Giant corporations are employing highly unethical or illegal tools of espionage against public interest organizations with near impunity, according to a new report by Essential Information.
The report, titled Spooky Business, was released this afternoon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The report documents how corporations hire shady investigative firms staffed with former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), US military, Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Secret Service and local police departments to target nonprofit organizations.
“Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is an egregious abuse of corporate power that is subverting democracy,” said Gary Ruskin, author of Spooky Business. “Who will rein in the forces of corporate lawlessness as they bear down upon nonprofit defenders of justice?”
Ruskin was joined at the press conference by Charlie Cray of Greenpeace, who documented ongoing corporate espionage activity against the environmental group.
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.
Many different types of nonprofit organizations have been targeted with corporate 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.
Corporations and their trade associations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics against nonprofit organizations.
The most prevalent tactic appears to be infiltration by posing a volunteer or journalist, to obtain information from a nonprofit.
But corporations have been linked to many other human, physical and electronic espionage tactics against nonprofits.
Many of these tactics are either highly unethical or illegal, Ruskin said.