected from your doctor’s office is then being handed over to the government for possible inappropriate misuse.

Booz Allen Hamilton, employer to whistleblower Edward Snowden, is one of the largest defense and intelligence technology consultants in the U.S.; their main client is the National Security Agency, as well as other federal intelligence agencies. In fact, the company states that the government accounts for 98% of their revenues. Employees, like Snowden, have security clearance to sensitive documents, such as those related to top-secret U.S. surveillance programs. In Snowden’s interview with Guardian UK columnist Glenn Greenwald, he explained how he could wiretap into anyone’s communications if they were on a public carrier.

Other companies engage in this work, such as Experien, which many people know as a credit reporting service, as well as the aggregator ChoicePoint, a private intelligence service both to private industry and the government. ChoicePoint sourced personal data from multiple public and private databases and kept more than 17 billion records of individuals and businesses, which it sold to an estimated 100,000 clients, including 7,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies ...

4) Can you comment upon the Justice Department’s recent retrieval of AP reporters’ and a Fox News journalist’s communications, without either party’s knowledge, and without first obtaining warrants to do so? Is this legal?

Department of Justice guidelines regulate the use of subpoenas against the press, providing that all reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources. Any subpoenas issued for sources require approval from the attorney general. Unfortunately if prosecutors don’t obtain approval from the attorney general they are punished only by administrative disciplinary action.

Many states have “shield laws” for the purpose of protecting sources and not inhibiting the press. Spying on journalists for purpose of discovering sources, without notifying the reporter or news outlet, denotes a government clearly afraid of certain truths coming out; we see this increasingly with stricter measures being taken against whistleblowers and harsh Internet laws.

When the government targets journalists, and does so secretly, it discourages sources and whistleblowers and it raises the stakes for engaging in truth-seeking journalism. Now reporters may fear charges of espionage or even conspiracy.

...

5) In Spying on Democracy you write, “When powerful private interests are threatened, corporations will use their influence to mobilize and manipulate the government to rally to their defense.” Can you provide examples?

One instance where this is easily seen is when public, or municipal police, are called on to protect private property, such as the financial institutions on Wall Street. In New York City, Goldman Sachs and many other corporations give generously to the Police Foundation, which supports a range of policing activities but is unaccountable to the public. When people gathered in lower Manhattan during Occupy, questions arose whether the police were shutting down public spaces and sidewalks in front of banks and on Wall Street because they were, in part, bankrolled by private industry.

Even before the Occupy movement began, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act requests show early collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and various financial institutions across the country gauging potential threatening individuals. Fusion centers—centers where intelligence agency personnel and even military personnel work often with business partners—are sharing information about anyone they see as a threat to corporate profits. They compile dossiers on these individuals and track their movements, spending enormous resources on monitoring them in their homes, in public meetings, and while they conduct their daily activities.

6) Many people will say that they don’t care about surveillance as they have nothing to hide. Based on your own work, how would you respond to this notion?

We’re growing accustomed to having diminished privacy by trading in personal rights for convenience interests. Give us your palm scan and we will get you through the hospital paperwork faster. Use an E-ZPass to drive through the toll booth faster and we can track your movements and store them for future retrieval. Order your clothes online and have pop up ads appear whenever you log on with similar shoes or handbags.

Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate ...

www.amazon.com › ... › Civil Rights

Amazon.com, Inc.

"Heidi Boghosian's Spying on Democracy is the answer to the question, 'if you're ....illustrative primer on governmental and private-sector intelligence gathering.

Segment: Heidi Boghosian on Spying and Civil Liberties ...

billmoyers.com/.../heidi-boghosian-on-spying-on-democr...

Bill D. Moyers

Nov 8, 2013 - A surveillance expert says the government and corporations are routinely watching our activities, making a mockery of our civil liberties.

Heidi Boghosian on Mass Surveillance | BillMoyers.com

billmoyers.com/.../heidi-boghosian-on-mass-surveillance/

Bill D. Moyers

Feb 21, 2014 - The bond between the private security industry and the government is soldered by ... handles cases defending the government's ability to gather intelligenceor protect ... Watch: Heidi Boghosian on Spying and Civil Liberties ...

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/national-security-inc-our-private-intelligence-apparatus-numbers

Edward Snowden revealed to the world the startling breadth of the National Security Agency's surveillance efforts, but his story also highlighted another facet of today's intelligence world: the increasingly privatized national security sector, in which a high school dropout could bring in six figures while gaining access to state secrets. Over the last decade, firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked for three months, have gobbled up nearly 60 cents out of every dollar the government spends on intelligence. A majority of top-secret security clearances now go to private contractors who provide services to the government at stepped up rates.

"I like to call Booz Allen the shadow [intelligence community]," Joan Dempsey, a vice president at the firm, said in 2004, as captured in Tim Shorrock's book, Spies for Hire. No kidding. Here's a look at our mushrooming intelligence contracting sector:

note no charts

OUR PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS, BY THE NUMBERS

12,000: Number of Booz Allen Hamilton employees with top-secret clearances

483,263: Number of contractors with top-secret clearances

1.4 million: Number of public and private employees, total, with top-secret security clearances, as of FY 2012

7th: Where employees with top-secret clearances would rank, by population, if they were a single American city

1: Occupations, out of 35 analyzed by the Project On Government Oversight, in which privatization yielded statistically significant savings—groundskeepers

4.4 million: Number of private contractors serving the federal government in 1999

7.6 million: Number of private contractors serving the federal government 2005

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 1999

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 2005

70: Percentage of classified intelligence budget that goes to private contracts (as of 2007)

90: Percentage of intelligence contracts that are classified

1,931: Number of private firms working on counterterrorism, intelligence, or homeland security, according to the Washington Post

$1.3 billion: Booz Allen Hamilton's revenue from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year, according to the New York Times

23: Percentage of the firm's overall revenue

98: Percentage of the firm's work that focuses on government contracts

3/15

In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit distributed an intelligence bulletin [3] to all field offices warning that environmental extremism would likely become an increasing threat to the energy industry. The eight-page document argued that, even though the industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent “criminal incidents” suggested that environmental extremism was on the rise. The FBI concluded: “Environmental extremism will become a greater threat to the energy industry owing to our historical understanding that some environmental extremists have progressed from committing low-level crimes against targets to more significant crimes over time in an effort to further the environmental extremism cause.”

Not long after the bulletin was distributed, a private security firm providing intelligence reports to the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security cited the FBI document in order to justify the surveillance of anti-fracking groups. The same security firm concluded that the “escalating conflict over natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania” could lead to an increase in “environmentalist activity or eco-terrorism.”

Since the 2010 FBI assessment was written, the specter of environmental extremism has been trotted out by both law enforcement and energy-industry security teams to describe a wide variety of grassroots groups opposed to the continued extraction of fossil fuels. In 2011, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP ) published a report [4] titled, “Environmental Criminal Extremism and Canada’s Energy Sector.” The RCMP warned that environmental extremism posed a “clear and present criminal threat” to the energy industry. While both the FBI and RCMP reports make an effort to distinguish between lawful protest and criminal activity, they often conflate the two – in the RCMP report the terms “violence” and “direct action” are used interchangeably – and suggest opposition to the energy industry will lead to extremism. (The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division declined to answer questions about the 2010 bulletin.)

Yet even as the resistance to “extreme energy projects” has grown in size and scope, there is little evidence to support the breathless warnings about “eco-terrorism.” There has been no upward spiral in criminality among environmental activists. To the contrary, arson, property destruction, and other acts of violence most closely associated with the radical animal rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s have become all but nonexistent. According to figures compiled by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at the University of Maryland, there has been only a handful of incidents defined as eco-terrorism since 2010. In fact, between 2010 and 2013, the latest year for which the GTD has published figures, out of a total of 54 terror incidents in the United States, five were attributed to the Animal Liberation Front. The last recorded incident carried out by the Earth Liberation Front – the bulldozing of two radio transmission towers in Washington – was in 2009. Earth First! hasn’t appeared in the database since 1994.

