Like other comments mentioned, this is just an AI-generated rehash of the underlying reporting that actually took place on this issue (see the “it isn't just X - it’s Y” and “- Bold Point Title: Short point contents”). Is there any way to change this link?
ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#42This kind of actions (alongside Chevron's treatment of Danziger for his work against their pollution in Ecuador) is why: * high level executives must have personal responsibility. They get paid the big bucks, they should get all the responsibility that comes with it. Jail a few of the egregious human rights abusers/negligent killers, and this kind of thing will be taken seriously. Why does a Muillenburg get to walk a…
This seems like a confused analysis. As Enron and FTX both show well, personal criminal responsibility for high level executives and a "corporate death penalty" already exist and get used when circumstances warrant. The decision to use them is just made through a structured system of laws and penalties, rather than a subjective sense of which executives you feel are bad.
> As Enron and FTX both show well, personal criminal responsibility for high level executives and a "corporate death penalty" already exist and get used when circumstances warrant
Really not comparable. Enron and FTX were both insolvent due to Ponzi scheme-esque levels of fraud by their executives. The executives were sued for misleading investors and outright fraud, including securities fraud.
Boeing killing people with negligence, or Chevron poisoning millions through negligence, resulted in nothing. Personal responsibility for executives only exists for defrauding investors or tax authorities, which is wildly insufficient. Corporate death penalty only exists if the company is literally insolvent, and even them it might get rescued (GM), which is wildly insufficient.
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason you can’t dump an air gapped archive and put it on a physical device in a deposit box? Best of both worlds should you truly need to access it. Or are depositions also a concern? Funny enough I just did a business law presentation on Comcast Corp v FCC (2010). Thanks for doing what you could for Net Neutrality
It was a pleasure! We lost nominally in the end (except in California and outside the US) but we built enough awareness to give the ISPs a fear that blatant violations would rock the boat and lead to worse outcomes for them, like more state laws or tougher agency rules when Democrats regained power. I do regret not pushing harder for federal legislation though! On airgapped email archives, yes, the subpoena threat mo…
If you really don't need old email, then don't bother, but for the chance that you do need them sometimes, but don't want to store everything in an internet connected place - it would be an option setting up a old laptop for this(maybe with Thunderbird), where you can remove the wifi chip for this air gapped use case. (In most older laptops they are easy to remove and not soldered on.)
Then regulary exporting all the needed files, either just copy them with a USB stick and more secure would be burning CD-R's for each data transfer. And it likely helps having an exotic linux system on the laptop, so a windows USB worm won't replicate there if you use the pragmatic USB data transfer variant.
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We are essentially all complicit. With statements like these it’s important to take into account proportionality and scale. Whereas a member of the public may have been aware of climate change after James Hanson’s congressional testimony in 1988, ExxonMobil had its own climate research division in the ‘70s and knew about the dangers of climate change at-least ten years prior [1]. They sat on these findings and in t…
I am aware, and that behavior is despicable, but I still don’t believe that this puts all the responsibility for climate change on oil companies generally or Exxon specifically. The public at large have known for centuries that burning fossil fuels creates locally systemically significant pollution, and we do it anyway. We have known for decades now that it creates globally systemically significant pollution, and sti…
First: I appreciate the overall tone of your comment. It's a polarizing subject, and I feel this is very much in good faith.
I think there's two important points you made that I'd like to address:
1. Failures to apply meaningful penalties / punishment to transnational corporations
2. Individual culpability for oil consumption
To start, I think it's worth looking at how punishments for corporate wrongdoings might look in a brighter world. Not having faith in the system is _completely_ understandable, and I think it can be easy to forget what it is we _do_ want after being shown what we _don't_ want over and over.
Off-the-cuff, I envision something like the forced closure and seizure of all Exxon assets by the federal government. These assets could be sold off to pay for the settlements of the multiple class-action lawsuits against Exxon focused on public health and environmental wrongdoing[1][2]. I'd love to see criminal charges for those at the top
There are past examples of companies doing wrong and being forced to close "with prejudice", or not being allowed to restructure into another entity with a different name. A famous example is the forced closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)[3]. Another is Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which was restructured into a public beneficiary trust that would administer payouts to "opioid creditors" or people who suffered from the opioid epidemic[4]. And hearteningly, there are also examples of executives facing jail time. Enron[5] is the most famous example, and though there are critiques that it wasn't far enough, Skilling was a fall guy, etc., it serves as a good reminder that even within our system today, there is already precedent. Theranos is another example of criminal proceedings against executives[6].
All this is to emphasize that though pessimism is understandable, optimism can help us push the system in the right direction, and doesn't have to mean having all the answers.
Now we can look at individual culpability.
