Total Surveillance: The Response to Snowden’s Leak Ignores the Reality of Political Repression

[marions ghost]

4. Anti-fracking groups followed and monitored:

From the article:

Fracking, Tracking, and Psyops

Several recent exposés have revealed the extent to which corporations and the government have also inappropriately used surveillance against peaceful environmental activists in an attempt to quell dissent and intimidate.

Private security firm The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), for example, was including the activities of a peaceful anti-fracking group in Pennsylvania in the company’s intelligence bulletins, which were then distributed by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security to local police chiefs, to state, federal, and private intelligence agencies, and to the security directors of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and PR firms.

News of this surveillance and intelligence sharing broke when James Powers, the director of the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security, mistakenly sent an email to a retired Air Force officer and anti-fracking activist he believed was sympathetic to the industry. Powers wrote: “We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies.” The surveillance had a chilling effect on the group, causing membership to dwindle when participants worried their phones had been tapped, that their emails were monitored, and that they were being followed on their routes to work as teachers, nurses, and doctors.

The fracking industry has a history of tracking, intimidating, and tricking skeptical landowners who threaten its profitability. At the “Media & Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011” conference in Houston, Fracking company Range Resources’ public relations chief confirmed that the company had hired Army and Marine veterans with combat experience in psychological warfare to influence communities in which Range drills for gas, saying “We have several former PSYOPs [Psychological Operations] folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments. Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of PSYOPs in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”

Because corporations conduct much of the government’s surveillance for them (by 2007, seventy percent of the US intelligence budget—or about $38 billion annually—was spent on private contractors), the potential for peaceful anti-corporate activism to be labeled terrorism is huge. And because corporations have state of the art technology and techniques, surveillance has become a sprawling industry of its own outside of government contracts. Overall annual spending on corporate security and intelligence is roughly $100 billion, which is double what it was a decade ago.

Hundreds of private spying organizations (or “para-CIAs”) have popped up in recent years to meet corporate demand, many of them staffed by former spies for agencies like the CIA and MI6. Other corporations, like Wal-Mart, have their own, in-house surveillance and security departments, staffed by former CIA, FBI, and State Department experts.