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</div><div>also psy-ops</div><div>bak 719</div><div>= =<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/">https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/</a>...<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1; margin: 1em 0px; font-kerning: normal; font-feature-settings: "kern";">Building the Virtual Wall</h3>Long before President Donald Trump called for the construction of a “big, beautiful wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border, there was the idea of a “virtual wall.” In 2006, Congress authorized the construction of 700 miles of fencing to be accompanied by a vast buildup of surveillance equipment and border guards in more remote terrain.A key component of that effort, known as SBINet, was canceled after five years and more than $1 billion in expenditures. In the wake of that failure, CBP turned to Elbit, based in Haifa, Israel, awarding it a $145 million contract in 2014 to develop the integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona. In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes <a href="https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/frontline-november-aerostats" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">blimps</a>outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition <a href="https://fcw.com/articles/2019/02/21/cbp-facial-recognition-border.aspx" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">software</a> at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/border-patrol-drones-being-borrowed-by-other-agencies-more-often-than-previously-known/2014/01/14/5f987af0-7d49-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">described</a> as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense.The surveillance has had an acute impact on borderland communities, including on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Drones fly overhead, and motion sensors track foot traffic. CBP checkpoints monitor people traveling between the reservation and cities such as Tucson and Phoenix. Vehicle barriers, surveillance cameras, and trucks have appeared near burial grounds and on hilltops amid ancient saguaro forests, which are sacred to people on the reservation.Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones, a University of Hawaii-Manoa geography professor who studies borders and migration....<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/how-private-contractors-have-created-shadow-nsa/">https://www.thenation.com/article/how-private-contractors-have-created-shadow-nsa/</a>nl lnx
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JUNE 15, 2015 ISSUEHow Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSAA new cybersecurity elite moves between government and private practice, taking state secrets with them.By Tim Shorrock MAY 27, 2015How-Private-Contractors-Have-Created-a-Shadow-NSA