Instead, environmentalists have largely relied on classic social change strategies such as choreographed nonviolent civil disobedience, carefully planned protests, and divestment from the fossil fuel industry. “Overall we’ve seen a decline in activity, in terms of violent criminal activity” among environmentalists, an FBI intelligence analyst told The Washington Post in 2012.

Nevertheless, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and many state law enforcement agencies continue to promote the idea that environmental extremism is on the rise. The oil and gas industry is spending more on security than it ever has. According to a 2013 report by Frost & Sullivan, a marketing research and consulting company, annual spending on global oil and gas infrastructure security is expected to top $30 billion in just a few years. (In comparison, $30 billion is roughly what South Korea spends on defense annually.) “Surveillance will continue to dominate the oil and gas infrastructure security market,” a summary of the report states.

At the same time, numerous intelligence-sharing networks between the private sector and law enforcement have been established at every level of government, giving rise to an unprecedented energy-intelligence complex. They range from project-specific and regional networks like the Nebraska Information Analysis Center’s Keystone Pipeline Portal community and the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee, to federal programs like the FBI’s Oil and Natural Gas Crime Issues Special Interest Group and the Department of Homeland Security’s Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council. These public-private partnerships, coupled with a revolving door between intelligence agencies and the more lucrative energy industry, have created a new kind of foe for the environmental movement. The fossil fuel industry is now an economic behemoth firmly hitched to the national security state.

It is true that environmentalists pose a threat to the energy industry – just not in the way the FBI or RCMP believe. The threat to the industry is existential and economic, not extremist. If the movement to end our reliance on fossil fuels prevails, the oil and gas industry will lose trillions of dollars in forecast profits. According to an estimate by the Carbon Tracker Initiative [5], if we hope to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the energy sector would have to leave more than $20 trillion worth of fossil fuels in the ground. “The oil and gas industry is doing everything they can to ensure they’re in business for the next 30 to 50 years and doing so at a time when we should be, as a nation, collectively figuring out how to stop using those same fossil fuels over the next ten years,” says Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper [6].

Conflict between fossil fuel interests and environmentalists is inevitable. But as the contest becomes ever more stark, there seems to be little effort to distinguish between lawful political activism and illegal activities. The fossil fuel industry’s reasonable concerns about the strength of its political opponents have morphed into a kind of paranoia, one that threatens to criminalize constitutionally protected dissent.

In the years since the FBI and RCMP reports, unconventional oil and gas development has been met with sustained protest, from small scale tree sits and encampments to massive nationwide demonstrations. The opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is only the most high-profile example of resistance to the fossil fuel industry. The term “Blockadia” has been used to describe the loose network of citizens seeking to disrupt the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. Tactics vary depending on the region and political backdrop, but the emphasis has been on nonviolent civil disobedience, legal action, and ballot measures to hamper pipeline projects, ban fracking, and prevent or slow down tar sands extraction. A handful of pipeline projects – including Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain and Williams Companies’ Constitution pipelines – have been stymied. In mid-December, after several years of intense organizing, lobbying, and direct action campaigns, New York became the first state with substantial shale gas reserves to ban fracking. Towns in Colorado, Texas, and Ohio have passed restrictions that limit oil and gas drilling.

Such successes have emboldened these groups and inspired action elsewhere. (Of course it should be noted that oil and gas development has hardly been halted; it continues apace throughout North America.) Rather than lead to an increase in criminal activity, as the FBI predicted, opposition to the oil and gas industry has, in some ways, become more mainstream. “Five years ago you would have never seen the faces of rural farmers and ranchers and tribal leaders on the front lines of climate actions,” says Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska [7], an environmental group opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline. “This unlikely Cowboy and Indian Alliance that is also working shoulder to shoulder with big green groups is changing the way America looks at the issue of land, water, and climate change.”

But the new face of the environmental movement seems not to have registered with an industry intent on steamrolling its critics. In 2011, in comments that have been widely cited, a spokesman for Anadarko Petroleum described the anti-fracking movement as an “insurgency” and suggested that industry insiders download the US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual as a guide to dealing with it. Less well known is the fact that Anadarko has built up a team of former intelligence operatives to combat what it views as an insurrection. The company’s southwest regional security manager was an officer with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was involved in undercover work. Another Anadarko security manager, LC Wilson, was regional commander of the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2009 to 2011 and oversaw law enforcement statewide. Anadarko has also been involved in the creation of at least two Oilfield Crime Committees, one in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, both of which are headed by former law enforcement officials. The South Texas Oilfield Crime Committee and the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee have gathered intelligence on environmental activists and routinely exchange information with law enforcement.

Anadarko is not alone. Most large energy companies have security teams run by former FBI, Secret Service, or law enforcement personnel. The director of corporate security at Devon Energy, for example, was a special agent with the Secret Service for 14 years. Chevron’s chief security officer was the former head of the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. And BP’s head of Government and Political Affairs from 2007 to 2012 worked for MI6, Britain’s top spy agency.

In most cases these security teams have been deployed to manage crises overseas. In Indonesia, for example, ExxonMobil ran its own intelligence operations and consulted regularly with the country’s military leaders as it sought to protect its assets amid destabilizing political conditions. In 2012 The Guardian reported that Shell Oil maintained a 1,200-person police force plus a network of undercover informants in Nigeria and spent tens of millions of dollars on security in the region.

As shale oil and gas development has expanded in North America, the frontlines of the energy wars are no longer overseas, but rather in places like Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Range Resources, one of the largest drillers in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale, has admitted to hiring veterans of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with experience in psychological warfare – or Psyops – to engage with local communities.

Neither Anadarko nor ExxonMobil nor Range Resources responded to requests for comment.

Even as the energy industry has beefed up its own in-house intelligence operations, it has established increasingly close ties with law enforcement agencies. This is partly a result of the post-9/11 national security state and the premium placed on information sharing. The Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC), established by the Department of Homeland Security in 2006, holds quarterly meetings to facilitate information sharing between the private sector and government agencies. (Meetings are exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which means there is no public oversight. Indeed, the Critical Infrastructure Information Act of 2002 stipulates that information voluntarily submitted by industry to the DHS or DOE is protected from public disclosure.) Within CIPAC there is an Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council and an Energy Government Coordinating Council. According to minutes from an August 2013 CIPAC meeting, the DHS has been working to provide more security clearances to the energy industry. “Currently DHS is working to enhance policies to share more classified information both cyber and non-cyber related,” the document states. Anadarko, Kinder Morgan, ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute are frequent participants and sponsors of CIPAC meetings.

In addition to CIPAC there is a Homeland Security Information Sharing Network for the Oil and Gas Industry (HSIN-ONG), a web-based platform that allows companies to communicate with each other and with law enforcement. It also gives them access to Suspicious Activity Reports and other intelligence related information. Around the same time that the information-sharing network was being created, the Department of Justice launched its National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative to “improve the sharing of suspicious activity reports among state, local, tribal, and federal law-enforcement organizations, as well as private sector entities.”

Intelligence-sharing systems also have been developed at the state level. The Nebraska Information Analysis Center (one of more than 70 Homeland Security “fusion centers”) has its own network that focuses on “possible unlawful tactics and techniques of individuals/groups opposed to Keystone XL pipeline.” According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal through a public records request, oil infrastructure company TransCanada has its own page in the HSIN portal where suspicious activity reports can be posted. TransCanada representatives, FBI agents, county attorneys, local sheriffs, and the US assistant attorney general all have access to the Keystone pipeline network.

