spying on nonprofit groups that they regard as potential threats. The report’s called, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.” It was released by the corporate watch group Essential Information. The report found a diverse group 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, NSA and FBI agents to engage in private surveillance work which is often illegal in nature but rarely, if ever, prosecuted.
Gary Ruskin talking:
we found a tremendous diversity of corporate espionage being conducted against a wide variety of civic groups across the country and the U.K., the case in Ecuador and in France as well. So what we found was a tremendous variety of use of different types of espionage tactics from dumpster diving to hiring investigators to pose as journalists or volunteers, to electronic espionage, information warfare, information operations hacking, electronic surveillance. And so this appears to be a growing phenomenon both here in the United States and maybe in other parts of the world as well. But our report is an effort to document something that’s very hard to know very much about. We aggregated 30 different cases of corporate espionage to try to talk about them, but really, each of the cases we have very fragmentary information. And so it’s hard to say — we have a, we have a part of an iceberg whether it’s the tip of the iceberg or the tippy tip of the iceberg, we don’t really know.
2010; Greenpeace files a federal lawsuit against Dow Chemical and Sasol North America for engaging in corporate espionage. The lawsuit alleged corporate spies stole thousands of confidential documents from Greenpeace, including campaign plans, employee records; phone records, donor and media lists.
The Greenpeace example is a great example of what corporate America can bring to bear, the lawlessness that they can bring to bear on nonprofit organizations like Greenpeace, like Peta, like Knowledge Ecology International, on Public Citizen and others. This was a tremendously diverse and powerful campaign of espionage that they targeted Greenpeace with. And so, you know, there are so many other examples in the report, but you mentioned Wal-Mart has a very large internal security operation and so we know of a case, for example, where they planted essentially a person with a bug in a meeting of people organizing about Wal-Mart and then as well they had a van that was able to surveil some other activities, protest activities as well. There are so many stories we can tell from the report. Another famous one was the largest operated nuclear power plants in the world; Electricite de France, caught with a copy of a Greenpeace hard drive on one of its contractor’s computers because they’d hacked into Greenpeace France. So there just so many stories we can tell.
what we found in some of the cases is there are spies that actually, you know, actively participate in an organization. For example, one of the most famous cases was a woman who’s real name was Mary Lou Sapone, who went by a Mary McFate and was very active in gun control movement for quite a long time and ran for the National Board of Directors of a prominent gun control organization and worked with the Brady Campaign like. She was totally a spy.
A spy probably for the NRA. And then there are other pretty well-known examples, like for example, there was a former congressman the late Congressmen Henry Hyde was also a bank director at a bank, the bank went belly up and he was the only bank director who did not pay the settlement for the bank going defunct. And he had a lawyer dispatch a journalist or someone who posed as a journalist to get information from the guy who uncovered so much of this Ron Dueling
there’s been a lot of espionage related food issues. So, let’s start with food for a little bit. So, let’s start with Kraft. Kraft was implicated in a scandal where there was genetically engineered corn that was not approved that made it into Taco Bell related product. So, Friends of the Earth and Center for Food Safety pointed this out . Kraft got very alarmed about the whole thing, and so they sent — apparently, they contracted with a really very intrusive private investigative firm called BBI — the same one that did the espionage against Greenpeace — to do physical intrusion and to do dumpster diving, including dumpster diving where they would actually have an active duty police officer to get into the private areas of — to the private property of these nonprofits and obtain their memos and their garbage so that they could figure out what it is that these GMO — GMO activists were working on. So, that’s Kraft.
Let’s see, Burger King did — contracted with an investigator that was quite worried about a really heroic civic organization called the Coalition for Immokalee Workers. So, they contracted with this investigative firm which then started calling up Coalition of Immokalee Workers posing as a student asking all sorts of questions. So, it took a while for CIW to figure out what was going on. But, they’ve figured it out that this was in fact a private investigator trying to spy.
Another example would be Monsanto in the food related zone. So, Monsanto and this famous company called Blackwater and then called Xe then Academy. then they were, at that time, they were called Blackwater. So, 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.