About a year ago, I wangled a media invitation to a “leadership dinner” in northern ?Virginia sponsored by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. INSA is a powerful but ?little-known coalition established in 2005 by companies working for the National Security Agency. In recent years, it has become the premier organization for the men and women who run the massive cyberintelligence-industrial complex that encircles Washington, DC.
The keynote speaker was Matthew Olsen, who was then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He used his talk to bolster the morale of his colleagues, which had recently been stung by the public backlash against the NSA’s massive surveillance programs, the extent of which was still com-ing to light in the steady release of Edward Snowden’s huge trove of documents. “NSA is a national treasure,” Olsen declared. “Our national security depends on NSA’s continued capacity to collect this kind of information.” There was loud, sustained applause.
One of those clapping was a former Navy SEAL named Melchior Baltazar, the CEO of an up-and-coming company called SDL Government. Its niche, an eager young flack explained, is providing software that military agencies can use to translate hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Facebook postings into English and then search them rapidly for potential clues to terrorist plots or cybercrime.
It sounded like the ideal tool for the NSA. Just a few months earlier, Snowden had leaked documents revealing a secret program called PRISM, which gave the NSA direct access to the servers of tech firms, including Facebook and Google. He had also revealed that the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, had special units focused on cracking encryption codes for social media globally.
SDL’s software is perfectly designed for such a task. It might be useful, say, for a team of SEALs on a covert operation trying to make sure their cover wasn’t blown by somebody on social media—something that almost happened when an alert Twitter user in Pakistan picked up early signs of the secret US raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And, of course, we don’t know the extent to which the NSA could deploy it.
In any case, the software, SDL boasts, is “securely deployed on-premise, behind the firewall, at over 75 government organizations, including the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.” No wonder Baltazar was at the INSA event, rubbing shoulders with the kings and queens of the intelligence-contracting industry.
* * 
This small company, and INSA itself, are vivid examples of the rise of a new class in America: the cyberintelligence ruling class.
These are the people—often referred to as “intelligence professionals”—who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last 15 years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.
Take Olsen, who served as general counsel for the NSA and as a top lawyer for the Justice Department before joining the NCTC. He is now the president for consulting services of IronNet Cybersecurity, the company founded last year by Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the longest-?serving director in the history of the NSA. The firm is paid up to $1 million a month to consult with major banks and financial institutions in a “cyber war council” that will work with the NSA, the Treasury Department, and other agencies to deter cyberattacks that “could trigger financial panic,” Bloomberg reported last July.
Some members of this unique class are household names. Most cable-news viewers, for example, are familiar with Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden, two of the top national-security officials in the Bush administration. In 2009, they left their positions at the Justice Department and the NSA, respectively, and created the Chertoff Group, one of Washington’s largest consulting firms, with a major emphasis on security.
Other members are unknown except to insiders. Sam Visner, whom I wrote about in a 2013 Nation article about NSA whistleblowers, is in this latter group. A former executive at the giant contractor SAIC, he was hired by Hayden in 2000 and tasked with managing the NSA’s privatized (and disastrous) Trailblazer program, which was outsourced to (who else?) SAIC. He returned to SAIC in 2003, then moved on to the government tech firm Computer Services Corporation, which not only manages but owns the NSA’s internal-communications system. For most of the last six years, as the cyberintelligence industry grew by leaps and bounds under Obama, Visner was running CSC’s massive cybersecurity program for the government.
Hardly a week goes by in Washington without a similar transition. In March, The Washington Post described cybersecurity law as “the latest hot job in the Washington revolving door.” Robert Mueller, the recently retired director of the FBI, had just joined the national-security law practice of WilmerHale. One of his latest tasks? Advising Keith Alexander as he tries to tamp down congressional outrage over his decision to hire two NSA officials, one of whom planned to work simultaneously for IronNet and the agency (he later withdrew).
Well, enough, you might say: Isn’t this simply a continuation of Washington’s historic revolving door?
The answer is no. As I see it, the cyberintelligence- industrial complex is qualitatively different from—and more dangerous than—the military-industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower in his famous farewell address. This is because its implications for democracy, inequality, and secrecy are far more insidious.
It is not new for American defense policies to be shaped by and for the 1 percent. Throughout US history, diplomatic and national-security officials have come directly from the ruling elite, and more often than not they have served those interests while in office. Allen and John Foster Dulles, the brothers and law partners who headed the CIA and the State Department during the Eisenhower administration, were classic examples, running multiple operations to support their own clients.
The Eisenhower era also saw the advent of retired generals moving into industry. In 1956, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a groundbreaking study of the institutions through which the corporations of his day wielded political and economic power. Mills was particularly disturbed by the spectacle of multinational companies appointing prominent generals to their boards. Among those who had traded in their uniforms for big business, he found, were some of the great heroes of World War II: Douglas MacArthur (Remington Rand), Lucius Clay (Continental Can), and Jimmy Doolittle (Shell Oil).
This “personnel traffic,” Mills wrote, symbolized “the great structural shift of modern American capitalism toward a permanent war economy.” It was a prescient analysis, but Mills was talking only of generals; the idea of high-level government officials going into the military business was unthinkable at the time.
The next several decades saw the rise of private security companies and consultancies run by former CIA and FBI agents. Once, in the early 1980s, I was startled to find myself seated next to William Colby, the notorious former CIA director, at a seminar on the Panama Canal. He was there representing a consortium of Japanese construction firms. And, of course, in 1982 Henry Kissinger walked away from his years as national-security adviser and secretary of state to start a corporate consulting firm that remains one of the most powerful in Washington.
Even as Cold War officials increasingly drifted toward the corporate world, there was one line they rarely crossed: Until the 1990s, taking positions at defense contractors was considered unseemly. Then came Frank Carlucci, a former CIA deputy director who served as national-?security adviser and defense secretary during Ronald Reagan’s second term. Within weeks of retiring, he had joined the boards of no fewer than nine major corporations, including three important military contractors.
This was too much for Caspar Weinberger, a former Bechtel executive who was Carlucci’s predecessor at the Pentagon. “Generally, I would not think it appropriate to serve on the board of a company that had extensive contractual relationships with the department, particularly not if they had those relationships while I was in office,” he told a reporter at the time. “Cap is entitled to his own preferences,” Carlucci sniffed in response. He went on to chair the Carlyle Group, the private-equity firm that had become the nation’s ninth-largest defense contractor by 2001.

