Private Intel / Security

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see blk hat hacker

see pvt intel 2 for newer

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)

psyops

===

aha, these are corps that use force to enforce the will of other corps:

a pvt (intel) corp, will not disclose proprietary methods; taking pvt $ no disclose

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BUSINESS

Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Were Hacked, Prosecutors Say

Private documents stolen during an extensive scheme appear to have been used to undermine investigations into the oil giant’s knowledge of climate change, prosecutors say.

Erin Mulvaney

October 12, 2023 07:07 pm ET

Appeared in the Oct 13, 2023 , print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'

:{federal prosecutors said private documents stolen during an extensive hacking-for-hire scheme appear to have been used to undermine investigations into:{Exxon Mobil’s knowledge of climate change.}:

The documents, taken from people involved in climate change advocacy, were among the intelligence collected as part of a five-year hacking campaign targeting thousands of individual victims and companies, according to sentencing documents filed Thursday by the Justice Department.

An Israeli private detective, Aviram Azari, who prosecutors say played a critical role, pleaded guilty in April 2022 to participating in the conspiracy. He is due to face sentencing in a New York federal court next week.

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office says clients hired Azari to manage various projects that were characterized as intelligence gathering, but were instead hacking efforts, stealing user credentials through spear-phishing messages that appeared to targets to have come from a trusted source. They say Azari was paid $4.8 million between November 2014 and September 2019 for his role in the scheme.

Prosecutors didn’t accuse anyone of hiring Azari in the court filing. In a court filing last year, prosecutors said his clients “included Israeli, European, and U.S. companies.” His lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Wall Street Journal previously reportedthat hackers hired by Azari had successfully gained access to accounts belonging to environmentalists and others seeking to hold Exxon and other big oil companies accountable for their alleged deceptions about climate change.

“It was intimidating,” Kert Davies, a climate advocate identified by prosecutors as a target of the scheme, said in an interview. He now works for the Center for Climate Integrity, but at the time worked for the Climate Investigations Center, both supporting campaigns to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change.

“Exxon is not named as a culprit, but their interests were served by this criminal,” he said.

Exxon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

An Exxon spokeswoman told the Journal in a March statement that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. To be clear, Exxon Mobil has done nothing wrong.”

The prosecutors said the scheme successfully hacked at least 100 victims, including a climate scientist involved in “a climate accountability campaign that sought to spotlight the role of major fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil.”

Other victims include individuals and companies critical of the now defunct German payment processor

Wirecard A.G

., Mexican politicians, African government officials, and others, prosecutors said. They say the true volume of individuals and entities, however, have yet to be identified, are likely in the thousands and span the globe.

Hacked documents were stolen from victims that were related to New York and Massachusetts attorneys general’s investigations into Exxon’s knowledge about climate change and subsequently leaked to the press, according to prosecutors.

The state investigations alleged the fossil fuel industry lied about climate change and should be held accountable for their role in it. Dozens of lawsuitsare moving forward in state court against the largest players in the industry, and are supported by some nonprofits linked to the hacking scheme.

Prosecutors say the news articles about hacked documents “appeared designed to undermine the integrity” of the investigations.

The Journal previously reported that the Rockefeller Family Fund was among the targets. The charity, created by heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s forebear Standard Oil, has been involved in the efforts that argue Exxon hid the extent of what it knew about the effects of climate change. The Journal also reported Greenpeace, 350.org and Public Citizen were targets.

According to the court filing, climate scientist Peter Frumhoff’s work email account was successfully hacked and received repeated deceptive emails. He told prosecutors, “the spearphishing campaign had an inevitable chilling effect” on efforts to combat climate change.

Another target was Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, who according to the court filing said a private email from January 2016 was leaked to the press that included an agenda and attendees of a meeting held at the Rockefeller Family Fund office in Manhattan. The email indicated that the meeting was meant to discuss how to sway public opinion against Exxon.

After the meeting was described in a news article, Exxon cited it in its court filings defending itself against lawsuits brought by the attorneys general.