Despite the numerous federal, state, and regional information-sharing networks established during the past decade, the industry has been reluctant to participate in programs that might be subject to public oversight. Thus last summer the oil and gas industry announced the creation of its own information sharing and analysis center, or ISAC, which allows member companies to submit intelligence anonymously and is exempt from public disclosure.

The industry’s fear of transparency is part of a larger pattern. Oil and gas firms often express alarm about having their facilities photographed or filmed by citizen watchdogs, which can lead to official investigations. For example, in 2011 the Rocky Mountain Energy Security Group (yet another regional intelligence sharing network) issued a security report that described activists in Pavillion, Wyoming who had photographed a natural gas processing facility. The report, which was disseminated to law enforcement and security professionals in the industry, defined the behavior as “suspicious activity” and said that the information was being circulated in order to determine “whether the activity has any underlying criminal or terrorism nexus (or intent).”

In recent years the FBI has pursued environmental activists in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho for little more than taking photographs of oil and gas industry installations.In 2011, after receiving an anonymous tip, the FBI went after Texas activist Ben Kessler, a member of the direct action environmental group Rising Tide North America [8]. In November 2013 and February 2014, a Pennsylvania state trooper and member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force visited anti-fracking activists at their homes in New York and Pennsylvania under the pretext that they had trespassed while taking photos of a gas compressor station. More recently, members of Rising Tide in the Pacific Northwest have been contacted or visited by FBI agents. (The energy companies’ fear of transparency is in some ways similar to the livestock industry’s exposé anxiety, which has led to the passage of so-called ag-gag laws that prohibit the filming of farms and ranches.)

The frontlines of the energy wars are no longer overseas, but rather in places like Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

But what happens when the private sector’s assumptions about criminal activity are wrong or misleading? In Pennsylvania the oil and gas industry has driven speculation that environmental organizations were behind several acts of vandalism at or near drilling sites, even though there’s no evidence of any link whatsoever. The unfounded assertion has spilled into the local press. In February 2014, The Williamsport Sun-Gazette in northeast Pennsylvania ran a story about the crimes headlined, “Ecoterror Target: Gas companies bolster security in response to threats.”

Jeff Monaghan, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario who writes on issues of surveillance, says the RCMP document reflects how deeply intertwined the suspicions of energy companies and intelligence agencies have become. “The broader context of this document is a very, very close working relationship between the Critical Infrastructure Protection team and the energy corporations. As the relationship develops the underlying belief is that environmentalists are first-and-foremost a threat to the economy. It’s really about protecting shared values of economic growth.”

Or, as the RCMP report put it, “Canada’s economic growth … and the objectives of environmentalists are in direct conflict.” Environmental activists wouldn’t disagree with that, especially given the aggressive pro-energy policies of the Harper government. What they take issue with is the highly provocative claim that their opposition to the energy industry will likely lead to criminal activity. As the interests of the state and energy sector become increasingly close, however, this perception is taking hold. Activists worry that it is shaping law enforcement’s approach to the movement and could lead to a crackdown on legal protest.

“It doesn’t surprise me that the industry is trying really hard to paint the environmental movement as fringe or dangerous, because it’s their last resort,” says Catskill Mountainkeeper’s Gillingham. “It’s behavior based on a losing argument.”

The conflict over the Keystone XL pipeline has reinforced the narrative that economic prosperity and environmental protection are mutually exclusive. Pipeline proponents like to paint the opposition as job killers and, yes, extremists. In April 2014, Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, described the pipeline as “a project that is being blocked purely by environmental extremism.” More recently, US Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, called anti-fracking activists campaigning for a moratorium “radical environmentalists.” A major Washington PR firm, Berman and Co., has launched an ad campaign bankrolled by the energy industry called “Big Green Radicals” that seeks to smear high-profile activists.

But the demonization of environmental advocates goes far beyond mere polemics. TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, has worked closely with law enforcement along the proposed pipeline route from the very early stages of its development. A certain amount of collaboration with law enforcement is to be expected with any major infrastructure project. But TransCanada has gone further. The company has pressured attorneys general to prosecute environmental activists under terrorism statutes. It has given local law enforcement advance notice of meetings with landowners whom the company describes as hostile. And the company has held workshops with local law enforcement and the FBI, including a daylong “strategy meeting” in Oklahoma with the FBI in 2012.

According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, the FBI distributed a bulletin in early 2013 “regarding threat concerns by environmental extremists against the Keystone Pipeline expansion project” to law enforcement across Nebraska. In its strategic plan for 2014-2017, South Dakota Homeland Security identifies what it considers to be extremist enclaves in the state, through which Keystone is proposed to pass. According to the document, “Uranium mining in the southwest part of the state and a proposed oil pipeline in the western part of the state garnered the attention of extremist environmental groups.” The report does not describe or name the groups, their intentions, or tactics. A public records request for additional documents or communication regarding “extremist environmental groups” in South Dakota was denied.

(Read the FBI bulletin here [3].)

In 2013 Earth Island Journal reported on the infiltration of a Tar Sands Resistance training camp [9] in Oklahoma. Two undercover officers from the Bryan County Sheriff’s office attended the weeklong event and shared intelligence with the Oklahoma Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center. Law enforcement was tipped off and a planned act of civil disobedience was preempted. During that same week TransCanada’s corporate security advisor was in frequent contact with the Oklahoma Fusion Center and made comments on a classified situational awareness bulletin.

In many ways Texas, where the Keystone pipeilne would terminate, is the heart of the American oil and gas industry. Not surprisingly, activists there are routinely harassed by law enforcement and corporate security for nothing more than keeping tabs on the industry. In East Houston, the city’s industrial hub and most polluted neighborhood (Houston itself is one of the most polluted cities in the country), environmental activist and community organizer Bryan Parras has been questioned by the police on several occasions and once was contacted by a Coast Guard special agent assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Houston. The organization he helps run with his father, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services [10] (or TEJAS), has been closely watched. Parras frequently takes activists and journalists on what he calls “toxic tours” – a survey of the neighborhood’s refineries, chemical plants, and shipping ports. He’s made a point of documenting the air pollution caused by the flaring at the refineries that flank the neighborhood. He says the images “compel people to action.”

They’ve also made Parras a subject of interest for industry and law enforcement. He is routinely questioned by the police or harassed by security representatives from Valero Energy, a major refining company and one of the industries Parras monitors. In 2013 Parras got a text from a friend, Tish Stringer, saying that an agent had visited her home and wanted to know about her relationship with him. The Coast Guard special agent, David Pileggi, told Stringer he’d been tipped off by Valero.

“It’s nothing new,” Parras says. “Since 9/11 we’ve been harassed repeatedly and pulled over for taking pictures or video of the facilities.”

In an emailed statement, Bill Day, vice president of communications at Valero, said the Houston refinery is designated by Homeland Security as “critical infrastructure” and therefore must meet enhanced security requirements. “One of those requirements,” he wrote, “is that when we see people taking photos or video of our facilities, we ascertain the purpose of that activity and then report it to DHS.” According to Shauna Dunlap, media coordinator for the FBI’s Houston Division, photographing and videotaping of critical infrastructures “can be a precursor of potential criminal activity.” The Joint Terrorism Task Force, she says, is “obligated to look into each and every suspicious activity report.”

This kind of surveillance and intimidation, Parras says, is particularly chilling in an area with a large number of undocumented residents. Not only are they vulnerable to threats of deportation, but also they’re quite literally at the crossroads of environmental destruction and the risks associated with climate change. East Houston is home to a disproportionate number of the city’s largest sources of industrial pollution, four major highways, and the shipping channel that feeds into the Port of Houston. If built, the Keystone XL pipeline would terminate in East Houston; Valero has a contract with TransCanada to receive most of the oil. “On the basis of location alone these neighborhoods appear far more vulnerable to health risks than others in Greater Houston,” a 2006 study commissioned by the mayor’s office concluded. In addition, rising sea levels threaten to inundate the heavily industrialized shoreline. “It puts us at even higher risk because we’re on the coast,” says Parras. “All these facilities are right on the water.”

