Feel free to assemble? To associate with whatever activist group supports a cause near and dear to your heart? To sound off in your blog about corporate greed, evil oil cartels, and genetically modified food? Prepare to be boarded! Ex-CIA agents may steal the subscription lists of your favorite magazines, get your name and address and go through your trash. Is the U.S. Government blatantly breaking the law by invading our privacy yet again? No, this time it’s Corporate America hiring the government’s discarded spooks to trample our rights as citizens.

James Ridgeway at Mother Jones broke the story. A corporate spying outfit staffed by ex-Secret Service, ex-CIA, and ex-police personnel — Beckett Brown International, a/k/a S2i (”BBI”) — has been utilized by corporations like Halliburton, Wal-Mart, even the Carlyle Group (what a boon to conspiracy theorists!) to spy on their worst enemy: activist America. So far, Greenpeace and other environmental groups have been targeted; who knows which progressive organizations will be next? Air America? The Huffington Post? The Interfaith Alliance? After all, if Halliburton and Wal-mart can hire BBI to go after Greenpeace, what’s to stop Pat Robertson or John Hagee from hiring such a firm to go through the trash at the Interfaith Alliance or steal the membership lists of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, so they can start harrassing you or me?

“The company paid private spies to collect phone records and other private information on prominent activists, to root through dumpsters and infiltrate the staffs of environmental organizations,” says the FreePress. Mother Jones noted that “[R]ecords include[d] internal and confidential financial reports of a local bank that had been the subject of a takeover.” One of the firms BBI targeted suffered a break-in that included the theft of laptops and file boxes.

The unethical, immoral propietors of BBI bascially killed the company while snapping at each other, but they have since been snapped up by other security firms and are presumbably still doing essentially the same illegal things. And let us not be fooled by the fact that corporate espionage is pervasive, even expected — it is still illegal. Did BBI have limits, ops that were too black even for them? “On the advice of Cannistraro and Bresett, BBI turned down a $1 million job with the Church of Scientology, according to Dodd.” So I guess even they have their limits. Thank Xenu for small favors.

So if you’re ever daring enough to have an independent thought for yourself and <shudder> actually share it with another human being, congratulations — apparently you have just invited corporate America to go dumpster-diving in your organization’s parking lot, or to go on a panty raid in your daughter’s dorm. Meet the love of your life at your local ACLU meeting? Watch out — he may be an ex-spook assigned to infiltrate. Start campaining for net neutrality? Comcast has got your number, baby! Your credit card number, your pin number, your social security number…. Invested in that paper shredder for your mail yet?

 BB,

Vivienne

Tags: Current Events, Morals, Vivienne D'Avalon //