Write to Erin Mulvaney at erin.mulvaney@wsj.com

87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the October 13, 2023, print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'.

ref

Exxon’s Climate Opponents Were Infiltrated by Massive Hacking-for-Hire Operation - WSJ

In the midst of perpetrating what federal prosecutors say was a massive corporate hacking campaign, Israeli private detective Aviram Azari in 2017 received welcome news.

A group of hackers in India wrote him to say they had successfully infiltrated the email and social-media accounts of a group of environmental activists campaigning against

“On a happy note I would like to report some success below: Project Name Rainbow,” the hackers wrote in electronic messages that were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The messages included evidence of the successful intrusions, including screenshots of compromised email inboxes.

The messages along with court records reveal new details about the hacking campaign, including that thousands of individuals and companies were targeted and at least some of the attacks resulted in the hackers successfully gaining access to the private accounts of the victims and obtaining their passwords.

Among the targets was the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity created by some of the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s forebear Standard Oil. The fund has for years been involved in campaigns arguing that Exxon hid from the public the full extent of what it knew internally about climate change and the role fossil fuels played in causing it.

Exxon has long denied those allegations.

An Exxon spokeswoman said in a statement that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. To be clear, ExxonMobil has done nothing wrong.”

Mr. Azari pleaded guilty in April 2022 to participating in a hacking conspiracy, wire fraud and identity theft. After several delays, his sentencing was set for late March in federal court in New York, but was delayed once more last week at his request.

Federal agents arrested Mr. Azari in 2019 while he was on a family vacation in Florida. Since then, he has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and the mystery has lingered about who Mr. Azari’s clients were.

Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan haven’t accused anyone of hiring Mr. Azari to hack the environmentalists and no one else has been charged publicly in connection with the case. In a court filing last year, prosecutors said his clients “included Israeli, European, and U.S. companies.”

Last year, prosecutors notified some of the activist groups, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, that they were targeted or successfully infiltrated, according to documents viewed by the Journal and people familiar with the matter.

It couldn’t be determined if the fund was successfully hacked. The hackers were able to access accounts belonging to employees of other groups that have also campaigned against Exxon, including Greenpeace, Public Citizen and 350.org, among others, according to the documents.

Mr. Azari’s attorney, Barry Zone, said his client isn’t cooperating with the investigation. The probe is ongoing, according to people familiar with the matter.

:{Ted Wells

“My client accepted responsibility for what he did and he’s sorry for the people who were affected,” Mr. Zone said. “In terms of the level of magnitude of hacking, I consider my client to be a very small player in that realm.”

Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said he hoped Mr. Azari would disclose who hired him. “This defendant did not decide on his own to follow and target climate advocates in the U.S. from halfway around the world. He was clearly working for corporate actors in this country,” Mr. Wasserman said.

According to court documents, Mr. Azari would provide the Indian hackers with information on the main targets for each hacking project as well as on individuals who were connected to the main targets, such as family, friends or co-workers.

The hackers would then send Mr. Azari periodic updates on their efforts. Through target lists and emails related to successful hacks obtained by investigators, prosecutors say they have determined Mr. Azari targeted thousands of individuals and entities.

In addition to climate-change activists, Mr. Azari also targeted hedge funds and other financial institutions.

:{Mr. Azari has admitted to prosecutors that one of his clients was the now-insolvent German payments company:{Wirecard}:

, according to a person familiar with the case. The Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity group at the University of Toronto, said it found that hackers engaged in sustained targeting of short sellers, journalists and investigators working on topics related to Wirecard. In a previous statement, Wirecard said it “has at no time been in direct or indirect contact with a hacker group from India.”

The government “does not know whether its information is complete,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing. “Indeed, there are likely to be thousands of additional individuals and entities who were targeted during the course of the spearphishing and hacking scheme.”

A common tactic of hackers, spear phishing is the use of phony messages designed to solicit personal information that can then be used to access private accounts.

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has focused some of its investigation on how a private email from Jan. 5, 2016, from one of the activists to other members of environmental groups, was eventually posted online, according to people familiar with the matter.

The email was sent to 16 people about a meeting that was to be hosted on Jan. 8, 2016, by the Rockefeller Family Fund to discuss efforts to sway the public that “Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

The gathering was held as some of the groups were advising the New York attorney general on a lawsuit it later filed against Exxon in 2018 accusing the oil giant of misleading investors about the risks that climate-change regulations posed to its business.