In many ways, for activists like Parras the last line of defense lies in taking photos, documenting the impacts of industrial pollution, and simply bearing witness. TEJAS hasn’t even engaged in civil disobedience or direct action, he says. Still, his organization is on Valero’s watch list. TEJAS organizers have been followed and photographed or videoed by Valero security personnel. Local teachers who joined Parras on one of his toxic tours were bullied into deleting photos and video they had taken of the refinery. Journalists he has shown around have been threatened by Valero that they’ll be reported to the FBI.

In the eyes of the oil and gas industry this is the new environmental extremism. And that view is being shared with law enforcement at every level.

The intimidation and surveillance have had an impact. Parras says his advocacy has been compromised by Valero’s scrutiny of his organization and the refinery’s close relationship with law enforcement. “It’s difficult to get neighbors to want to engage and speak out,” he says.

Adam Federman, recipient of a Polk Grant for Investigative Reporting, is a contributing writer to Earth Island Journal. His work has appeared in Salon, among other outlets.

http://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-06-monsanto-cash-helped-fund-bill-to-stifle-whistleblowers-in-iowa/

Monsanto cash helped fund bill to stifle whistleblowers in Iowa

By Tom Laskawy

.Speaking of Monsanto, it turns out they are playing a role in Iowa’s proposed anti-whistleblower bill — a bill focused primarily on agriculture. Should the bill pass, it will become illegal to produce undercover videos at various types of agricultural facilities (as well as to get a job at a facility with the express intent of producing a video). Sarah Damian of the Government Accountability Project, a “whistleblower advocacy organization,” observes over at the Food Integrity Campaign’s blogthat Monsanto has been throwing lobbying dollars behind Iowa’s effort to draw a steel curtain around food production. And not without reason:

… Monsanto has more facilities in Iowa than in any other state in the country, with more than 25 offices. The company is heavily invested in the bill’s outcome because “crop operations” are also covered, which would apply to Monsanto’s seed houses, pesticide manufacturing plants and research facilities throughout Iowa. The biotech and crop chemical giant wouldn’t want any undercover videos produced on its clock, apparently.

That’s a bit ironic, however, given the fact that Monsanto investigators are notorious for trespassing on farmers’ property and going to extreme measures to produce evidence of seed patent infringement, including posing as land mappers or even joining a local Alcohol Anonymous group to gain the farmers’ trust and gain video access to their fields. Talk about undercover.

And don’t think that Monsanto hasn’t planned ahead. According to Damian, there are provisions in the bill that would allow Monsanto to continue snooping around farmers’ fields in its ongoing search for so-called “seed thieves” aka “patent infringers.”

Despite occasional setbacks and even uncertainty in the marketplace, let it not be said that Monsanto has lost its taste for playing the heavy.

A press release from Constellis Holdings signals major news in the High Threat Security Industry. Academi, the company formerly known as Blackwater and Xe, will join Triple Canopy along with a handful of other high threat security companies under a new management structure named Constellis Holdings.

“This move allows us to create a suite of services to better provide critical support capabilities for government and commercial clients and will utilize ACADEMI’s world-class training facility, the largest and most comprehensive private training center in the U.S.” said Jason DeYonker, Managing Director of Constellis Holdings, Inc.

Constellis Holdings, Inc. has agreed to acquire Constellis Group, Inc., a leading provider of security, support and advisory services to government, multinational corporations and international organizations operating in challenging environments around the world. Constellis Holdings was formed by the founders of Triple Canopy and the private equity investors who formed ACADEMI.

The transaction brings together a global team of industry leaders, including: Triple Canopy, Constellis Ltd., Strategic Social, Tidewater Global Services, National Strategic Protective Services, ACADEMI Training Center and International Development Solutions.

Operating under the oversight of a distinguished Board and an experienced management team, the combination of these companies will enable a significant expansion of services within the global security market, delivering mission support, integrated security solutions, training and advisory services at home and abroad.

See more at: http://www.your-poc.com/academi-triple-canopy-5-companies-merge-forming-largest-high-threat-security-group-world/#sthash.FiHVwsPu.dpuf

Sockpuppets Series

One of the research areas I'm focusing on as part of a book project I'm working on is state- and corporate-sponsored propaganda and how it affects the population at large, and how it systematically neutralizes (or sabotages) the effectiveness of social justice movements and activists.

Back in January 25th, 2013, I wrote a well-received diary titled "Research Study Explains How U.S. Media Brainwashes The Public." In that diary I focused on the propagandist effects of corporate media conglomeration, and I made reference to a Gonzaga University Master's Degree Thesis by Frank McCoy, submitted on December, 2012: "THE PROPAGANDA MODEL: CORPORATE AND POLITICAL COLLUSION INTHE CREATION OF AN OLIGOPOLISTIC MAINSTREAM U.S. MEDIA."

Before I continue, I'd like to point out that I'm very surprised at how little ongoing research there is about modern-day government/corporate propaganda, given that it seems to me (from the research I'm conducting) that it is now more ubiquitous, advanced, and effective than any time in history...

More recently I published a diary reporting on how government and corporate spy networks have been infiltrating activist groups: "Report: U.S. Gov. And Corporate Security Companies Collude to Bring Down Social Justice Groups." In that diary I referenced a recently-published report on how "[c]orporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups they view as potential threats with little fear of retribution," as reported by The Los Angels Times.

I've written a few other diaries about this topic, and I'm in the process of writing the chapter on propaganda (for my book) using the available reference material (studies, research, etc.)... I will also set up a reference section on modern-day propaganda on my website for those who are interested in more in-depth knowledge about the subject.

In the meantime, I'd like to call attention to the latest revelations about how corporate PR and spy networks work in conjunction with governments to neutralize activists.

The website, PopularResistance.org recently published a related article: "Stratfor Monitors and Studies Social Movements"

It was very interesting to see (and confirm) something I've observed for quite some time now (as I continue researching the subject): The effort to cognitively infiltrate social justice groups and activists is systematic and disciplined. For a more in-depth examination on this, I really recommend another article published at PopularResistance.org: "Here's How The Corporations Defeat Political Movements."

In the meantime, I'll focus on Stratfor's recommendation(s) when it comes to neutralizing activists. In one of the most disciplined cognitive infiltration strategies I've seen, they recommend a very matter-of-factly "divide-and-conquer" process on dealing with different types of activists. Here's how they break them down:

RADICALS: Radicals, who see the system as corrupt and needing transformation,need to be isolated and discredited, using false charges to assassinate their character is a common tactic.

REALISTS: The Realists can be convinced that transformative change is not possible and we must settle for what is possible.

IDEALISTS: Idealists can be convinced they have the facts wrong and pulled to the Realist camp.

OPPORTUNISTS: Opportunists are in it for themselves and can be pulled away for their own self-interest.

I'm writing a more extensive essay about this subject, which I will publish later on tonight, but in the meantime I wanted to publish this short diary to elicit readers' opinions (and observations) about the subject, especially the break down of the different types of activists, and the corporate state strategy on how to deal with each.

ref above:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/27/1258654/-Report-U-S-Gov-And-Corporate-Security-Companies-Collude-to-Bring-Down-Social-Justice-Groups

BillMoyers.com [1] / By Joshua Holland [2]

How Corporate Spooks Spy on Nonprofit Activist Groups

November 25, 2013 |

In 2010, a group of hackers known as LulzSec gave us a peek into the shadowy world of corporate espionage. The group released 175,000 emails it obtained from a private security firm called HBGary Federal.

