“Burger With a Side of Spies” -Green is the New Red

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“Burger With a Side of Spies” Posted: 08 May 2008 03:33 PM CDT Eric Schlosser has a great oped in The New York Times about how Burger King hired a sketchy private security firm to spy on non-violent activists. WHILE the Patriot Act has raised fears about government spying on ordinary citizens, the growing threat to civil liberties posed by corporate spying has received much less attention. During the late 1990s, a private security firm spied on Greenpeace and other environmental groups, examining activists’ phone records and even sending undercover agents to infiltrate the groups, according to an article in Mother Jones. In 2006 Hewlett-Packard was caught spying on

journalists. Last year Wal-Mart apologized for improperly recording conversations with a New York Times reporter. And now it turns out that the Burger King Corporation, home of the Whopper, hired a private security firm to spy on the Student/Farmworker Alliance, a group of idealistic college students trying to improve the lives of migrants in Florida. There are some striking similarities between the FBI’s use of “Anna” to infiltrate and influence environmental activists, and Burger King’s use of spies to infiltrate activist groups. Perhaps the most important difference, though, is that I would argue corporate-sponsored surveillance has even fewer oversights than government-sponsored surveillance (which, as Schlosser notes, has already been expanded considerably).

What’s also striking is the rhetoric being used against mainstream groups like the Student/Farmworker Alliance. Burger King told Schlosser that it had used undercover investigative firms “in order to prevent acts of violence.” Of course, there’s absolutely no indication that any acts of violence were likely, but to the FBI–and now, corporations–the specter of violence and terrorism is enough to justify any civil liberties violation. (Sound familiar?) One of the most chilling lines in Schlosser’s piece, and I encourage you to read the entire thing, is this quote from a PR flak, defending Burger King’s actions. It sounds like some kind of nationalistic defend-the-homeland rhetoric, until you realize it’s about Burger King: “It is both the

corporation’s right and duty,” a company spokesman later wrote in an e-mail message to me, “to protect its employees and assets from potential harm.” Norwegian Culture Jamming Posted: 08 May 2008 12:18 PM CDT I got a kick out of how this Norwegian enviro/animal/anarchist group took a scare-mongering ad campaign, used to label activists as “terrorists” in major media outlets, and spun it into activist propaganda. [uPDATE: From a comment on this blog post, I learned that this flier was actually created by the UK chapter of the group and then

translated into many languages. I swapped out the image for the English version, because I think it gives a better idea of how the original ad was turned on its head. Thanks for clarifying!] Click here for the original. Nelson Mandela on Terrorist Watchlist Posted: 08 May

2008 11:20 AM CDT Like many environmental and animal rights advocates, even Nelson Mandela is on a “terrorist watchlist.” Unlike grassroots activists, though, it looks politicians are trying to get him removed. I’ve seen quite a few blog posts on this, where the author is outraged that a “freedom fighter” like Nelson Mandela is on a terrorist watchlist. His placement on the list is seen as a bureaucratic error, or leftover hypocrisy from the Reagan

administration, but that misses the point. I think what we need to take away from examples like this is that there is no concrete definition of “terrorist.” It’s a fluid term, meant to demonize the enemy of the hour. At the time, Mandela was demonized as both a communist and a terrorist. In the early 60s, he was the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, in the fight against apartheid. He coordinated property destruction and sabotage against government targets, and has admitted that civilians were often victims in these attacks (for more, see his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom). The Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, and similar groups are labeled the “number one domestic terrorist

threat” by the United States today, yet they haven’t harmed anyone. If Mandela can go from guerrilla fighter to Nobel peace prize winner in a few decades, I wonder what folks will be calling “eco-terrorists” in 2050. In history books, the only difference between a “terrorist” and a “freedom fighter” is that the “terrorist” lost. http://pets.Fortheanimals7/join http://www.myspace.com/fortheanimals7