bahrain

7) Qorvis Communications

The public relations firm Qorvis has had certain interactions with the Kingdom of Bahrain that begat a few scandals. Qorvis was reportedly hired by the Bahraini regime to engage in “reputation management”—essentially monitoring the media and manipulating the press to promote a specific perception of the Kingdom while silencing critical voices. This is particularly troubling in view of the human rights situation in Bahrain: There have been violent crackdowns by security forces against demonstrators, and activists are frequently targeted with attacks or censorship by the regime. Actions by Qorvis are suspected to include a coordinated barrage of vicious social media attacks against Maryam al-Khawaja, a Bahraini human rights activist, when she gave a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2011.

DN  BB

I should note, what’s really important about all of this is that the Team Themis thing was actually stumbled upon by several different people at once. This was a great example, one of several great examples, of crowdsourced journalism. Later on, we went on to document, you know, further abuses both by HBGary and by Palantir,showed that Palantir was lying when they claimed they—you know, this was a low-level person only that was involved in this, and they didn’t—you know, they didn’t approve of it, when in fact their chief counsel and a number of other employees were in on those emails. There were other projects, as well, that are also, I think, very indicative not just in what it says about how the state operates with these interests, but also what they can do now. Persona Managementwas one particularly frightening technology, that involves fake online personas, that the military—CENTCOM, in this case—can operate. These are provided by private companies, which can turn around and sell them to whoever else, including foreign despots, immoral corporate actors across the world. We’ve seen this over and over again with additional hacks that have shown, you know, how Tunisia, for instance, was being assisted by the French government in repressing its citizens. We see a company called Qorvis in D.C. that assists Bahrain in smearing dissidents.