The hack revealed, among other things, that Bank of America (BofA) had grown concerned about a promise that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made in 2009 to release a trove of sensitive documents that Assange claimed could “take down” the bank. BofA went into crisis-control mode, setting up a “war room” to handle the fallout from the expected release (which, as it turned out, never came).

It also approached the Justice Department, which referred the mega-bank to a K-Street lobbying firm, which introduced BofA executives to a group of private security firms called Team Themis.

Peter Ludlow, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote in The New York Times [3] that the group offered, among other services, a “common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it.”

Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald… because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks.

Team Themis considered falsifying documents and feeding them to Greenwald in order to discredit his reporting. They also pitched the Chamber of Commerce with a plan to infiltrate Chamber Watch, a progressive group that opposes the CoC’s anti-regulatory agenda. They suggested creating “two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”

When the story broke, Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce rushed to distance themselves from the plans and HBGary claimed that they had never gotten past the planning stage. But the leaked emails briefly shined a light on the murky, largely unregulated world of corporate spying – an industry that watchdogs say has grown exponentially since the 9/11 attacks.

Last week, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Corporate Policy Center issued a report titled, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations [4],” which detailed a number of revelations of corporate espionage operations against non-profit activist groups. Moyers & Companyspoke to the report’s author, Corporate Policy Center Director Gary Ruskin, last week.

Joshua Holland: Over the past few years, a few cases of corporate espionage against various activist groups have come to light, but your report is the first to attempt to document this phenomenon in detail. Do we know how widespread this practice is?

Gary Ruskin: We really do not. Our report, “Spooky Business,” is really an effort to say something that we really know very little about. It’s kind of like documenting the tip of the iceberg, but we don’t know how deep the iceberg goes. So it’s going to require a lot more journalistic work, as well as some investigations by the Department of Justice and other law enforcement officials.

Holland: Let’s look at an example of the kinds of stories that have come to light and then we can discuss the ramifications. What is S2i, the company formerly known BBI?

Ruskin: Those two companies are basically private investigation firms and they were very active in surveilling and conducting espionage against a wide variety of nonprofit organizations.

Holland: What kind of specific activities did you find these private ‘spooks,’ if you will, doing to disrupt activist groups — or is disrupt even the right word?

Ruskin: I think “disrupt,” “surveil” and “conduct espionage” are all quite correct. They conducted a wide variety of espionage activities. One thing that they did to Greenpeace was they conducted more than 120 efforts at “dumpster diving,” where they would go onto Greenpeace’s property and essentially trespass and obtain the group’s thrown-out memos and the like.

BBI also had on its retainer an active duty police officer in Washington, D.C., who could help them get onto Greenpeace’s property. They did a wide variety of physical surveillance and intrusion and infiltration activities. And it appears that they did wiretapping, as well as hiring an NSA contractor who specialized in computer intrusion and electronic surveillance and that was all used against Greenpeace. Theft of a wide variety of Greenpeace memos — it’s a very long and complicated list of espionage activities.

Holland: And have you found instances where they actually infiltrated these groups, where they posed as activists themselves to get on the inside?

Ruskin: We found that that was the most common form of espionage, where a company would hire an intelligence person, who would then either pose as a volunteer or as a journalist and then vacuum up a lot of information.

Holland: And you mention in the report that a lot of these companies had employed former NSA, CIA and other types of former intelligence officers.

After 9/11, we saw a huge expansion of our intelligence budgets and I think most people may not realize that a large share of that expansion wasn’t done through government agencies directly, but through outside security contractors.

According to journalist Tim Shorrock [5], around 70 percent of our national security spending now goes to private firms. So I guess the question is: to what degree did building all of this private intelligence capacity help create the situation that you describe in the report?

Ruskin: Well, I think you hit it right on the head there. We essentially have this private national security state and they have a tremendous amount of private national security capability. And this is for-profit and they want more contracts, so they’ll take contracts from companies that want to conduct espionage against nonprofits and this is a problem.

And another part of the problem is that there haven’t been much in the way of investigations — and certainly not prosecutions in the United States over this sort of thing – so the people who conduct this kind of espionage think that they can do it with impunity. And, so far, they’re right.

Holland: Michael Hayden, the former director of both the NSA and the CIA, oversaw that privatization effort in the early 2000s and late ’90s. He told Shorrock — and I’ll quote, because I think it’s so interesting. He said, “The largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32.” That’s where the NSA and its top contractors are located. Hayden coined the term ‘Digital Blackwater’ to describe this stuff.

Gary, I may be asking you to speculate here: after 9/11, we saw the line between activism and terrorism starting to blur. We started hearing terms like “ecoterrorism,” for example. I wonder to what degree you think that mindset has bled into the private sector, with intelligence agencies seeing activism as somehow criminal or illegitimate and something to be targeted?

Ruskin: Well, I think it’s pretty clear that we’re seeing that sort of thing more and more. It’s clear that that was part of the treatment of Occupy Wall Street across the country, where there were these interesting FBI-corporate “partnerships.” We wrote about one in the report called “InfraGard [6].”

And it’s not just happening in the United States. There was a really interesting piece in a Vancouver newspaper last week showing government espionage of environmental activists and groups in Canada on behalf of oil companies.

Holland: There’s a revolving door here, with personnel moving between private intelligence companies and the government, right? And revolving doors make regulation really challenging. Is there any sort of regulation of this kind of corporate spying?

Ruskin: When we’re talking about private corporate spying on nonprofits, there’s been very little. And that’s part of the problem: in general, there’s been very little attention paid to moonlighting CIA operatives, or retired operatives. We don’t know what they actually do and whether it’s ethical and whether it should continue. And so that’s something that Congress really could and should do — hold hearings to shine some light on what is really happening so that we can figure out how it’s got to change.

Holland: You mention the Pinkertons in the report. That was a private police force used by corporations to, among other things, brutalize, and sometimes even murder labor organizers a hundred years ago.

So I wonder if this is a new thing or an old thing that now has new technologies and uses more sophisticated tactics than beating people over the head with baseball bats?

Ruskin: In some ways it’s definitely a very old thing. But what’s different now is the technology is far more intrusive. And we have this giant national security state that is, in effect, for hire by companies to do their espionage. And the third thing is that there’s been no pushback from law enforcement. In the UK and in France, there has been pushback on this sort of thing, but not here in the United States. So that’s got to change.

Holland: And have you seen a chilling effect from this, or is that a potential danger here, Are activists being scared off?

Ruskin: You know, democracy really depends on an active citizenry and on active citizen groups and to the extent that that is impaired because of espionage, well, then our entire democracy is the poorer for it. And that’s why we really think that the Justice Department and Congress need to do their job.

Holland: Let me play Devil’s advocate for a moment. How would you respond to the other side of the argument, which is that companies have a right — and let’s face it, in some instances a need — to anticipate and try to head off illegal actions against them, as opposed to legal First Amendment-protected activism?

Ruskin: Well, there’s no question that they’re perfectly within their rights to collect information by legal means, but when they break the law that’s very different. We uncovered in our report some conduct that certainly appears to be illegal and we supposedly live under the rule of law in our society. So let’s make sure that that continues.

You can download “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations” here [4].

See more stories tagged with:

spying [7]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-corporate-spooks-spy-nonprofit-activist-groups

Links: [1] http://billmoyers.com/ [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland [3] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/ [4] http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/opinion/put-the-spies-back-under-one-roof.html?ref=opinion [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfraGard [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/spying [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

spooky biz

Blackwater essentially wanted to be the espionage arm of Monsanto. So, they did some work together. We have fragmentary information about their work together. So, and then, there’s been a lot of activity in the oil and the chemical — from oil and chemical companies. So, Dow Chemical did extensive espionage against Greenpeace. Shell has done some espionage as well, so has BP.

