Isn’t it enough that tiny public interest groups like ours struggle for
funding, lack sufficient staff given our workload, and generally have
to spend our days fighting corporate villains (and their flackies like
John Stossel) that set legislative and political agendas, devise
stealth strategies to hurt consumers and purchase expensive media to
persuade public officials that there’s something wrong with, well,
those of us trying to protect the public?
If this unbelievable exclusive from Mother Jones doesn’t convince you that these corporate special interests have way too much time and money on their hands, I don’t know what will.
Seems like a bunch of environmental groups have been the focus of a major covert cloak and dagger effort by companies that hired former spies and secret service agents to disrupt the work of these groups by going through these groups’ trash, infiltrating them, staking out the homes of their executives, etc. etc. “Scary” sounding groups like "Green Peace", "Friends of the Earth", "U.S. Public Interest Research Group", "The Center for Food Safety" and "The Center for Health, Environment & Justice"– lots of groups with whom we work, were the targets. One mission, for example, was to go after groups that had the audacity to oppose genetically engineered food not approved for human consumption.
MoJo's piece centers on the company, Beckett Brown International (BBI) later renamed S2i (seriously that has got to be straight out of a movie). Basically, S2i was a hired gun for big corps brought on to make the lives of certain environmental groups and their staff pretty difficult. They called their missions "protective services" and "crisis management." Not as cool as it sounds considering that a lot of their mission was staking out trash receptacles.
If anyone’s thinking of coming after ThePopTort.com, just remember that we have security cameras EVERYWHERE! (Thought you should know.)
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