 * 
With the end of the Cold War, Carlucci’s ?way became the norm. Intelligence and defense budgets were cut after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thousands of CIA and NSA officers left government for positions with defense contractors. Demand for them grew during the Bosnian War, as the military and its intelligence agencies began hiring private companies to do work historically carried out by the state.
Among them was Halliburton, the Texas oil-services and logistics firm. In 1995, after retiring as George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary, Dick Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton. Over the next five years, he transformed the company into one of the world’s largest military contractors. Around the same time, the elder Bush was hired as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group. By the time Cheney became George W. Bush’s vice president in 2001, outsourcing was official policy, and the migration of senior-level government officials into the defense and intelligence industries was standard practice.
Then came the September 11 attacks, after which untold billions of dollars were poured into intelligence and surveillance. This ushered in the new age.
What we have now is a national-security class that simultaneously bridges the gap between private and public, merging government careers with jobs as corporate executives and consultants. By retaining their security clearances, many of its members have access to the most highly guarded intelligence, which they use to the benefit of their corporate and government clients. The power they wield is exponentially greater than that of their Cold War predecessors.
To see the difference, let’s take a closer look at the Chertoff Group and its best-known executive, Michael Hayden. Chertoff founded his consultancy in March 2009, barely two months after President Obama’s inauguration. The group’s cofounder was Chad Sweet, who had served as Chertoff’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and had earlier worked in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. In effect, the pair re-created the national-security team that had provided much of the intelligence advice to Bush and Cheney, and they said as much in their literature. According to the firm’s website, the Chertoff Group provides “business and government leaders with the same kind of high-level, strategic thinking and diligent execution that have kept the American homeland and its people safe since 9/11.”
When Hayden came on board in April 2009, he emphasized continuity. “After serving for decades at the highest levels of the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence services, I grew accustomed to working alongside remarkably talented and dedicated professionals,” the former NSA director wrote. “I wanted an opportunity to re-create the experience in the private sector.” And he did just that. One of the firm’s early recruits was Charles E. Allen, a legendary intelligence official who had recently served as director of intelligence for Chertoff’s DHS. Another principal with extensive NSA experience is Paul Schneider, Chertoff’s deputy secretary at DHS; from 2002 to 2003, he was Hayden’s senior acquisition executive at the NSA. That would have put him in charge of all of the NSA’s hugely expensive contracting, which exploded during Hayden’s reign from 1999 to 2005.
With other hires, Hayden created a kind of shadow NSA at the Chertoff Group. But this isn’t his only gig. He has also joined the boards of Motorola Solutions (a key NSA contractor) and Alion Science and Technology (likely one as well). Strangely, Hayden’s bio on the Alion website touts his role in domestic surveillance: “Under his guidance as the Director of NSA, the domestic telephone call database was created to monitor international communications to assist in locating terrorists.”
The Chertoff Group doesn’t disclose its clients. But one of its most important functions for both the state and its contractor allies is as a broker of mergers and acquisitions. These aren’t just “deals”; they also represent significant reorganizations within the intelligence community, which is 70 percent contracted and, like any other industry, requires centralization. Using its team of NSA, CIA, and DHS veterans (who have deep classified knowledge of their agencies’ contracting histories and future needs), the Chertoff Group has brokered dozens of deals through its subsidiary, Chertoff Capital. Its areas of focus include cybersecurity, intelligence and data analytics, defense technology and “Development and Diplomacy (‘Soft Power’).” You get the picture.
Another way the cyberintelligence elite exerts undue influence is through the media. Matthew Olsen, the former National Counterterrorism Center director and IronNet president, recently joined ABC News as a commentator. Hayden is a fixture on cable news, where he regularly extols the greatness of the NSA and its vast surveillance capabilities. Look into any “national-security analyst” on television, and you’ll find a member of this class. Watch carefully: Few of them ever diverge from the company (or NSA, or CIA) line. Worse, the networks rarely disclose these conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, members of this dual public/private class rub shoulders at places like INSA, where they often meet behind closed doors to discuss classified programs. And even while making millions of dollars through their contracting and consulting gigs, these former officials advise the same agencies they profit from. Olsen, for example, was just named to the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Council. It’s a cozy, closed, and very profitable world.
 * *
So what does the existence of such a class mean? First off, it deepens inequality. We all know that corporations can buy access to lawmakers through hefty political donations. Now they have access to some of the state’s most closely held secrets. According to a declassified document obtained in April by The New York Times, Hayden and Alexander were “read into” Stellar Wind, the warrantless-surveillance program started after 9/11. They are bound by law not to divulge those secrets. But their knowledge based on those secrets is of unfathomable value to the corporations they advise on cybersecurity and acquisitions strategies. That knowledge isn’t shared with the public, but it is available to the companies that can afford it.
Second, it places participatory democracy at risk. The vast majority of Americans are excluded from the consequential discussions that take place at the cyber-intelligence elite’s secret meetings. While hashing over controversial programs such as domestic spying, offensive cyberintelligence operations, or FBI terrorist-entrapment programs, the state and corporate leaders at INSA—as well as other places where the new class meets—operate on a completely different plane from the rest of us. Meanwhile, the black hole of secrecy keeps the new hybrid class and its organizations immune from any meaningful oversight by either the executive branch or Congress.
To penetrate this shield, there’s a great need for more reporting and whistleblowing about the pernicious role of contractors in national security. Unfortunately, only a few journalists have explored the world of privatized spying. And strangely, virtually none of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden have focused on the corporate elephant that so clearly dominates the surveillance jungle. As far as I’ve been able to track, only one or two of the Snowden documents actually mention contractors.
One was released in 2014 as part of a Der Spiegel story on the NSA’s extensive collaboration with the German intelligence agency BND. The 2005 document identified an NSA code name as the “coverterm [sic] representing NSA’s contract with Computer Services Corporation (CSC) for mission support. All publicly available information regarding work on this contract…will be sanitized so that no association with NSA will be made.” This document has yet to be mentioned by either the Intercept or The Washington Post, the largest recipients of the Snowden trove.
In his many public appearances since 2013, including in the film Citizenfour, Snowden himself has played down his relationship with Booz Allen Hamilton, which employed him during his time with the NSA. Tom Drake, one of the whistleblowers who exposed the agency’s corrupt relationship with SAIC and Booz Allen and worked as a senior executive at the NSA until 2008, told me in April that Snowden most likely never had possession of the NSA’s contracts. Because Snowden was an infrastructure analyst, Drake said, “he wouldn’t have had access to that.” Contracts, he added, are stored in a “completely different system.”
But whether they come from Snowden or another whistleblower, documents on the contractor role at the NSA and other agencies are essential if we are to understand the totality of US spying programs and the full extent of the threats they pose. To confront the surveillance state, we also have to confront the cyberintelligence ruling class and expose it for what it really is: a joint venture of government officials and private-sector opportunists with massive power and zero accountability.Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.<div>
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</div><div>Federal prosecutors are investigating whether top Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy sold access to the president’s inaugural team to foreign clients, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/prosecutors-intensify-scrutiny-of-trump-fundraiser-elliott-broidy-11561109521" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Wall Street Journal</a> reports.<div class="p1_11" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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</div><div></div><div>=</div><h3 class="LC20lb"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/04/29/family-separation-protests-surveillance/">Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to ... - The Intercept</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd"><cite class="iUh30">https://theintercept.com/2019/04/29/family-separation-protests-surveillance/</cite></div>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.” ...
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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.