Chevron is sort of an interesting case. They have been hit with a $9.5 billion fine related to their pollution they — that Texaco, which they purchased, conducted, spilled in Ecuador. So, Chevron tried to, through a private investigative firm, giant private investigative firm called Kroll tried to hire a journalist who’s name was Mary Cuddehe to essentially act as a corporate spy for Chevron and to try to discredit a public health study about the effects of the oil spill. So, they tried to hire her. She said no and then she just wrote this totally wonderful, charming piece about Kroll’s efforts in The Atlantic a few years ago.

cf See James Ridgeway, “The Dirty History of Corporate Spying.” Guardian, February 15, 2011.

The use of former intelligence, military and law enforcement officers for corporate espionage appears to be commonplace. Especially prevalent is the use of former Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Secret Service agents, as well as current or former police officers, and other former military, intelligence and law enforcement officials. These current and former government employees, and current government contractors, do their spying against nonprofits with little regulation or oversight, and apparently with near impunity. Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations ---- including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-- Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON ---- have been linked to espionage or planne

The CIA’s “old boy network” is legendary. Regarding the FBI, Eamon Javers describes a little--known publication, the Trapline, which “lists every retired FBI agent in the country who works in the private investigations business.” Javers describes the Trapline as “a bit like an institutionalized old--boy network for retired G-men

In 2010, the Washington Post was able to identify 1,931 private companies that “work on top--secret contracts.” The Post also estimated that “out of 854,000 people with top--secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors.”12

http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/25**/spooky_business**_us_corporations_enlist_ex

A new report details how corporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups they regard as potential threats. The corporate watchdog organization Essential Information found a diverse groups of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, antiwar, public interest, consumer safety, pesticide reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups. The corporations carrying out the spying include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, and others. According to the report, these corporations employ former CIA, National Security Agency and FBI agents to engage in private surveillance work, which is often illegal in nature but rarely — if ever — prosecuted. We’re joined by Gary Ruskin, author of the report, "Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations," and director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information.

We now know that the U.S. government can obtain virtually any email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype messages, file transfers, and social networking details it wants. We know that it can monitor the location, duration, and telephone numbers involved in any phone call on an ongoing, daily basis. We know that it monitored the foreign officials who traveled to the G20 summit in 2009. We know that it has deliberately weakened the encryption software meant to protect financial transactions. We know that it has tapped into the fiber-optic cables connecting international servers so that it can copy, basically, any information that moves through them.

What does this mean for environmental activists, who, like the rest of us, increasingly organize their lives over the internet? “I remember in the past we used to tell each other to wipe our phone’s contacts before protests,” says Joshua Kahn Russell, who once organized protests with the Ruckus Society and now is a global community manager with 350.org. “I can’t imagine activists doing that now, since the government and private companies have infinitely more access to our personal information that we freely provide through Facebook and other social networking sites.”

The ’90s and early ’00s were, arguably, the peak of government paranoia about the environmental movement. In 2005, John Lewis, the top FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, declared that radical environmentalists were the No. 1 domestic terrorist threat. State, local, and federal officials dedicated a tremendous amount of time and effort to tracking down the disbanded members of The Family, an offshoot of the Earth Liberation Front that set fire to a car dealership, a ski resort, a horse slaughterhouse, and other sites in the Pacific Northwest. The FBI also spent three years monitoring Greenpeace [PDF] and put several members on the terrorism watch list, in an investigation that the Justice Department’s inspector general later ruled was improper.

If electronic surveillance is being used on environmental activists, there is not much sign of it yet. “We use everything from two-way radios to cellphones to internet to chat to Facebook to organize,” says Ramsey Sprague, a Texan who has worked with the Tar Sands Blockade. “We follow Basic Security Culture, which is just about being aware of what you are talking about, and who you are talking about it with.”

The most visible manifestation of surveillance in the environmental movement has been a rash of undercover agents. At times they have engaged in activities that blurred the lines between police work and entrapment; but for the most part, they’re a consistent enough presence that every experienced environmental group has a policy for dealing with them.

“It goes against the core values of inclusion to look at someone and say ‘That looks like a cop,’” says Sprague. “Although young officers do look very … sculpted. So you have them do outreach. Send them out to go talk to people who are really being affected by what oil companies are doing in their community.”

nyc: http://gothamist.com/2013/10/10/occupys_undercover_shady_ubiquitous.php

Both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy were visited by undercover informants, as were groups like the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance. That organization figured out it was being monitored this March, after its plan to block the gates to TransCanada’s oil reserves in Cushing, Okla., was derailed by the sudden appearance of police officers, who began to pull over cars full of demonstrators before they even reached Cushing.

A public records request revealed that the leak came from two undercover officers who had been attending training sessions for the protests and writing up reports, describing in particular detail [PDF] the efforts that protesters were using to avoid conflicts with law enforcement, as well as the fashion choices and political beliefs of different subgroups.

Group 4 consisted of a smaller group of Anarchists that appeared to have no real tie to eco-activism or any other interest group or movement. The only interest appeared to be doing away with government, capitalism, and corporations. This small group consisted of late teens and early twenty year-old white males. Many wore upside down American flags on jackets and backpacks.

The high level of monitoring that environmental groups faced in the ’90s and early ’00s has in many ways prepared them well for the new age of no privacy. When an environmental protest occurs that involves some level of surprise, like Tim DeChristopher’s bid on drilling rights in Utah, it is usually carried out by a very small group of trusted confidantes. Even DeChristopher wasn’t entirely sure what action he was planning until the moment it happened.

And lack of secrecy can be a strategic tool in its own right. The Tar Sands Blockade has tried to document as much of its activities as possible. Much of the blockade took place on constantly shifting territory, well out of cellphone range, and so getting anyone capable of documenting it to the site became as critical as planning the action itself. “We found that when we had cameras on the police,” said Sprague, “we had fewer instances of police brutality. It’s part of our campaign strategy.”

Overall, says Sprague, whatever peril the internet has brought, it has also brought good. In particular, it has connected different aspects of the environmental movement to one another, making its full scope more visible.

“We’re in a different era. It’s no longer possible to see environmentalists as just hippies. When the front lines of environmental battles are being fought by ranchers, hunters, indigenous people — it’s always been this way. But now we can see it.”

Sprague credits technology with helping the movement see itself better. “I mean — the computer industry is very much to blame for a lot of environmental degradation, too. But right now? We’re coming into a golden age.”

Heather Smith (on Twitter, @strangerworks) is interested in the various ways that humans try to save the environment: past, present, and future

grist

===

just added security to this cat:

United Stateshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_security_companies#United_States

ABM Security Services

Arrow Security

ADT Security Services

AlliedBarton

G4S Secure Solutions

Inter-Con Security

Monitronics

Pinkerton Security

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/business-and-human-rights/private-military-and-security-companies international

press2:

PVT INTELL

Long a revolving door between corporations and government, perhaps nowhere as common and consequential as that involving the military-industrial-complex that Eisenhower warned us about. Add this to the GOP creed that any company can perform any function better than any government, plus unimaginable amounts of untraceable cash for intelligence in the wake of 911. Add to that the digital revolution (giving an individual hacker without any kind of resources, but also unprecedented ability to monitor our lives) and the fear engendered in corporations by Occupy and you get:

Hunton & Williams, Team Themis

US Chamber of Commerce

In Sept 10, 2010 US Chamberwatch filed charges with IRS that it was laundering charity money for a front group connected to AIG [this is a big deal: AIG one of the biggest recipients of TAR bailout, saved by Geitner although they had taken the most extreme risks, and CEO Greenberg massive B2/GOP donor indicted for fraudulent accounting a la Enron; The US Chamber of Commerce, though it is clearly a commercial organization with huge assets, does not want to pay taxes, wants corporations to be able to give them money and then write it off?!, and they do not want to disclose who gives them and how much, otherwise we would know they are not the nice guys who fund the Little League team in our home towns but very large corps, often trans/multinational, who want to get subsidies and jettison health and environmental rules]. ThinkProgress showed foreign money funneled into account used to defeat progressive politicians with negative ads.