Others who attended the meeting included climate activist and author Bill McKibben, a co-founder of 350.org, and representatives of Greenpeace and Public Citizen.

According to Citizen Lab, all of the email recipients were the target of spear phishing attempts shortly after the January meeting. The hacking attempts were conducted by an Indian company called BellTroX, according to Citizen Lab. BellTroX was also the firm hired by Mr. Azari, people familiar with the matter said.

The meeting was subsequently described in media reports, including in a Journal article in April 2016. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet, later published a copy of the private email about the January meeting on its website.

Recipients of the email told the Journal that they believed it was obtained through hacking and that everyone on the email had attested they didn’t share it with a wider audience.

“We were pretty strict on who was joining and what we were sharing,” said Jamie Henn, a co-founder and former communications director for 350.org who received the email and attended the January meeting. “We knew this was explosive material.”

Eliana Johnson, the Washington Free Beacon’s editor in chief, said in an email that the outlet stood by its reporting.

Exxon eventually cited the email on its website as evidence of “a coordinated campaign perpetuated by activist groups with the aim of stigmatizing ExxonMobil.” Exxon’s lawyers have also cited the email in briefings in court cases, arguing it demonstrated improper influence by the campaigners on prosecutors pursuing investigations into Exxon.

In his opening statement in the trial stemming from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit, Exxon lawyer Ted Wells quoted the email and said it was part of a “vilification agenda.”

“They want to talk about how they can get [activist groups] involved to advance that false agenda to try to perpetrate something false,” said Mr. Wells, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, during the 2019 trial, in which a New York state judge cleared Exxon of fraud claims. “It’s almost like the Russians, trying to interfere with the election.”

Mr. Wasserman, the Rockefeller Family Fund director, said Exxon has repeatedly used the email “to develop a convoluted and completely false story about how citizens working together to address climate change are somehow conspirators—a fairytale meant to deflect attention from Exxon’s internal corporate documents about the climate catastrophe they knowingly helped cause. It’s like the arsonists trying to pin blame on the firefighters.”

Exxon called Mr. Wasserman’s statement “completely false.”

Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com

Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:

Appeared in the March 30, 2023, print edition as 'Hackers Infiltrated Exxon Critics'.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/never-heard-of-them-anonymous-arizona-gop-ballot-auditing-firm-unknown-its-home-state/

An Arizona judge is demanding more information about a Florida-based ballot firm's audits of the 2020 presidential election results as others raise concerns about the firm's reputation.

According to Politico, Cyber Ninjas consulting firm has caused a stir with its controversial audit of voting results in Maricopa County, and many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are asking: who are the Cyber Ninjas?

In Arizona and the firm's home state of Florida, no one seems to have a clue who they are.

When Christian Ziegler, vice-chair of the Republican Party in Florida was asked about the firm's founder, Doug Logan, she admitted she had no idea who he is. Like many other Florida Republican leaders and lawmakers, Ziegler said, "Doug Logan? Cyber Ninjas? No. I don't know these guys. Never heard of them."

On Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and other Democratic leaders also criticized the firm's audit as Superior Court Judge Christopher Coury in Phoenix demanded more information about it. On Monday, April 26, Hobbs appeared on "Cuomo Prime Time" where she expressed concern about the audit as she insisted it is yet another attempt by Republicans to "appease" the voters in their party.

"A group of Republicans are continuing to try to appease their base who refuse to accept that ... Trump lost Arizona and that he's not the president anymore," Hobbs told CNN's Chris Cuomo.

Hobbs also noted that her office has been focused on working "with a lawsuit that's been filed to try to address the security's concerns at a minimum, but at this point, this seems like such a farce that it would be a good idea to stop it."

Amid Republicans' push for election audits, organizers have reportedly been very selective when it comes to revealing details about who will be conducting the audits and if the selected teams will be bipartisan.

CNN also reports that organizers have "ignored requests from election integrity groups to allow nonpartisan election administration experts to observe the process," adding that "journalists who want to report on the endeavor are allowed to do so only if they agree to participate as election observers, and will be barred from taking notes or video."

