The Green Menace: Is Green the New Red?

originally posted by: CraftBuilder
I've read reports of the FBI infiltrating animal rights clubs/humane societies to monitor, destabilize, and ridicule them. Same thing, wrapped up in sexpionage scandals etc. The premise for the FBI involvement is that animal rights events and meetings threaten to undermine the productivity of a substantial domestic industry (meat). What is so hypocritical about this is that despite the NSA disrupting profits of major domestic tech companies by reducing the appeal of their products (forcing them to install snooping tech) the FBI has not gotten involved.

Its sad how in order to protect and serve they end up knowingly destroying innocent peoples lives. Its like creating a weapon to protect your country and testing it on your own people, or killing innocent bystanders to protect a secret of state.

It appears that, at least in part, that some of the motivation behind infiltration is not to identify terrorists, but those who support the use of violence under more extreme circumstances. Now, I may be taking a slightly hard and cynical look at this, but that sounds a lot like they want to know who will and won't fight back, or rather, those with the ability to organise and broker information and alliances.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:
"In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."
I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response...

www.theguardian.com...

originally posted by: ElGoobero
allow me to be a contrarian.
there is such a thing as eco-terrorism;

I totally agree, acts of sabotage and violence have been committed by environmental groups. This is beyond dispute and well documented. Acts that endanger the lives of others should not be tolerated, but peaceful, non-aggressive obstruction, in my opinion, is an entirely legitimate means of protest.

My main concern however is that law enforcement agencies are sharing intelligence with the corporate sector, and that some law enforcement agencies are defacto, an arm of corporate interests, which given that those agencies are funded by public monies, should they be representing the people who pay their wages, rather than, taking back handers and doing dirty details while on our clock?

I know, I know, I am a naive idealist to expect such accountibility...but I just can't help it, I was born this way.



Anyhooo...

By 2007, 70 percent of the US intelligence budget – or about $38 billion annually – was spent on private contractors... As early as 2004, in a report titled “The Surveillance Industrial Complex,” the American Civil Liberties Union warned that the “US security establishment is making a systematic effort to extend its surveillance capacity by pressing the private sector into service to report on the activities of Americans.” At the same time, corporations are boosting their own security operations. Today, overall annual spending on corporate security and intelligence is roughly $100 billion, double what it was a decade ago, according to Brian Ruttenbur, a defense analyst with CRT Capital.

Since 9/11 accusations of eco-terrorism have proliferated and a number of individuals and groups have been prosecuted under new laws, which have profoundly impacted the radical environmental movement. The broad crackdown and subsequent fear and paranoia that swept through activist circles have been referred to as the “Green Scare.” “The shift was gradual,” Will Potter writes in Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, “slowly merging the rhetoric of industry groups with that of politicians and law enforcement.”

In public, corporations have amplified the threat of eco-terrorism to influence legislation, such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. In private, meanwhile, they have hired firms to spy on environmental groups. About a month after 9/11, for example, the crisis communications firm Nichols Dezenhall (now Dezenhall Resources) registered a website called StopEcoViolence.com (now defunct), which served as a sort of faux watchdog group and source for media outlets including The New York Times. Around the same time, Dezenhall – described by Bill Moyers as the “Mafia of industry” – was involved in corporate espionage. Along with two other PR companies, Dezenhall hired a now-defunct private security firm, Beckett Brown International, to spy on environmental activists. One of the targeted groups was Greenpeace. In 2011 Greenpeace filed a lawsuit charging that Dow Chemical, Sasol (formerly CONDEA Vista), the PR firms, and individuals working for Beckett Brown International (which was founded by former Secret Service officers) stole thousands of documents, intercepted phone call records, trespassed, and conducted unlawful surveillance. In a story for Mother Jones, James Ridgeway revealed that the security firm obtained donor lists, detailed financial statements, Social Security numbers of staff members, and strategy memos from several groups, and, in turn, “produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.” (In February a Washington, DC court ruled that the claims of trespass and misappropriation of trade secrets could proceed.)

More recently, according to a report in The Nation, the agricultural giant Monsanto contracted with a subsidiary of Blackwater, the private security firm, to gather intelligence on and possibly infiltrate environmental groups in order to protect the company’s brand name. “This is the new normal,” says Scott Crow, an author and longtime environmental activist who was the subject of FBI and corporate surveillance for close to eight years beginning in 1999.

www.earthisland.org...

a reply to: ladyinwaiting

This is simultaneously frightening, and sickening. A known known, yet unknown unknown. 
Or....... maybe corporations really are people? Can we build a prison large enough? Can we feed them ethics for lunch and facts for dinner? Should we label them all as sociopaths and make them wear a scarlet letter? S. and $. 