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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
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</div><div><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/17/libyan_humanitarian_crisis_worsens_as_over">https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/17/libyan_humanitarian_crisis_worsens_as_over</a></div><div>
</div><div>...GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the role of Erik Prince and his former mercenary organization, Blackwater, in Libya?</div>ANAS EL GOMATI: Well, it’s really the UAE’s role that is behind this. I think, in 2010, the UAE, 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 why I’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...<div>=</div></div>
<a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/rise-china-s-private-armies">https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/rise-china-s-private-armies</a><div class="media media-element-container media-main_image_with_description" style="margin: 0px -6em 1em 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[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]</div>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 marchOver 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.<blockquote style="margin: 1em -2em 1em 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">‘Most security challenges stem from clashes between the locals and workers and the fear that an influx of Chinese will affect demographics’</blockquote>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....---<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=IOQjNuxMrOEC">https://books.google.com/books?id=IOQjNuxMrOEC</a>&dq=Cam+Simpson+private+intel+security&source=gbs_navlinks_sCorporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military IndustryFront CoverP. W. SingerCornell University Press, Jun 16, 2011<a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?446055-9/author-discussion-war">https://www.c-span.org/video/?446055-9/author-discussion-war</a><span class="time" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-weight: 600; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-transform: uppercase; display: block; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><time style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">JUNE 10, 2018</time><div class="initial" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="video-page-title" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; display: inline;">Author Discussion on War</h1> </div><div class="initial" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline;">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.</div><div class="initial" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline;">brotherhood of spies U2</div><div class="initial" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline;"><a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-girl-from-kathmandu-cam-simpson/1126699090?ean=9780062449719">https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-girl-from-kathmandu-cam-simpson/1126699090?ean=9780062449719</a></div><div class="initial" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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.</div><div>=</div><div>dem in chains</div><div>
<span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">koch network spy on jrnl " upping the transaction costs for the other side" 232<div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">
</div></div><div></div><div>=<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">early FAR hodaI</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>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), a tireless 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).<div class="sideindent" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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!</div>As noted by David Knowles of AOLNews (<a title="" href="http://www.aolnews.com/2010/10/06/alex-jones-greatest-hits-on-google-trends/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">10/6/10</a>), 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 <a title="" href="http://scotthorton.org/fairuse/2014/02/06/reagan-aides-and-the-secret-government-miami-herald-july-5-1987/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">article</a> 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 in FEMA-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 GoldOne 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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">sw</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="mw-content-text" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" lang="en" style="direction: ltr;"><div class="mw-parser-output">Anderson is the owner of <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Genesis_Communication_Network" class="mw-redirect" title="Genesis Communication Network" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Genesis Communication Network</a> and <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Midas_Resources&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Midas Resources (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Midas Resources</a>.<div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1;"><div class="toctitle" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;"><h2 style="background: none; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: 1.3;">Contents</h2>  [<a role="button" tabindex="0" class="togglelink" style="font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none; cursor: pointer;">hide</a>] </div><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ted_Anderson#Midas_Resources" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">1Midas Resources</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ted_Anderson#Resources_and_articles" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">2Resources and articles</a><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ted_Anderson#Related_Sourcewatch" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">2.1Related Sourcewatch</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ted_Anderson#References" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">2.2References</a></li></ul></li></ul></div><h2 linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" style="background: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177);">Midas Resources</h2>"One of the world's premiere precious metals firms, parent company of The Genesis Communications Network, proud sponsor of the <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Campaign_For_Liberty&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Campaign For Liberty (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Campaign For Liberty</a> and creator of the <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Paul_Air_Corps&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Ron Paul Air Corps (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Ron Paul Air Corps</a>."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 <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Young_Americans_For_Liberty&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Young Americans For Liberty (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Young Americans For Liberty</a> (YAL) and many others." <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ted_Anderson#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">[1]</a>In the past, "Special offer: get a free year of <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_International_Forecaster" class="mw-redirect" title="The International Forecaster" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">The International Forecaster</a> with the purchase of a gold franc coin from Midas Resources." <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.theinternationalforecaster.com/Free_Sample_Issue" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="%221.0%22" encoding="%22UTF-8%22" standalone="%22no%22%3F%3E%3Csvg" width="%2212%22" height="%2212%22%3E%3Cpath" fill="%22%23fff%22/%3E%3C/svg%3E" stroke="%22%2306c%22" d="%22M9.995" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" e="E" cpath="Cpath" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data">[1]</a><h2 linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" style="background: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177);">Resources and articles</h2><h3 style="background: none; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Related Sourcewatch</h3><h3 style="background: none; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">References</h3><div class="mw-references-wrap"><ol class="references" style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ted_Anderson#cite_ref-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data">About</a>, organizational web page, accessed October 7, 2013.</li></ol></div></div></div><div id="catlinks" class="catlinks" data-mw="interface" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 5px; margin-top: 1em; clear: both;"><div id="mw-normal-catlinks" class="mw-normal-catlinks"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Categories</a>: <ul style="list-style: none none; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 0px; padding: 0px 0.5em 0px 0.25em; zoom: 1;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Tobaccowiki" title="Category:Tobaccowiki" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Tobaccowiki</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Stubs" title="Category:Stubs" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: none;">Stubs</a></li></ul></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/30/tigerswan-lisa-smith-security-license-louisiana-bayou-bridge-pipeline">https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/30/tigerswan-lisa-smith-security-license-louisiana-bayou-bridge-pipeline</a></div><div>
