This report is an effort to document what we do know, even though the details in each case are far from complete. Much of what we know has been uncovered via improbable strokes of good fortune, such as whistleblowers within private investigations firms, leaked documents or bizarre coincidences. That suggests that what we do know is merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Many factors have contributed to the rise of corporate espionage against nonprofits and whistleblowers, such as the rising availability of former CIA, NSA and other military, intelligence and law enforcement officials; the outsourcing of government intelligence operations to private intelligence firms; the spread of surveillance techniques generally; the rising power and sophistication of electronic surveillance; the continued growth of corporate power in the United States; the paucity of law enforcement resources spent on protecting nonprofits; and the failure to punish corporations and their private intelligence firms for unethical or illegal espionage.
For many companies, the intangible value of their brand is a precious asset. For this reason, many companies may view nonprofits and whistleblowers as potent and unpredictable adversaries, and want to know everything they can about them. Companies take "brand risk" seriously, which also leads them to outsource their efforts to target nonprofit organizations, thus reducing the brand risk of such activities and hiding behind shields of plausible deniability.
Corporations have used a great variety of human, physical and electronic espionage tactics. According to Jack Devine, a 32-year veteran of the CIA, and former acting director of its foreign operations, " The private sector has virtually all the same techniques as the government." [9] Many of these techniques, at least when used by private corporations, are unethical or illegal, and have undeniably been used against nonprofit organizations.
A diverse array of nonprofits have been targeted by espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups.
Many of the world's largest corporations and their trade associations -- including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald's, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON -- have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.
Today, corporations can hire talented and experienced former intelligence, military and law enforcement officials to conduct espionage against nonprofit organizations. Former agents of the CIA, NSA, Secret Service, FBI, U.S. military and current and former police have all been linked to spying on nonprofits. The revolving door keeps spinning. Six years ago, the investigative reporter Douglas Frantz suggested, " The best estimate is that several hundred former intelligence agents now work in corporate espionage".These ex-spies apply a higher level of expertise, honed by government service, to the cruder tactics already practiced by private investigators." [10]
In recent years, there has been a large transfer of government intelligence operations from government staff to private firms. "The CIA, NSA and other agencies once renowned for their analysis of intelligence and for their technical prowess in covert operations, electronic surveillance and overhead reconnaissance have outsourced many of their core tasks to private intelligence armies," writes Tim Shorrock. "As a result, spying has blossomed into a domestic market worth nearly $50 billion a year." [11] In 2010, the Washington Post was able to identify 1,931 private companies that "work on top-secret contracts." The Post also estimated that "out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors." [12]
While such outsourcing is outside the scope of this report, it speaks to the immense capacity of intelligence gathering for hire, which corporations may employ to target nonprofit organizations.
In this report, we define corporate espionage as corporations' use of unethical or illegal investigative or surveillance techniques to obtain information about the activities of other corporations, whistleblowers, activists, and nonprofit organizations.
This report presents narratives of corporate espionage, most of
them during the past seventeen years. We will also discuss
some recent FBI investigations of nonprofit organizations, as well
as a corporate-FBI partnership on intelligence matters.
In 1994, John C. Dodd met Richard Beckett at a bar in Easton, Maryland. Shortly thereafter, Beckett introduced Dodd to Paul Rakowski, a retired Secret Service agent. Rakowski pitched to Dodd the idea of forming a new private security business. In August 1995, the private security firm Beckett Brown International (BBI) was formed.
As part of its work, BBI spied on many nonprofit organizations. James Ridgeway [13] of Mother Jones, who broke the story of BBI's espionage operations, wrote that BBI
"spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records--donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos--from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies." [14]
Greenpeace
For much of the 1990s, Greenpeace conducted a campaign to phase out
the use of chlorine to manufacture plastics and paper.
Especially in the early- and mid-1990s, Greenpeace's campaign
generated critical media coverage for Dow, the world's largest
producer of chlorine.
[15] It
also won support from the Clinton administration and other
governmental bodies.
[16]
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