Nobody has the power to disarm them. They have all the power and I don't see them disarming themselves. It's FUBAR as far as I can tell, and may very well be our ruin.

Judging by the changes I have noted here at ATS and at similar sites, it looks like it may be true what many have said about the infiltration of the www.

Any time hot button issues are attempted to be discussed, you see a slew of new folks show up then disappear. So it is highly likely that we have a resident agent or two.

as far as our security people giving $ to private corps, this is mostly tech stuff. go to any government operation (local Motor Vehicle place e.g.) and they have a contractor to clean the building, one to fix the computers, another to maintain photographic equipment, probly others.

as far as corps deploying their own pajama kids to counter the thousands of idealistic kidiots working for the greens...freedom of speech is a good thing. the major media sure aren't going to give us any pro-corporation news.

I don't mind the FBI spying or collecting info, but active disinformation, or, planting activists to encourage bad behavior, is not what they're supposed to do.

originally posted by: NightSkyeB4Dawn
Any time hot button issues are attempted to be discussed, you see a slew of new folks show up then disappear. So it is highly likely that we have a resident agent or two.

That kind of diffusion of certain topics, from what I can gather, would seem counter productive as it usually bumps those threads, keeps them at the top, draws further attention. It seems to me that there are certain aspect to ATS that gives such tactics limited scope here. We must though, hit a number of flags and whistles on our way through the general processing systems of the NSAs Prism and the UK GCHQ. Plus there is also all the social science studies that are going on, we probably have a few state sponsored anthropologists monitoring our behaviour.

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

www.theguardian.com...

It is not just the US where the effort to subordinate social science to the demands of state military ideology continues apace. In Britain, a key area where this is occurring is in the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Global Uncertainties programme, recently rebranded as the 'Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.'

The programme is led by the Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC), and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). But it is not an independent exercise.
Rather it is explicitly designed to "help governments, businesses and societies to better predict, detect, prevent and mitigate threats to society" in the context of" environmental change and diminishing natural recourses, food security, demographic change, poverty, inequality and poor governance, new and old conflicts, natural disasters and pandemics, expansion of digital technologies, economic downturn and other important global developments."

The RCUK partnership is thus deeply politicised. It "works closely" with a wide range of UK government departments, including the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Department of Communities and Local Government, Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence (MoD), Home Office, and the US Homeland Security Department.

Its strategic advisory board is chaired by Sir Richard Mottram, a longtime Whitehall civil servant for defence whose last post was as Permanent Secretary for Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the Cabinet Office – Prime Minister Tony Blair's top national security adviser – who also recently praised the coalition government's Strategic Defence and Security Review as containing "much of value."

The government's defence review which happened to meet with Sir Mottram's approval, titled 'Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty', highlights the future risks of heightening "competition for resources, growing populations and climate change." Priorities include "securing trade and energy supply routes"; working "overseas, using diplomatic, military, intelligence and economic activity to mitigate disruption to the transit of energy supplies"; as well as tackling risks "associated with other resources, such as key mineral components important for particular industries (e.g. rare earth metals which are crucial for some low carbon technologies), water and food."

Domestically, the review calls for "enhanced central government and Armed Forces planning, coordination and capabilities" under the extraordinary totalitarian powers of the Civil Contingencies Act, to respond to domestic emergencies in the form of natural hazards, environmental disasters or other forms of strategic shocks.

www.theguardian.com...

originally posted by: ElGoobero
I don't mind the FBI spying or collecting info, but active disinformation, or, planting activists to encourage bad behavior, is not what they're supposed to do.

I am not sure that they know that. I think the lines are seriously blurred.

a reply to: ElGoobero

For example...

The incident began when a server used by the Climatic Research Unit was breached in "a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack",[5] and 160 MB of data[8] were obtained including more than 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents.[18] The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the data were taken was not one that could be accessed easily, and that the data could not have been released inadvertently.[19] Norfolk Police later added that the offenders used methods that are common in unlawful internet activity, designed to obstruct later enquiries.[5] The breach was first discovered on 17 November 2009 after the server of the RealClimate website was also hacked and a copy of the stolen data was uploaded there.[20] RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt said that he had information that the files had been obtained through "a hack into [CRU's] backup mail server."[21] At about the same time, a short comment appeared on Stephen McIntyre's Climate Audit website saying that "A miracle has happened."[22]

On 19 November an archive file containing the data was uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia,[23] and then copied to numerous locations across the Internet.[8] An anonymous post from a Saudi Arabian IP address[24] to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent[20] described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents", adding that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps".[25] That same day, Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit was forwarded an internal email sent to UEA staff warning that "climate change sceptics" had obtained a "large volume of files and emails". Charles Rotter, moderator of the climate-sceptic blog Watts Up With That, which had been the first to get a link and download the files, gave a copy to his flatmate Steve Mosher. Mosher received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening and replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow." Shortly afterwards, the emails began to be widely publicised on climate-sceptic blogs.[22] On 20 November the story emerged in mainstream media.[8]