</div><div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden" open="open" sans="sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="min-height: 280px;"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The private security firm <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/10/28/private-security-firm-dakota-access-iraq-afghanistan-blackwater" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">TigerSwan, known for its controversial military-style tactics against Dakota Access pipeline protesters</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/conflict-cajun-country-bayou-bridge-pipeline-louisiana-standing-rock" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Bayou Bridge pipeline</a>. In November, several environmental groups opposed to the Bayou Bridge pipeline <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/11/13/bayou-bridge-pipeline-opponents-file-intervene-hearing-private-security-firm-louisiana" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">attempted to intervene in this case</a>, 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 <a href="https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/no-bayou-bridge-pipeline-petition-intervene" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">denied this request</a>.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 <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/intervene-request_lisa-smith-deposition_tigerswan.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">request to intervene in TigerSwan’s case</a> 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.”<h3 style="line-height: 1.28205em; margin-top: 1.28205em; margin-bottom: 1.28205em;">TigerSwan Employee Tries to Set up New Security Firm in Louisiana</h3>[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,” <a href="http://www.katc.com/story/35902508/private-security-firm-that-surveilled-dapl-protests-seeks-louisiana-license" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">according to the board’s executive director Fabian Blache III</a>.<a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/06/28/tigerswan-faces-lawsuit-over-unlicensed-security-operations-in-north-dakota/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">TigerSwan is being sued</a> 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 <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/energy-transfer-partners-bakken-oil-pipeline-through-iowa" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Dakota Access pipeline</a>.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. <a href="http://coraweb.sos.la.gov/commercialsearch/CommercialSearchDetails.aspx?CharterID=1260911_E0CF76B202" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Louisiana state records indicate</a> 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.” <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-smith-73756544/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Her current LinkedIn profile</a> 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 <a href="http://lsbpse.com/disciplinary-actions/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">board turned down Smith’s request</a> 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.<h3 style="line-height: 1.28205em; margin-top: 1.28205em; margin-bottom: 1.28205em;">TigerSwan Connections in Louisiana</h3>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, <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/15/what-outsider-hidden-conflicts-interest-can-learn-local-about-bayou-bridge-pipeline" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">retired Major General James “Spider” Marks testified in support</a> of this pipeline at a Louisiana Department of Natural Resources permit hearing and <a href="http://www.theadvertiser.com/story/opinion/2017/02/08/bayou-bridge-pipeline-bringing-safety-and-security-louisiana/97571802/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">published an op-ed endorsing it in a local newspaper</a>. 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 <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/07/05/dakota-access-tigerswan-james-spider-marks-los-angeles-riots" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">seems to be a trend for Marks</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/11/13/bayou-bridge-pipeline-opponents-file-intervene-hearing-private-security-firm-louisiana" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Julie Dermansky has previously reported</a> 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 <a href="http://sostrategy.com/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Southern Strategy Group</a>.”The firm is currently awaiting a hearing with the Louisiana State Board of Private Security Examiners appealing its denied application.<h3 style="line-height: 1.28205em; margin-top: 1.28205em; margin-bottom: 1.28205em;">Louisiana Proposes Harsher Punishments for Pipeline Offenses </h3><div>With implications for future protests against the Bayou Bridge pipeline, this week the Louisiana State Legislature introduced <a href="https://legiscan.com/LA/bill/HB727/2018" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">House Bill 727</a>, 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 <a href="http://legis.la.gov/legis/Law.aspx?d=78576" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Louisiana criminal code</a>, 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, <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/21/wyoming-alec-model-bill-pipeline-protests" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">including Wyoming, Iowa, and Ohio</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/31/iowa-bill-alec-criminalize-pipeline-protest" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">likened actions by pipeline protesters to “terrorist activities.”</a></div></div></div></div></div><div>=</div><div>----no link many
Bayou Bridge Pipeline Opponents Say Louisiana Governor's Office Is Surveilling ThemBy 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, LouisianaPastor 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 1Security 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 PipelineDominic 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 siteHub 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 vehicleAnne 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 protestSecurity 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.”</div><div></div>=dapl:<p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" padding="padding" px="px" border="border" line-height="line-height" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.1em;">The activists who disarmed Thompson of an AR-15 as he was headed toward the main camp, Oceti Sakowin, face felony charges. <p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" padding="padding" px="px" border="border" line-height="line-height" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.1em;">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. <p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" padding="padding" px="px" border="border" line-height="line-height" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.1em;">--<p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" padding="padding" px="px" border="border" line-height="line-height" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.1em;">. Other security firms working along the pipeline included Silverton, Russell Group of Texas, 10 Code LLC, Per Mar, SRC, OnPoint, and Leighton, documents show.=<a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/they-got-hurt-at-work-then-they-got-deported" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.propublica.org/article/they-got-hurt-at-work-then-they-got-deported</a>...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.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative; line-height: 1.4;">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.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative; line-height: 1.4;">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.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative; line-height: 1.4;">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.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative; line-height: 1.4;">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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative; line-height: 1.4;">...<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/16/standing_rock_sioux_chair_on_militarized">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/16/standing_rock_sioux_chair_on_militarized</a><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/31/private_mercenary_firm_tigerswan_compares_anti">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/31/private_mercenary_firm_tigerswan_compares_anti</a>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 <a href="https://boingboing.net/2017/05/27/provocateurs-and-drones.html">https://boingboing.net/2017/05/27/provocateurs-and-drones.html</a>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, includingTigerswan 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."<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; border-left: 4px solid rgb(153, 153, 153); padding-left: 1em; margin: 1em;">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.”</blockquote><a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">LEAKED DOCUMENTS REVEAL COUNTERTERRORISM TACTICS USED AT STANDING ROCK TO “DEFEAT PIPELINE INSURGENCIES”</a> [Alleen Brown, Will Parrish and Alice Speri/The Intercept]...
western goals fdn proto cointelpro Teller jane fonda TMI only victim</div><div><a href="http://www.projectcensored.org/private-military-companies-in-service-to-the-transnational-capitalist-class/">http://www.projectcensored.org/private-military-companies-in-service-to-the-transnational-capitalist-class/</a></div><div>
</div><div>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 a few 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 21st 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:<a href="http://www.projectcensored.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/C16_Ch08_Phillips_21stCenturyFascism.pdf" target="blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">Read the full study, as featured in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line, here.</a></div><div>
</div><div>=
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<div>...</div><div><div>
</div><div>ref Dana P intel study; 1200 govt orgs 1900 pvt co, 850K w/ top secret clearance `173</div></div>