Hobbs shared her reaction to the scarcity in the details.

"We have so many concerns about this exercise," Hobbs said Monday. "I kind of don't want to call it an audit. I think that's an insult to professional auditors everywhere because they're making this stuff up as they go along." She added, "I think there was a high level of expectation that whoever had their hands on the ballots and the equipment would adhere to some level of security measures and transparency, and that clearly has not happened."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Florida firm hired to oversee Maricopa County, Arizona vote audit ... ›

Smear Appears

With or without real evidence, the point of the covert campaign was not to find genuine evidence of plagiarism, but rather a classic case of attacking the messenger.

“Their aim, according to a well-informed source, was to counteract The New Yorker’s story on the Koch brothers by undermining me,” wrote Mayer. “'Dirt, dirt, dirt' is what the source later told me they were digging for in my life. 'If they couldn’t find it, they’d create it.'”

Vigilant Resources International, “Dark Money” details, got a retainer fee to help the effort along according to sources who spoke to Mayer on the condition of anonymity.

“VRI’s Threat, Risk and Vulnerability Assessments focus on safety and value and address a full spectrum of physical security, integrity, intellectual property and other operational risks,” VRI explains of its work on its website.

VRI goes on to explain of its business conduct:

We provide our findings and prioritized recommendations as actionable 'blueprints' for what should promptly and continuously be addressed to drive the best outcomes in risk management, crisis prevention and mitigation for each facility assessed. Our findings, recommendations and plans comport with applicable regulatory requirements and present industry best practices that are custom-tailored to the unique organizational structure, culture, profile and operations of each client.

After receiving initial contact from the New York Post, Mayer also got what she described in her book as a more alarming plagiarism query from theright-wing news website The Daily Caller, along with more benign ones from The Washington Post, ThinkProgress and a couple others. The Washington Post and ThinkProgress denied plagiarism victimhood, however, as did two other outlets not named by Mayer in the book.

“Paul Kane, a reporter at The Washington Post, quickly looked up the story in question and sent me an e-mail saying, 'Not only did you not steal from me, you Frickin’ credited me in the VERY NEXT line,'” Mayer explains in “Dark Money.” “The New Yorker had even linked to his story online. And, I later learned, my husband, who was then an editor at The Washington Post, had edited the story that I supposedly stole.”

Lee Fang, now a reporter at The Intercept and formerly a blogger for ThinkProgress, similarly denied the copyright infringement accusation.

“Ms. Mayer properly credited me in her story, and clearly did a ton of her own research,” Fang declared in a January 2011 statement provided to the New York Post. “I have nothing but admiration for her integrity as a journalist.”

Smear Disappears

Mayer killed the smear campaign before it gained any momentum or press time, however, mostly due to deft handling of the situation before it spun out of control and developed a life of its own.

“With only a few hours before these allegations were set to go online, all I could do was to try to get out the truth before the lies were spread,” Mayer explained of how she management of accusations. “By midnight, I had reached three of the four authors from whom I was alleged to have plagiarized. All offered to make public statements supporting me and denying I had misappropriated their work.”

Most importantly, Mayer had the truth on her side. The allegations? Tantamount to a ruse, as she laid out in the book:

Someone, probably using a computer program, had mechanically sifted through almost a decade of my work and isolated quotations from officials, and other widely repeated phrases, to argue that 'the structure and wording' were 'quite close' to four other reporters’ news stories. None of the supposedly purloined sentences were of any particular significance…Even sillier, in two of the four stories I was alleged to have 'plagiarized,' I had specifically given credit to the authors whose work The Daily Caller was claiming I'd stolen.

Rather than plagiarism becoming the story, then, the genesis of how the smear campaign appeared and subsequently disappeared was picked up by the likes of the New York Post, Business Insider and Salon. At the heart of that campaign was The Daily Caller, an alternative right-wing version of The Huffington Post founded by Tucker Carlson, the former MSNBC host and senior fellow at the Koch-founded and Koch-funded Cato Institute.