The US Chamber of Commerce was getting tired of criticism, so they asked their lawyers Hunton &Williams [Lewis Powell's old firm! It's also the lawyers for USCoC and Bank of America, sued EPA on CO2, buffer] which in turned hired Team Themis (goddess of justice, a consortium of three private intel co's, including two others, Booz Hamilton and Palantir of Snowden SA fame). Fake "insider personas" aka sock puppets to infiltrate, mine social networks, and hack computers even of families of activists. "Sock Puppets" sounds quirky, but COINTELPRO had significant successes in disrupting progressive organizations not just by gathering information, but by injecting disinformation, ideally prompting paranoia and rifts. [example?]

Themis was preparing a PowerPoint to impress the clients, so they decided to do a demo to show their prowess by doing some online reconn of Richard Wyatt, H&Wms lawyer (pictures of their kids, movements and associations with their wives—sent not to Wyatt but another H&W lawyer Woods with advice on hiding friends’ list].

10/10 Win 7 theme for games that would provide back door

Identify Wikileak donors and threaten, also civil liberties lawyer helping Wikileaks

12/1 /10 dossiers from Facebook scrape Also Move-On and other enemies of the USCoC.

12/2 Woods (H&W partner) request for slides on Wikileaks for big bank

12/3 Target Greenwald for Wikileaks presentation

Barr at HGB looking at Jan 2011.(also Exelon nuke employees?)

1/20 Barr on Wikileaks

1/26 Barr working on Anonymous (teams up with Booz)

2/4 Financial Times publishes story on Barr and Anon; Anon retaliates with hack, wiped his iPad and backup

? Got diverted to go after Wikileaks, but 2/4 Anonymous hacked Themis instead and posted data.

HBG Went after Glen Greenwald, thinking that he'd cave to blackmail as he's a reasonable professional. One proposed technique was to post fake seemingly incriminating documents in a "honey hole for hacktivists to find, then threatening to denounce the activists. Greenwald notes how scary it is the effortless and seamless morphing from intel companies doing threat assessments and sabotage on the enemy of US, then going after the enemy of a corporation.

Also Brad Blog: called Ann Coulter on voter fraud, machines, climate change [what do he and Greenwald have in common?]

Bank of America

Julian Assange said in 2009 they had 5 GigaB from an executive's computer that would prove misconduct, but difficult to present (clearly and compellingly?). In December 2010 B of A joined Wikileaks boycott with MasterCard, PayPal and others.

2011 G Greenwald says Justice Dept recommended H&W to Bank of America General Counsel . HBG hired by a big US bank presumably Bank of America) to launch offensive cyber attacks on the servers that host Wikileaks (Salon 2/25/11 article) . “ And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America’s General Counsel by the Justice Department — meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on Wiki Leaks....”

2/1/13 B of A site down, hackers said to not be cause, though many other banks had suffered DoS attacks. Also 2010 in retaliation for 5$ fee?

2/27/13 Anonymous hacks B of A; they had hired TEKSystems in 2012 to go after hackers as well as OWS, but the info was crappy.

Another private intel co that// HBG (but clowns)

Strategic Foresight, Stratfor "shadow CIA" as they will do intel work for corporations (Dow, Bhopal , Yes Men, PETA eco-terror), but has also worked for DoD, DHS paid them to spy on OWS; established in Austin 1996, hacked by Jeremy Hammond, 27 year old Chicago.(hack was Dec 2011). Protest Warrior and a number of cop related (e.g. tear gas manufacturer)

Sabu caught by FBI and betrayed Hammond . Anonymous hacked Stratfor and uploaded files to WikiLeaks; Hammond eventually busted (credit card info critical error?]. Husband of judge was one of those who had Stratfor info released; she refused to recuse herself, denied him bail in Nov 2012 after he'd been in jail with no trial for eight months, and told him he faced a life sentence! In addition, Metropolitan Correctional Center has very strict limits. Got 150K files but Hammond cannot look at them without an attorney present (his? Why?) , so estimates two years to look at the docs, so requested bail to prepare defense. May 2013 he pled guilty for max of twenty years (those arrested in UP got much less 1984 Computer Fraud Act used against Aaron Schwartz too.

Judge's husband was part of hack, but she refused to recuse herself; she denied him bail (she was on short list for SCOTUS B2]. Stratfor guys went of Austin General Assembly “a terrible threat to corporations” to they can deal with “hippy hijinks” OWS Texas? called Deep Green Resistance eco-terrorists. Stratfor got intel from Texas Department of Public Safety Stratfor went after Bhopal protestors (Dow), PETA, Anonymous? Yes Men? Rep of Coca Cola asked for info on PETA (animal testing] because they feared protests at 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Burton tells Alfano about classified FBI investigation of PETA that could be useful.

Stratfor teamed with Goldman Sachs to create an investment company to trade in government bonds, currency etc. Unholy alliance of private intel (connected to mil/CIA intel) fused with financialization [one of the 4 horsemen; remember too Jaron's big computer theory]. Stratfor is literally a joke, but the industry is so incredibly lucrative than they stay in business (hired a “liberal”? Journalist/novelist Kaplan as beard).

2/27/12 Wikileaks published five million emails from Stratfor dated July 2004 to December 2012.

2004 Yes Men fake Dow press conf; stock dropped in Frankfurt 4 percent in 23 minutes, losing 2 billion dollars; shares rebounded after BBC apology.

Collateral damage:

Writer/journalist Barrett Brown, talented writer, he was working on a book on pundits when Anonymous caught his attention, as he believed it was going to be transformational and had been seriously under-reported. He started a small collective to analyze the document dumps. What he found was amazing: DOJ giving tips on how to hire private intel to go after legitimate protest. Endgame software selling real-time computer vulnerabilities; FBI caught on and got a subpoena, clearly they wanted his sources (odd, since they knew what files he was looking at? What they had a tougher time finding out was who was working with him?]. Because he was inconsiderately not at home when they came for him, they tracked him down at his mom's house, but then had to get another warrant to search her house. In the meantime, they are both charged with obstruction of justice. He claims his mom did not know his laptop was in her house, thus she's innocent [and who could blame her if she did mislead or stall the feds?] he's looking at 105 years in jail, lost it when they threatened his mom. cf. Aaron Schwartz same 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse rap.

pension plan DESTROYS PENALTY FOR BAD CONDUCT; even nixon rehabbed? but also attractor // incubator: you can't fail ~ market dogma (irony) ; thus encourages more extreme behavior? (amplify fdbk) on what basis/ did mil and gov't spooks separate from govt service?

SS agent Is Given Six-Month Sentence

By The Associated Press Published: September 19, 1989

A Secret Service agent convicted of using excessive force to arrest a man near a Presidential candidate's New York motorcade last year was sentenced yesterday to six months in a halfway house and fined $2,000.