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 <a href="http://www.inc.com/magazine/201302/george-chidi/confessions-of-a-corporate-spy.html?src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">George Chidi describes in Inc</a>. On the other end of the spectrum is the far more exciting—and illicit—line of work seen in <a href="http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/09/06/265303/index.htm?src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">Richard Behar’s 1999 story</a> about the pharmaceutical industry. Here are five stories that delve deep into the murky world of corporate information gathering.<h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; vertical-align: baseline; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">1. <a href="http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/09/06/265303/index.htm?src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">“Drug Spies”</a> (Richard Behar, Fortune, September 1999)</h1>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.<h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; vertical-align: baseline; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">2. <a href="http://www.inc.com/magazine/201302/george-chidi/confessions-of-a-corporate-spy.html?src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">“Confessions of a Corporate Spy” </a>(George Chidi, Inc., February 2013)</h1>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.<h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; vertical-align: baseline; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">3. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/the-secret-keeper?Src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">“The Secret Keeper”</a> (William Finnegan,New Yorker, October 2009)</h1>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.”<h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; vertical-align: baseline; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">4. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/08/a-spy-in-the-jungle/60770/?src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">“A Spy in the Jungle”</a> (Mary Cuddehe, The Atlantic, August 2010)</h1>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 <a href="http://www.kroll.com/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">Kroll</a>, 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 Yorker article.<h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; vertical-align: baseline; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">5. <a href="http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-penenberg.html?Src=longreads" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">“The Pizza Plot”</a> (Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, New York Times Magazine,December 2000)</h1>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 book<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spooked-Espionage-In-Corporate-America/dp/0738205931?tag=longreads-20" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;"> Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America</a>, is a dazzlingly fun look at just how Schwan pulled that off.