I wanted to look at this point second because I think it becomes more approachable once we've seen what widespread change can look like. I don't have citations, or evidence to bring here. Just my own experience. I find it much easier to start taking personal responsibility when I know that there is some effort being made to offer me a mode of life where I don't induce second order demand for oil (i.e. I need to buy groceries, those groceries may come packaged in plastic). I find it much easier to take a freezing half-mile walk to the store when I see the companies inducing oil demand many orders of magnitude beyond what I'll ever use or need begin to face consequences.
[1] https://www.legaldive.com/news/816m-exxonmobil-verdict-is-la...
[2] https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2022/12/02/muni...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_In...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma#Bankruptcy
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Enron
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos#Civil_and_criminal_pr...
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#45My organization Fight for the Future was targeted by the same hacking-for-hire operation while working on net neutrality protections. It was really interesting because at the time the conclusion of our security consultants was that the attack was just random commercially-motivated prospecting. Then the Citizen Lab Dark Basin report came out years later and it was clear they were after our internal comms, so they coul…
> After the attack we put a 3 month retention limit on most emails and messages. I recommend this to anyone doing sensitive work! You miss the old emails sometimes but it's worth it.
How are pro-delete policies like these impacted by the discovery-process in law? Or even Sarbanes-Oxley?
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason you can’t dump an air gapped archive and put it on a physical device in a deposit box? Best of both worlds should you truly need to access it. Or are depositions also a concern? Funny enough I just did a business law presentation on Comcast Corp v FCC (2010). Thanks for doing what you could for Net Neutrality
Nah, the value of having access to 3-month-old e-mails is that they're indexed in gmail, so if someone asks how much we paid for that widget 18 months ago you can get the original quotes in an instant. Whereas if the data is in a bank vault, you ask the same question and the reply is "IDK, I think it was about $50-100?"
Exactly.
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#47My organization Fight for the Future was targeted by the same hacking-for-hire operation while working on net neutrality protections. It was really interesting because at the time the conclusion of our security consultants was that the attack was just random commercially-motivated prospecting. Then the Citizen Lab Dark Basin report came out years later and it was clear they were after our internal comms, so they coul…
> After the attack we put a 3 month retention limit on most emails and messages. I recommend this to anyone doing sensitive work! You miss the old emails sometimes but it's worth it. How are pro-delete policies like these impacted by the discovery-process in law? Or even Sarbanes-Oxley?
Great question. IANAL but my understanding is that outside of some specific regulatory requirements in specific industries you're free to put these policies in place as long as you do it before you have any expectation that you're going to be sued.
That's another reason to bite the bullet and put these policies in place now: once you actually have a specific fear of being sued it's maybe too late, because at that point changes to your retention policy could be construed as interfering with the legal process.
You can also have your policy exempt certain categories of documents (like financial records) and that's okay too as long as you're consistent about it.
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#48This kind of actions (alongside Chevron's treatment of Danziger for his work against their pollution in Ecuador) is why: * high level executives must have personal responsibility. They get paid the big bucks, they should get all the responsibility that comes with it. Jail a few of the egregious human rights abusers/negligent killers, and this kind of thing will be taken seriously. Why does a Muillenburg get to walk a…
And they knew about impacts of climate change in the 70s https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... Reminds me of how I see executives manage to “fail upward”, where it’s just so clear the people pulling the strings don’t give a darn about workers or the population at large.
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1]
It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2].
The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4].
More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade before the last founding father of the United States died.
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0: The Rodney and Otamatea Times (Aug 1912) https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...
1: Popular Mechanics (Mar 1912): https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=...
2: Nature (1882): https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0
3: Journal of Science (Apr 1896) https://doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#49Can we change to the more reliable source, on which this article is based? https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massiv...
This is a more up-to-date article: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-inves...
In particular, it has reporting on the chain back to Exxon and that the FBI is investigating the PR firm involved. The original CitizenLab article is more thorough, but only identifies the hack-for-hire group and the Indian company it operates out of.
Re: ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you're a sociopath. But I also don't buy the framing that oil companies are murdering people when they're providing the energy society needs. Fossil fuels have largely powered the modern world. That doesn't excuse covering up the science and the need to transition either. But there's tradeoffs and nuance to all this. Was solar and battery technology good enough in the 70s and 80s to start transitioning then?…
> That doesn't excuse covering up the science and the need to transition either That's what we're calling sociopathic behavior. Not drilling oil and gas.
I'd call the socipathic behavior trading a billion lives for a trillion dollars, but that's just something the parent came up with. What's the actual tradeoff, what sort of transition could have happened by now, to what extent was the rest of the scientific community aware of greenhouse gases, would a lot more nuclear power plants being built have been seen as better by the public?