[HN Gopher] ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targetin...
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ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate
Activists
Author : ohjeez
Score : 237 points
Date : 2024-12-06 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vulnu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vulnu.com)
| sofixa wrote:
| This 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 away with tens of
| millions of dollars for presiding over the killing of people?
| Some egregious ones will be made a public example of (shot in New
| York), but this is not a solution to anything.
|
| * A corporate death penalty should be a thing. An ExxonMobil,
| after all the crap they've done (the Valdez tanker, this) is
| obviously rotten to the core. Nationalise, sell ot the pieces,
| and everyone who was employed there in any decision making
| capacity gets a stain on their CV like the people who worked at
| Enron or FTX or any other scummy company.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| 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.
| Bluestrike2 wrote:
| Or that they just weren't very good business people. Their
| understanding of climate change back then was good enough to
| have a damned decent roadmap for how things were going to
| play out over the next fifty years. They were capable of
| projecting what was going to happen, the likely regulatory
| changes that wold be needed to mitigate climate change, and
| how that would affect them.
|
| One would expect the average CEO would literally _kill_ for a
| roadmap of the future. They had it, and more. Exxon, ARCO,
| and others even made early R &D investments that helped
| pioneer terrestrial solar power, not to mention their
| extensive R&D capabilities more broadly. Sticking with the
| metaphor, they had the map _and_ some of the most important
| tools for the journey ahead.
|
| Fifty years were long enough even a financial moron could
| have developed a long-term transition plan that avoided
| stranded assets and massive losses. And they--and their
| people--weren't financial morons. Hell, much of their capital
| equipment and facilities investments had expected lifespans
| of a similar length. They had everything needed to create the
| mother of all soft landings.
|
| Hell, they could have engineered an outcome where they came
| out well ahead. Being able to rebrand yourself as _the
| company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world_
| buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for
| subsidies in Washington. We'd have paid them for it and
| _thanked them for the privilege_.
|
| It couldn't have been that much harder than convincing an
| entire political party that the problem didn't exist. Oil
| companies convincing the public they were shitty companies
| that needed to be reborn? If they focused on the dying part
| of rebirth, that wouldn't have been a very difficult sell
| even back then.
|
| Only someone who failed upwards could have been gifted a hand
| like that and still manage to choose the worst possible path
| for both the world and their own company. All they managed to
| do was delay the transition and make it more expensive for
| their company and the world.
| immibis wrote:
| > Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose
| to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a
| lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in
| Washington. We'd have paid them for it and thanked them for
| the privilege.
|
| This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the
| current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to
| save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will
| destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop
| them.
|
| When was the last time the government paid someone to save
| the world?
| reaperman wrote:
| 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.
|
| ----------
|
| 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/boo
| ks?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)
| jeromechoo wrote:
| I agree with you but the only time execs were held personally
| responsible that I can remember is Enron and that was on
| insider trading charges. There is so much plausible deniability
| and near unlimited appeals built into the system that it would
| take mountains of evidence and several hundred Lina Khans for
| an actually responsible executive to be tried for something
| like this.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Well, there is this Vietnamese billionaire
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68778636
|
| And Iceland put bankers in jail after the financial crisis
| https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8751267/iceland-capital-
| control...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
|
| Hardly. Enron and FTX fell because they were insolvent, not
| because a "corporate death penalty" was levied on them.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Purdue, then, although a "corporate death penalty" executed
| in response to non-government-induced insolvency still
| seems relevant to me. The biggest proximate effect of
| shutting down a company is that all its employees become
| unemployed, so it's not something you'd generally _want_ to
| do when there are other options on the table.
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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.
| gdjskshh wrote:
| CEOs can be held accountable, look at the former CEO of United
| Health.
|
| A functional legal system would be better, but as they say,
| nature finds a way.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Can we change to the more reliable source, on which this article
| is based?https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-
| massiv...
| pera wrote:
| This is a more up-to-date article:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-inves...
| mikepavone wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| simply https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-
| massiv... works too
| austin-cheney wrote:
| This citizenlab article is so much better. The article at the
| top reads like a conspiracy theory tabloid that loosely says
| one thing while simultaneously suggesting something else.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| My 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 could milk a decade of emails
| for anything that looked bad when taken out of context. Yikes.
|
| 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.
|
| I think it's possible we'll learn more soon about who hired our
| hackers, which is exciting! It was almost certainly a major
| American ISP, or the lobbying umbrella group they created. It's
| my optimistic read that blowback from this case has already
| eroded the practice of dirty tricks like these. More lobbyists
| and companies getting caught would strengthen the effect.
|
| Since I left Fight for the Future I've been working on a Signal
| alternative that feels more like Slack, for teams facing similar
| threats. Hopefully something comes of that too!
| tmpz22 wrote:
| 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
| holmesworcester wrote:
| 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 model
| is real too. That also happened to us because of some _other_
| dirty tricks by ISPs in the same campaign! Fake FCC
| submissions opposing net neutrality were being created with
| blatantly stolen user data; like, not people being tricked
| into singing a petition but just straight up identity theft.
| We documented all of this and pitched some state AGs on
| looking into it. New York did, which was awesome, but they
| ended up subpoenaing everyone including us! We were psyched
| about this overall of course since it was our idea, and they
| did end up finding out who did it which was awesome
| (Broadband for America, the umbrella lobbying group for the
| telcos) but it was a huge amount of work to comply with the
| subpoena. The retention limits reduced that burden. Another
| reason to have them!
|
| I would also say that, if you do create an airgapped archive
| and store it in an appropriately paranoid way, you are likely
| to never ever bother to dig it out of storage before the SSD
| melts into uselessness. You'll miss the ocassional old email
| but not enough to go digging for it.
| lukan wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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?"