Former Republican House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert called the attacks a "manufactured distraction", and the dispute was described as a "highly orchestrated" and manufactured controversy by Newsweek and The New York Times. Concerns about the media's role in promoting early allegations while also minimising later coverage exonerating the scientists were raised by journalists and policy experts. Historian Spencer R. Weart of the American Institute of Physics said the incident was unprecedented in the history of science, having "never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance."[37] The United States National Academy of Sciences expressed concern and condemned what they called "political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular".[38]

en.wikipedia.org...

On a positive note.

Lord Nicholas Stern's TED Talk, 16 minutes is all.

How can we begin to address the global, insidious problem of climate change — a problem that’s too big for any one country to solve? Economist Nicholas Stern lays out a plan, presented to the UN’s Climate Summit in 2014, showing how the world’s countries can work together on climate. It’s a big vision for cooperation, with a payoff that goes far beyond averting disaster. He asks: How can we use this crisis to spur better lives for all?

www.ted.com...

There is so much concerning here.

One thing is that intell operatives tend to work in a rather life and death way when it comes to secrecy, violence and tactics. I doubt that changes a lot when they are suddenly working in an area where they actually have vastly LESS oversight on them than normal. And there's a whole lot of ways to off someone or make them too sick/diseased to matter. Not to mention the damage even one poisonous person can do to any social environment if they're pathological enough to plan it.

originally posted by: RedCairo
There is so much concerning here.

One thing is that intell operatives tend to work in a rather life and death way when it comes to secrecy, violence and tactics.

I don't think that the vast majority do, perhaps those that work in military zones but the vast majority of intelligence work, I would suppose, is desk based and that field work involves form filling and routine interviews. Those that are undercover, such as the Met's SDS did seem to use incitement of violence as one of their tactics however, and that did mean leading the fray into volleys of police truncheons. In the US, on the otherhand, rather in the UK where environmentalism remained attached to general counter culturalism, such embedding seems to be amongst respectable middle-class professionals. Violence is hardly likely to be an applicable tactic.

Most of the intrusion, in recent years, has been electronic anyway. Hacking. Collection of data. That sort of thing. Not very James Bond or Jason Bourne, but cogs and wheels all the same. That those targeted are representatives of social justice organisations and other activists, including environmental groups. It is perhaps legitimate that a group like Amnesty International should be monitored, for example, by the apparatus of states, but private emails, client privileged information, conversations etc, should not be read, nor should it be passed on to the private sector, even if that private sector is run by one of the "old boys".

I don't think that the average law enforcement officer, or even intelligence officer thinks too much at all about what they are told to do, they just do it, and that is what they are paid for, but further up the pecking order, where this revolving door recruitment policy persists, and is facilitated by greased palms, there needs to be greater accountibility. Our governments have incredible powers of access, particularly the UK and US, though they are vaguely more open about it than other nations, so who knows, (anyway, I digress)...those powers, we trust, are being used to protect us against "evil", to monitor major crime, international terrorism, sex trafficking...drug trafficking...all the sicknesses of the modern world (blah, blah)...and anti-frackers...anti-frackers? In who's best interest is that little tactic?

Greenpeace is a criminal organization funded and supported by Royal Dutch Shell and the dutch royals.
The purpose of Greenpeace has always been to protect Royal Dutch Shell's oil interests and violent exploitation of African countries, especially Nigeria. Additionally their role as anti-nuclear activist is the main driving force against nuclear energy development and there's good indication it was involved in the sabotage of the Chernobyl NPP in 1986.

a reply to: Anaana

Corporations are comprised of lots of people, as well as shareholders and it is counter-productive to assume that most of them are sociopath

No the companies themselves by their nature are sociopathic.

Our bioshpere is being destroyed for short term profit and gain. When does defending it become an act of self defence..?

Greenpeace branding of the ship "Akademik Lomonosov" as floating Chernobyl is propaganda emanating from the Dutch and British royals. I would stress that the King of the Netherlands together with Greenpeace should search for "Chernobyls" closer to their homes, such as in outdated and collapsing NPPs of Borssele, and others in Belgium, Germany and Sweden.
If Mr Haverkamp wants to look for possible terrorist targets I advice him and his fellow lunatics to look closer ... and more carefully. If he wants to look for damages done to nature by criminals instead he should probably look closer to forest fires in Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and other countries in which various EU intelligence agencies, put up forest fires on purpose, to damage landscape and "green reserves" sometimes using patsy lunatics to start these fires!