powerbase, uk?

<table width="100%" style="line-height: 19.2px; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><tbody><tr valign="top"><td width="33.3%"><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">C</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/C2i_International" title="C2i International" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Hakluyt</a></li></ul></td><td width="33.3%"><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">H cont.</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Heather_Millgate" title="Heather Millgate" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">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-line: none; 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background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">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-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Inkerman Group</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">J</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Justin_King" title="Justin King" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Justin King</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">K</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><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-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Kroll WorldWide Associates Inc.</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">L</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Lynceus" title="Lynceus" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Lynceus</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">M</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Mark_Kennedy" title="Mark Kennedy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Mark Kennedy</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Mark_Kennedy:A_chronology_of_his_activities" title="Mark Kennedy: A chronology of his activities" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Mark Kennedy: A chronology of his activities</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Paul_Mercer" title="Paul Mercer" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Paul Mercer</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">P</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Pelorus_Research" title="Pelorus Research" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Pelorus Research</a></li></ul></td><td width="33.3%"><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">P cont.</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Private_security_industry_and_the_police:revolving_door" title="Private security industry and the police: revolving door" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Private security industry and the police: revolving door</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">R</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Gordon_Rainey" title="Gordon Rainey" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Gordon Rainey</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Rebecca_Todd" title="Rebecca Todd" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Rebecca Todd</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Rod_Leeming" title="Rod Leeming" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Rod Leeming</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">S</h3><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="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaancamaaabw4ls6aaaagxrfwhrtb2z0d2fyzqbbzg9izsbjbwfnzvjlywr5ccllpaaaaazqtfrfafkm="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANCAMAAABW4lS6AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAAZQTFRFAFKM" qiuk9qaaaaj0uk5t="QIUK9QAAAAJ0Uk5T" wdltzbkaaaagkleqvr42mjgbaegokggbjbgbxbxsbqaaamachwald5r8ygaaaaasuvork5cyii=");" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://powerbase.info/index.php/Scottish_Resources_Group" title="Scottish Resources Group" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll transparent;">Vericola</a></li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table>
=
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.