London Greenpeace and McDonalds. this a very old story. So, Approximately 20 years ago there were some activists who were handing out leaflets about McDonalds and their activities. McDonalds actually sued them for libel. This was called, then, the famous McLibel Trial. So, for a long time this trial went on and on but as part of trial, out came the revelation that McDonalds had investigator spying on people on trial and on some of the other London Greenpeace activists at the time.
one of the problems that we have with corporate espionage here in the United States is there’s no investigation of it here and there’s no real investigation, there’s no prosecutions. In the United Kingdom, for example, there’s been a giant phone hacking scandal with respect to Rupert Murdoch and News of the World, the now defunct News of the World newspaper. And there, there was The Guardian of London did this very big investigative series on it and then the British government has been doing an investigation and now there are prosecutions happening right now in this case. So, there, there has been a real serious government response when there was corporate espionage found in France from Électricité de France there was very serious investigation. There were prosecutions, fines, people went to jail. But, here in the United States, Congress is totally asleep. There is no investigation of this matter at all as far as we can tell, either from Congress or from the Department of Justice. That’s really awful. Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is a threat to democracy and it’s a threat to individual privacy.
Eamon Javers has really tried to heroically pull this stuff out into the light, but, it’s been very hard for him and really what he knows is pretty much all we know, and pretty much all that’s been reported on CIA or NSA for that matter, moonlighting. So, we really don’t know. He asks all the right questions, but, we really don’t have answers to them and that’s what Congress really should be for, to figure out who is moonlighting for whom, how much are they being paid, what companies are hiring active duty CIA or NSA or other law enforcement officials, how common is this, what kinds of espionage activities are they allowed to do or do they consult or do they actually execute these espionage activities. Congress is asleep, and it’s really a shame because these are vital questions for out democracy and we deserve to know.
What we know about corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is very fragmentary and so we have very little information on it at all. So, a little bit comes from Jeremy Hammond’s hack. So, the guy is now going to go to jail for 10 years for really what’s a form of civil disobedience, or maybe you ought to call it commercial disobedience. So, that’s a very large price to pay.
there are a lot of things that have to happen. But, the place to start is to enforce the laws that we already have. So, there are — in our report we document a number of instances where there is apparent law breaking. So, we urge Congress to investigate this. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, for example would be a great place to start. Then, we urge the Justice Department to read the report and to look into the possible violations that we see there. But, in addition, there do need to be additional protections. For example, there needs to be a criminal protection to — we need to make it illegal for a company to do dumpster diving for commercial purposes in order to protect the inner workings of civic organizations. Because civic organizations, they can’t do their work effectively, if they are constantly being pried into and spied upon by these giant corporations who have so much resources and are able to hire former NSA, former CIA, Secret Service, U.S. military or even perhaps active duty. We don’t really know. We know that sometimes there have been active duty police officers hired.
how much do corporations pay for this spying? this is a question that is very, very hard to answer based on the information that we have. But, we do know, for example, there was a proposal made by Palantir Technologies, Barico and HPGary Federal, to Hunton & Williams to do some electronic espionage and information warfare where the price tag was $2 million a month. As far as we know that was never actually carried out. But, we do have the documents of the proposal. So, that is one sense of how much money we’re talking about, but, really it’s a very hard question to answer.
the FBI corporate partnership when it comes to spying on nonprofits as you talk about InfraGaurd. this is something we don’t know very much about, but, there is this little known FBI corporate partnership called InfraGuard. It, essentially, it seems like it’s like business class for law enforcement. They get extra special information which is such a foreign concept, really to the rule of law. So, they share information with one another. But, we’re really not quite sure what they share and whether or not — to what extent maybe the FBI might be providing intelligence or assistance with respect to corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations. We just don’t really know.
were you able to speak to any corporate heads about their spying on nonprofits? writing the report was just enough to get all of the diverse documents from thirty different sets of corporate espionage stories and compile them into one narrative. So, that’s what we did.
– source democracynow.org
Gary Ruskin, Director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information. He authored the new report, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.”