“In the end, even the Daily Caller found the allegations to be unfounded, and to its credit, abandoned the story,” wrote the New York Post. “The story is dead but the person or persons behind the allegations remains a shadowy mystery.”

Tucker Carlson proclaimed cluelessness as to how his publication was tipped off to the so-called story to begin with.

“I never ask the reporters where they get stuff, only whether it’s true,” he told the New York Post. “In this case, we didn’t have enough.”

Safir and VRI did not confirm or deny any retainer ties to the effort, Mayer reported in the book.

A source told Mayer that Nancy Pfotenhauer — former head of Koch front group Americans for Prosperity and Citizens for a Sound Economy, as well as former Koch Industries lobbying in Washington, DC and senior adviser to U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — served as one of several ringleaders of the effort.

Koch Industries already came out swinging in advance of the book's publication, responding to an advanced review by New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore by accusing Mayer of working to “further an agenda-driven story line [that] is grossly inaccurate.”

‘Right Out of California’ Book Review: On the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism

Posted on Nov 13, 2015

By Gabriel Thompson

(Page 2)

Growers and their allies discovered another way to win: surveillance. One of the most fascinating characters in Olmsted’s book is Gen. Ralph Van Deman. A legendary figure in the history of military intelligence, Van Deman honed his skills fighting insurgents in the Philippines before retiring to set up a massive intelligence gathering operation out of his San Diego home. His files grew to cover some 125,000 “subversive” groups and individuals in California — which included the American Federation of Labor and the YMCA — and he collaborated extensively with growers, who created their own spying and surveillance arms to track down organizers and break strikes.

Growers were obsessed with two organizers in particular: Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker. Their names pop up in books about the period, but Olmsted fills in new biographical details about the pair, who were hounded across the state by law enforcement and often forced to operate underground. Both were white, spoke little Spanish, and were members of the Communist Party, though neither cared much for Marxist theory; they were interested in organizing farmworkers, and were willing to suffer for it. “These people seen that we didn’t have anything, we didn’t have ulterior motives,” Chambers said. “We had less than they had. If they went hungry, we went hungry.”

Chambers came out of the Irish-American working class, while Decker was from a middle-class Jewish family (her last name was actually Dwofsky). She had joined the Youth Communist League in Syracuse and organized coal miners in Kentucky before landing in California. Unlike the plainspoken Chambers, she was a gifted public speaker and, with her fashionable dresses and high heels, a curious presence on the picket line. While they were seen as the driving force behind the 1933 cotton strike, it was the mostly Mexican workforce that had pulled it off. But growers found it difficult to imagine brown-skinned workers acting on their own, and decided the two organizers needed to be taken care of.

They got their chance the following year. By now, Decker and Chambers had relocated the union’s office from San Jose to Sacramento — a lynch mob had strung up a San Jose man several blocks from their office, and they feared being the next target. The duo continued to organize small marches and protests. The district attorney ordered a raid of the Communist Party headquarters, arresting 24 people for vagrancy, including the two star organizers. Soon the charges were updated to criminal syndicalism. The resulting trial was front-page news for weeks, and Olmsted dedicates a chapter to this largely forgotten episode, in which growers essentially paid for a verdict that sent the organizers to prison for five years. “State has farm peace,” ran the headline in the Los Angeles Times.

For readers interested in the history of California radicalism — and reaction — Olmsted’s book covers fascinating new ground and offers an intriguing, and ultimately convincing, thesis. It is also something of a mirror reflected across eight decades. At a time of extreme inequality, even the government’s most modest policies on behalf of the poor — shipments of free food, the construction of a handful of labor camps — were met with hysteria by the right. There is a photograph in the book of four Los Angeles “churchwomen” holding pistols as they take target practice. The image is from 1935, and the ladies are identified as members of American Women, Inc., a group who believed that Roosevelt was pushing as “Communist a policy as the Russian government’s own economic program” and who were prepared to lay their lives on the line to save their country. As Wallace Stegner once remarked, “California is America, only more so.”