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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.

bs

 

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

 

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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

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http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/25/spooky_businessus_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

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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

3

    3D Global Solutions

A

    AGS
    AKE Limited
    Aegis Defence Services
    AirScan Inc.
    Anteon International Corporation
    ArmorGroup International PLC

B

    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

C

    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

D

    DS Vance Iraq
    Defence Systems Limited
    Diligence, LLC

   
D cont.

    DynCorp

E

    EOD Technology, Inc.
    EUBSA BV Inc.
    Edinburgh International
    Erinys International Ltd.
    Evergreen International Aviation, Inc.
    Executive Outcomes
    Executive Solutions International

G

    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

H

    Hart Group
    Hill and Associates
    Homeland Security Company

I

    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

J

    Janusian Security Risk Management Ltd.

K

    Keenie Meenie Services
    Kellogg Brown and Root
    Kroll, Inc.

L

    Leonie Industries
    Levdan, Ltd.

M

    MVM, Inc.
    Management and Training Corporation
    Simon Mann
    Meteoric Tactical Solutions
    Meyer and Associates
    Military Professional Resources Inc.

N

    National Security Research, Inc.

   
N cont.

    New Korea Total Service
    Northbridge Services Group, Ltd.

O

    OSSI-Safenet
    Olive Group

P

    PSD Training
    Pacific Architects and Engineers, Inc.
    Pistris, Inc.
    Erik Prince
    Private Security Company Association of Iraq

R

    RamOPS Risk Management Group
    Robert Richer
    Rubicon International Services, Ltd.

S

    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

T

    THULE Global Security International
    Titan Corporation
    Total Defense Logistics (HKG) Ltd.
    Triple Canopy Inc.
    Trojan Securities International

U

    US Investigations Services
    Unity Resources Group

V

    VIP Investigations & Protective Services Inc.
    Vinnell Brown and Root
    Vinnell Corporation

W

    <3>
        Xe

 

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