Judge Pierre N. Leval of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced the agent, Kevin Schatzle, after viewing a videotape of the April 10, 1988 incident. Mr. Schatzle was in the security detail for Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, then campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

A jury convicted Mr. Schatzle, 28 years old, in June of using excessive force when he kicked and punched Christopher Gorayeb, 32, a lawyer. It acquitted him of false arrest.

http://gawker.com/5850054/meet-the-guy-who-snitched-on-occupy-wall-street-to-the-fbi-and-nypd bs:

Tom Ryan's Profile

A 20-year security veteran, Thomas Ryan is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Cyber Operations and Threat Intelligence for Provide Security. The company was formed with the concept of the convergence of both physical and cyber techniques for Executive Protection, Advanced Red Teaming, Crisis Management, Threat Profiling, Threat Assessments and Penetration Testing. In his role, Mr. Ryan leads a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world. Prior to founding Provide Security, Mr. Ryan had functioned as a security instructor for US Army INSCOM, USNORTHCOM, USSOUTHCOM and several other military and government agencies. bs

Dr. Kevin Schatzle CISSP, CFE, CPP

Managing Partner LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tommyryan Blog: http://www.thomasryan.net Managing Partner LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-kevin-schatzle-cissp-cfe-cpp/8/348/641 Blog: http://www.kevinschatzle.com

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.

What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's New York-based cyber security team.

Expand

On September 18th, the day after the protest's start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. "We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them," writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with.

Another organizer named Conor responds: "+1,000,000 to Jackie's proposal on working people/union struggles outreach and solidarity. Also, why not invite people to protest Troy Davis's execution date at Liberty Plaza this Monday?"

Five minutes after Conor sent his email, Ryan forwarded the thread—with no additional comment—to Loyd's FBI email address. "Thanks!" Loyd responded. He cc'd his colleague named Ilhwan Yum, a fellow cybersecurity expert at the agency, on the reply.

Expand

On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad.

The NYPD might have been very grateful he did so, since it involved a proposed demonstration outside NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. In the thread, organizers debated whether to crash an upcoming press conference planned by marijuana advocates to celebrate NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ordering officers to halt arrests over possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Anonymous Leaks Personal Details of Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Wall Street Protesters

Anonymous is on the hunt for the cop featured in a video pepper-spraying Occupy Wall Street… Read…

"Should we bring some folks from Liberty Plaza to chant "SHAME" for the NYPD's recent brutalities on Thursday night for the Troy Davis and Saturday for the Occupy Wall Street march?" asked one person in the email thread. (That past Saturday, the video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a protester had gone viral.) Ryan promptly forwarded the email thread to Loyd at the FBI and Dragos at the NYPD.

Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of September17discuss emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers.

"I don't know, I just put everything I had into one big package," Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart's blog. Some security expert.

Expand

But Ryan didn't just tip off the authorities. He was also giving information to companies as well. When protesters discussed demonstrating in front of morning shows like Today and Good Morning America, Ryan quickly forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, the chief security officer at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal.

Ryan wrote:

Since you are the CSO, I am not sure of your role in NBC since COMCAST owns them. There is a huge protest in New York call "Occupy Wall Street". Here is an email of stunts that they will try to pull on the TODAY show.

We have been heavily monitoring Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.

"Thanks Tom," Farrell responded. "I'll pass this to my counterpart at NBCU."

===

chuck hamel took concorde to tell BP pres valdez term problem; ex cia hired to spy,

entrapped; failed; used RC toy truck to bug hotel; busted/arrested by navy seal intel team

(doing what?) p 14

BP had to pay hamel; palast vult pic----

does not list haliburton?

Pages in category "Private military corporations"

The following 119 pages are in this category, out of 119 total.

Private Military Corporations

Private Military Corporations/list of PMCs

3D Global Solutions

AGS

AKE Limited

Aegis Defence Services

AirScan Inc.

Anteon International Corporation

ArmorGroup International PLC

BH Defense LLC

Babylon Gates

Andrew Bearpark

J. Robert Beyster

J. Cofer Black

Blackwater USA/External Links

Blackwater USA/external articles 2003-2006

Blackwater USA/external articles 2007

Blackwater USA/external articles 2008

Blackwater Watch

Blue Hackle Limited

Brillstein Security Group

CACI International

CAG Internacional S.A.

Centurion Risk Assessment Services, Ltd.

Chesapeake Strategies Group

Civilian Police International, LLC

Cochise Consultancy Inc.

Col. Theodore S. Westhusing

Combat Support Associates, Ltd.

Control Risks Group

Jeff Corkill

Coup Attempt in Equatorial Guinea

Crescent Security Group

Crisis Control Group, LLC

Cubic Corporation

Custer Battles

DS Vance Iraq

Defence Systems Limited

Diligence, LLC

D cont.

DynCorp

EOD Technology, Inc.

EUBSA BV Inc.

Edinburgh International

Erinys International Ltd.

Evergreen International Aviation, Inc.

Executive Outcomes

Executive Solutions International

G4S

General Dynamics Information Technology

Genric, Ltd.

Global CST

Global Marine Security Systems Company

Global Options, Inc.

Global Security Services

Global Strategies Group

Golan Group

Greystone, Ltd.

Michael Grunberg

Hart Group

Hill and Associates

Homeland Security Company

ISEC Security

ISP International Security Provider

International Charter Incorporated of Oregon

International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries

International Tactical Officers Training Association

Janusian Security Risk Management Ltd.

Keenie Meenie Services

Kellogg Brown and Root

Kroll, Inc.

Leonie Industries

Levdan, Ltd.

MVM, Inc.

Management and Training Corporation

Simon Mann

Meteoric Tactical Solutions

Meyer and Associates

Military Professional Resources Inc.

National Security Research, Inc.

N cont.

New Korea Total Service

Northbridge Services Group, Ltd.

OSSI-Safenet

Olive Group

PSD Training

Pacific Architects and Engineers, Inc.

Pistris, Inc.

Erik Prince

Private Security Company Association of Iraq

RamOPS Risk Management Group

Robert Richer

Rubicon International Services, Ltd.

S2i (Australian security company)

SOS International

Saladin Security

Sandline International

Satelles Solutions, Inc.

Science Applications International Corporation

Securiforce

Select Armor, Inc.

Silver Shadow

Southern Cross Security

Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group

Special Ops Associates

Tim Spicer

Steele Foundation

Steven Stephanowicz

THULE Global Security International

Titan Corporation

Total Defense Logistics (HKG) Ltd.

Triple Canopy Inc.

Trojan Securities International

US Investigations Services

Unity Resources Group

VIP Investigations & Protective Services Inc.

Vinnell Brown and Root

Vinnell Corporation

<3>

PVT INTEL Security 2

fBI Hired Social Media Surveillance Firm That Labeled Black Lives Matter Organizers “Threat Actors”

Plans to Coordinate

Related

Indigenous Water Protectors Face Off With an Oil Company and Police Over a Minnesota Pipeline

Sharing Intelligence

Workers Feared Amazon

'Coercion and Intimidation'

Record Profits

Costly Stock Options

No Answers

DeJoy Strikes Again

Fought Mail-in Votes, Then Didn't

answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not anti-scraping laws

Purchasing Police Power

Public-Private Surveillance

“Paid Protesters” and Propagandists

Opposing Jordan Cove

The strange Mr. Watts

Intrusive and bureaucratic guerrilla warfare

As The Intercept outlines,

Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to ... - The Intercept

Intel for Profit

Targeting Critics of the President

Author Discussion on War

Contents

Midas Resources

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

References

TigerSwan Employee Tries to Set up New Security Firm in Louisiana

TigerSwan Connections in Louisiana

Louisiana Proposes Harsher Punishments for Pipeline Offenses

1. “Drug Spies” (Richard Behar, Fortune, September 1999)

2. “Confessions of a Corporate Spy”(George Chidi, Inc., February 2013)

3. “The Secret Keeper” (William Finnegan,New Yorker, October 2009)

4. “A Spy in the Jungle” (Mary Cuddehe, The Atlantic, August 2010)

5. “The Pizza Plot” (Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, New York Times Magazine,December 2000)