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

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Amazon.com, Inc.:{:(style="border-style:solid;border-width:4px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{":{Heidi Boghosian's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Spying on Democracy is the answer to the question, 'if you're ....illustrative primer on governmental and :{private:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-sector :{intelligence:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: gathering.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

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

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

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Bill D. Moyers:{:(style="border-style:solid;border-width:4px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Nov 8, 2013 - A surveillance expert says the government and corporations are routinely watching our activities, making a mockery of our civil liberties.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

### Heidi Boghosian on Mass Surveillance | BillMoyers.com

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

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Bill D. Moyers:{:(style="border-style:solid;border-width:4px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Feb 21, 2014 - The bond between the :{private:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: security industry and the government is soldered by ... handles cases defending the government's ability to gather :{intelligence:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:or protect ... Watch: :{Heidi Boghosian:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: on Spying and Civil Liberties ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

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

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

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

note no charts

OUR PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS, BY THE NUMBERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 1999

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 2005

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

90: Percentage of intelligence contracts that are classified

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

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

23: Percentage of the firm's overall revenue

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

---

3/15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Read the FBI bulletin here [3].)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

Monsanto cash helped fund bill to stifle whistleblowers in Iowa

By Tom Laskawy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sockpuppets Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

ref above:

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

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

How Corporate Spooks Spy on Nonprofit Activist Groups

November 25, 2013 |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more stories tagged with:

spying [7]

---

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

Links:

[1] http://billmoyers.com/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland

[3] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/

[4] http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/opinion/put-the-spies-back-under-one-roof.html?ref=opinion

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfraGard

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/spying

[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

===

spooky biz

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

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

cf See

James

Ridgeway,

“The

Dirty

History

Corporate

Spying.”

Guardian,

February

15,

2011.

The

use

former

intelligence,

military

and

law

enforcement

officers

for

corporate

espionage

appears

commonplace.

Especially

prevalent

the

use

former

Central

Intelligence

Agency,

National

Security

Agency

and

Secret

Service

agents,

well

current

former

police

officers,

and

other

former

military,

intelligence

and

law

enforcement

officials.

These

current

and

former

government

employees,

and

current

government

contractors,

their

spying

against

nonprofits

with

little

regulation

oversight,

and

apparently

with

near

impunity.

Many

the

world’s

largest

corporations

and

their

trade

associations

-‐-‐

including

the

U.S.

Chamber

Commerce,

Walmart,

Monsanto,

Bank

America,

Dow

Chemical,

Kraft,

Coca-‐

Cola,

Chevron,

Burger

King,

McDonald’s,

Shell,

BP,

BAE,

Sasol,

Brown

Williamson

and

E.ON

-‐-‐

have

been

linked

espionage

planne

---

The

CIA’s

“old

boy

network”

legendary.

Regarding

the

FBI,

Eamon

Javers

describes

little-‐known

publication,

the

Trapline,

which

“lists

every

retired

FBI

agent

the

country

who

works

the

private

investigations

business.”

Javers

describes

the

Trapline

“a

bit

institutionalized

old-‐boy

network

for

retired

G-men

---

2010,

the

Washington

Post

was

able

identify

1,931

private

companies

that

“work

top-‐secret

contracts.”

The

Post

also

estimated

that

“out

854,000

people

with

top-‐secret

clearances,

265,000

are

contractors.”12

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

grist

===

just added security to this cat:

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

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 2012to 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 companyto 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 hekicked 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	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

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."

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chuck hamel took concorde to tell BP pres valdez term problem; ex cia hired to spy,

entraped; 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.

3D Global Solutions

D cont.

DynCorp

Janusian Security Risk Management Ltd.

National Security Research, Inc.

N cont.

- Xe

Private Intel / Security

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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)

Smear Appears

Smear Disappears

‘Right Out of California’ Book Review: On the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism

Posted on Nov 13, 2015

OUR PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS, BY THE NUMBERS

Monsanto cash helped fund bill to stifle whistleblowers in Iowa

How Corporate Spooks Spy on Nonprofit Activist Groups

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

SS agent Is Given Six-Month Sentence

Tom Ryan's Profile

Anonymous Leaks Personal Details of Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Wall Street Protesters

does not list haliburton?

Pages in category "Private military corporations"

Attachments