Greenpeace has accused corporate heavyweights of resorting to spying
Greenpeace has accused corporate heavyweights of resorting to spyingWhile the alleged crimes might be a decade old, new charges of espionage by Greenpeace against some big US companies raise a number of significant ethical issues.
Greenpeace has filed a lawsuit in the US against the Dow Chemical Company, Sasol North America, Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum, accusing them of conspiring to spy on the organisation’s activities in the late 1990s.
Dow is the world’s largest chemical company and a major producer of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Sasol North America is part of South African energy and chemical giant Sasol.
Sasol is involved because it now owns the erstwhile chemical manufacturer Condea Vista, which it renamed as Sasol North America after acquiring it in 2001. It was Condea Vista that allegedly engaged in espionage before being acquired by Sasol. Dezenhall and Ketchum allegedly hired a security firm to spy on Greenpeace on behalf of their clients Dow and Condea Vista.
The case filed in the District Court of Columbia accuses the companies of hiring a private security firm – Beckett Brown International (BBI) – to spy on Greenpeace using physical and electronic surveillance techniques. BBI’s employees include former officers from the US secret service and the Central Intelligence Agency. The company changed its name to S2I in 2000.
Follow the funds
Mark Floegel, senior investigator at Greenpeace USA, says the industrial spies were seeking specific knowledge of how Greenpeace was allocating its funds. This would help their corporate clients allocate money to counter Greenpeace’s campaigns, the allegations suggest.
Seeking compensatory damages, the lawsuit details that the companies conspired to “spy, infiltrate and steal confidential information from Greenpeace with the intention of pre-empting, blunting and thwarting environmental campaigns”.
The alleged espionage took place between 1998 and 2000. At this time Greenpeace was actively campaigning against Condea Vista’s toxic release into the Lake Charles region of Louisiana, and also about Dow Chemical’s use of chlorine in manufacturing and production of GMOs for food products.
The suspected espionage was first reported when a BBI employee leaked records to Mother Jones, a non-profit investigating news magazine, in 2008. Greenpeace is now using those records as evidence in the lawsuit.
“If corporations want to know what we think, they merely have to call us and ask for a meeting,” Floegel says. He says the public relations and industrial security firms that advocate espionage to companies are leading executives astray for their own financial gain.
This is the second incident of alleged corporate espionage against Greenpeace. In 2009, French judges opened an investigation into allegations that executives of the state-owned nuclear power giant EDF were involved in espionage that included hacking into computer systems.
Greenpeace’s campaign against new installations of nuclear reactors has annoyed the nuclear power industry.
“When espionage is revealed, as in the case of Dow and Sasol in the US or in the case of EDF spying on Greenpeace France, the corporations involved suffer from legal sanctions and public disapproval,” Floegel says.
Dow Chemical’s Greg Baldwin says Dow has no reason to believe that any employee did anything improper. “Even though the alleged activities occurred more than a decade ago, Dow will take the Greenpeace allegations seriously as we expect all Dow employees and those working on behalf of Dow to adhere to Dow’s code of business conduct,” Baldwin says.
The spying allegations are likely to widen the distrust between rights campiagners and companies. The Dow court case will be watched closely. And if the court finds the allegations to be true, it will be a serious blow to the company’s reputation and credibility.