Last
month, an investigation by the New Yorker magazine alleged that
disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein used private detectives from
two different firms to spy on women he had allegedly sexually
harassed or assaulted. The New Yorker claimed that a private spy
posed as a women’s rights advocate to get actor Rose McGowan to
talk and secretly recorded the meetings. McGowan has accused
Weinstein of rape although Weinstein has “unequivocally denied”
all claims of non-consensual sex.
In
Britain, these sorts of methods have come to be associated with the
Metropolitan Police and their undercover police officers. Officers in
the Special Demonstration Squad and its successors pretended to be
animal rights activists and anti-capitalist demonstrators to
infiltrate activist organizations such as Greenpeace.
The
revelations that some of them had long relationships and even
children with protestors while living under assumed identities led to
the Pitchford Inquiry into undercover policing, which is ongoing.
However, some police say that there are far more questions to be
asked about the activities of private sector undercover operatives.
The
Bureau and Guardian were given inside information which shines a
light on this hidden world, when hundreds of pages of documents were
leaked to us from two corporate intelligence firms. The documents
cover the period 2003-11 and offer insight into how some operators in
a normally subterranean industry work.
The
subsequent investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau then
identified five large companies which have paid corporate
intelligence firms, often known as “private spies”. These firms
were paid to monitor campaigning groups that challenged their
businesses, the leaked documents reveal.
The
monitoring, which included the use of fake activists, who infiltrated
campaign groups to spy on them, intelligence gathering and obtaining
internal documents, was funded by household names including the Royal
Bank of Scotland, British Airways, Porsche, the utility company RWE
and the manufacturing company, Caterpillar.
The
targets of the monitoring spanned the grieving family of a young
protester crushed to death by a bulldozer to a range of environmental
campaigns, including even phone mast protesters.
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