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Exactly.
| Teever wrote:
| Surely there's a middle ground for these things.
|
| The value in old data isn't just in pulling up a single
| piece of information like a magician pulls a rabbit out of
| their hat, it's tremendously useful for looking back and
| seeing how an organization and its methodology has changed
| and how that information can be applied to future project.
| michaelt wrote:
| I see it as less about pulling up a single piece of
| information
|
| and more that a tool that every employee uses a dozen
| times a day
|
| produces much more value than the same tool if it's used
| only by the big boss, and only once or twice a year as
| it's so inconvenient to use
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > 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?
| holmesworcester wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Yikes.
|
| That's a common response these days and while I empathize, I
| think it's wrong. The right response IMHO is, essentially,
| 'fuck them; they can't stop us'.
|
| A Soviet dissident (I don't recall the name atm) advised not
| talking about your arrest, torture, detention - the horrors,
| the fear, etc. That's what the oppressors want you to do, to
| spread fear and intimidation to all the people they didn't
| arrest; that's half the point of their actions - they don't
| have the resources to arrest everyone. If you don't talk about
| it, it's a forgotten moment of one small point in time and
| space. It's the echoes of it, of people repeating the story,
| that spread across orders of magnitude more time and space.
| Don't spread it around and you've disarmed your oppressors.
|
| Also, look at contemporary political movements: The
| overwhelmingly successful one is barely slowed by attacks,
| never expresses any fear or intimidation, is always on the
| offensive. The flailing one is regularly talking about its
| terror, despair, whether or not there is any hope at all, and
| quitting.
|
| There's a time and place to talk about your fears - privately,
| to your trusted confidants (and not to those who depend on you
| for leadership). Everyone has them; that's fine. Out in public
| is not the place; that's where you show that you can manage
| your fears and are resolute, undeterred, unshaken. Think of
| great leaders - Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, etc. - who ever
| said 'Yikes'? On social media, we all are leaders.
| jl6 wrote:
| If proven, this should be harshly punishable under existing
| aiding and abetting laws.
|
| On the underlying matter of oil companies being responsible for
| climate change... the law and the morality is far less clear. We
| are essentially all complicit.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| > 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 the '90s actively
| engaged in PR and misinformation campaigns to delay action on
| climate change. They have been incredibly successful at this
| and the US has no policies to limit fossil gas extraction or
| burning.
|
| [1] https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled
| jl6 wrote:
| 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 still we burn it anyway.
|
| A few thousand greedy, profiteering, unscrupulous oil bosses
| would not have gotten away with doing it had there not been a
| few _billion_ consumers paying them to do it. At some point,
| the blame must also be treated as systemic.
|
| What happens in the scenario where Exxon is found guilty and
| given the corporate death penalty that some have asked for?
| Their assets would be confiscated and passed to some new
| owner. The government maybe? Whoever gets them, will they
| shut them down? No, they'll keep those wells pumping, under
| some new brand name, because the demand for oil is systemic.
|
| If Exxon is culpable for paying a hacker to commit a crime on
| their behalf, then the population at large are culpable of
| paying Exxon to pump oil on our behalf.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| And what is the replacement to power and heat and cool
| people if those companies were shuttered?
| Wololooo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They should pay, they knew what they were selling and were
| misleading people now we are in a critical situation
| because of their actions. Individuals can do only so much
| and most of the people don't even really grasp and
| understand the implications of their actions, but gets
| appalled when they do...
|
| You can turn the problem in all directions, the
| manipulation of public opinion to freeze any attempt at
| reversing climate change is actually a crime against
| humanity...
| triceratops wrote:
| I'd have much more sympathy for this point of view if Exxon
| and co had loudly shouted about the dangers of climate
| change from the rooftops and the public at large _still
| ignored them_.
|
| They did the opposite of that, in fact, and continue to do.
| So I have no sympathy for any oil companies if they ever
| face any punishment. A vanishingly unlikely prospect by the
| way.
| gruez wrote:
| >The government maybe? Whoever gets them, will they shut
| them down? No, they'll keep those wells pumping, under some
| new brand name, because the demand for oil is systemic.
|
| Not to mention a bunch of the biggest oil companies are
| already government owned:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_c
| o...
|
| top companies in the list are Sinopec, China National
| Petroleum Corporation, and Saudi Aramco, all state owned.
| HowardStark wrote:
| 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_Commer
| ce_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_crimin
| al_pr...
| maeil wrote:
| > We are essentially all complicit
|
| Empty statement that shirks responsibility when some are
| complicit orders of magnitudes more than others. Even among
| those not directly involved in fossil fuel industries. This
| matters. In Nazi Germany, someone working at a screw factory,
| some of whose screws ended up in military devices, was also
| complicit. Yet the morality is clear - they weren't sent to
| Nuremberg whereas others were, for good reason. Even though the
| war would have been near impossible with no screws available.
| jl6 wrote:
| Where do you think Exxon sits on the giving-orders to just-
| following-orders to just-making-screws spectrum? And where do
| people buying oil products sit?
| Hizonner wrote:
| > If proven, this should be harshly punishable under existing
| aiding and abetting laws.
|
| Convenient how the elements of the offenses in the "existing
| laws" are such that it's trivial for any non-idiot to structure
| things so their conduct _can 't_ be proven to meet them, eh?
| Sort of like Al Capone.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| They bought a corrupt judge against this climate lawyer:
|
| https://www.freedonziger.com/
| foundry27 wrote:
| 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?
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