speaking of hackers, Monsanto, and biotech . . . .

Corporate
Phantoms

By George
Monbiot

Tony Blair's speech to the Royal
Society last Thursday was a wonderful
jumble of misconceptions and logical
elisions. He managed to confuse
science with its technological
products. GM crops are no more "science"
than cars, computers or washing
machines, and those opposing them
are no more "anti-science" than people
who don't like the Millennium
Dome are "anti-architecture".

He suggested that in the poor world
people welcome genetic
engineering. It was unfortunate that
the example he chose was the
biotech industry in Bangalore in
south-west India. Bangalore happens
to be the centre of the world's most
effective protests against GM crops,
the capital of a state in which
anti-GM campaigners outnumber those in
the UK by 1,000 to one. Like most
biotech enthusiasts, he ignored the
key concern of the activists: the
corporate takeover of the food chain,
and its devastating consequences for
food security.

But it would be wrong to blame Blair
alone for these misconstructions.
The prime minister was simply
repeating a suite of arguments
formulated elsewhere. Over the past
month, activists have slowly been
discovering where that "elsewhere" may
be.

Two weeks ago, this column showed how
the Bivings Group, a PR
company contracted to Monsanto, had
invented fake citizens to post
messages on internet listservers.
These phantoms had launched a
campaign to force Nature magazine to
retract a paper it had published,
alleging that native corn in Mexico
had been contaminated with GM
pollen. But this, it now seems, is
just one of hundreds of critical
interventions with which PR companies
hired by big business have
secretly guided the biotech debate
over the past few years.

While I was writing the last piece,
Bivings sent me an email fiercely
denying that it had anything to do
with the fake correspondents "Mary
Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", who
started the smear campaign

checked the email's technical
properties. They contained the
identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com". The
message came from the same computer
terminal that "Mary Murphy"
has used.

New research coordinated by the
campaigner Jonathan Matthews
appears to have unmasked the fake
persuaders: "Mary Murphy" is
being posted by a Bivings web
designer, writing from both the office
and his home computer in Hyattsville,
Maryland; while "Andura
Smetacek" appears to be the company's
chief internet marketer.

Not long ago, the website slashdot.com
organised a competition for
hackers: if they could successfully
break into a particular server, they
got to keep it. Several experienced
hackers tested their skills. One of
them was one using a computer
identified as bw6.bivwood.com.

Though someone in the Bivings office
appears to possess hacking
skills, there is no evidence that
Bivings has ever made use of them.

But other biotech lobbyists do appear
to have launched hacker attacks.
Just before the paper in Nature was
publicly challenged, the server
hosting the accounts used by its
authors was disabled by a particularly
effective attack which crippled their
capacity to fight back. The culprit
has yet to be identified.

Bivings is the secret author of
several of the websites and bogus
citizens' movements which have been
coordinating campaigns against
environmentalists. One is a fake
scientific institute called the "Centre
for Food and Agricultural Research".

Bivings has also set up the "Alliance
for Environmental Technology", a
chlorine industry lobby group. Most
importantly, Bivings appears to be
connected with AgBioWorld, the genuine
website run by CS Prakash, a
plant geneticist at Tuskegee
University, Alabama.

AgBioWorld is perhaps the most
influential biotech site on the web.
Every day it carries new postings
about how GM crops will feed the world,
new denunciations of the science which
casts doubt on them and new
attacks on environmentalists. It was
here that the fake persuaders
invented by Bivings launched their
assault on the Nature paper.

AgBioWorld then drew up a petition to
have the paper retracted.

Prakash claims to have no links with
Bivings but, as the previous article
showed, an error message on his site
suggests that it is or was using
the main server of the Bivings Group.
Jonathan Matthews, who found
the message, commissioned a full
technical audit of AgBioWorld. His
web expert has now found 11
distinctive technical fingerprints shared by
AgBioWorld and Bivings's Alliance for
Environmental Technology site.

The sites appear, he concludes, to
have been created by the same
programmer.

Though he lives and works in the
United States, CS Prakash claims to
represent the people of the third
world. But he set up AgBioWorld with
Greg Conko of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the far-right
libertarian lobby group funded by such
companies as Philip Morris,
Pfizer and Dow Chemical.

Conko has collaborated with Matthew
Metz, one of the authors of the
scientific letters to Nature seeking
to demolish the maize paper, to
produce a highly partisan guide to
biotechnology on the AgBioWorld
site.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute
boasts that it "played a key role in
the creation" of a petition of
scientists supporting biotech (ostensibly to
feed the third world) launched by
Prakash. Unaware that it had been
devised by a corporate lobby group,
3,000 scientists, three Nobel
laureates among them, signed up.

Bivings is just one of several public
relations agencies secretly building
a parallel world on the web. Another
US company, Berman & Co, runs a
fake public interest site called
ActivistCash.com, which seeks to
persuade the foundations giving money
to campaigners to desist.

Berman also runs the "Centre for
Consumer Freedom", which looks like
a citizens' group but lobbies against
smoking bans, alcohol restrictions
and health warnings on behalf of
tobacco, drinks and fast food
companies. The marketing firm Nichols
Dezenhall set up a site called
StopEcoViolence, another "citizens'
initiative", demonising activists.

In March, Nichols Dezenhall linked up
with Prakash's collaborator, the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, to
sponsor a conference for journalists
and corporate executives on
"eco-extremism".

What is fascinating about these
websites, fake groups and phantom
citizens is that they have either
smelted or honed all the key weapons
currently used by the world's biotech
enthusiasts: the conflation of
activists with terrorists, the
attempts to undermine hostile research, the
ever more nuanced claims that those
who resist GM crops are
anti-science and opposed to the
interests of the poor.

The hatred directed at activists over
the past few years is, in other
words, nothing of the kind. We have
been confronted, in truth, by the
crafted response of an industry
without emotional attachment.

Tony Blair was correct when he
observed on Thursday that "there is only
a small band of people... who
genuinely want to stifle informed
debate". But he was wrong to identify
this small group as those
opposed to GM crops. Though he didn't
know it, the people seeking to
stifle the debate are the ones who
wrote his speech; not in the days
before he delivered it, but in the
years in which the arguments he used
were incubated.