how to spot an infiltrator

Since late summer 2007, an employee of a corporate espionage agency has been trying to infiltrate Plane Stupid. Toby Kendall, who works for C2i International, a "special risk management" firm, thought he was undercover in our London group, gathering information on what we're up to. Instead we've been feeding the 'revenge movie' obssesed mole false information, which he's been reporting to the aviation industry for months.

After last year's Camp for Climate Action new activists began turning up to London Plane Stupid meetings. Most were perfectly normal people angry at the expansion of Heathrow airport. But one newbie didn't fit in with the rest - Ken Tobias, an Oxford graduate who claimed to have just got back from China. Something about him just wasn't right.

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We carried out a quick background check. Although Ken lived in London, he wasn't on the electoral register, nor on the records of the rugby team he claimed to have played for. We fed him false information about a fake action and were told by an industry insider two days later that security at airports around the country had been alerted. The ludicrous idea of a Climate Camp in Hyde Park soon ended up in the papers, as did the content and locations of meetings he'd attended.

We had hit a dead end. We couldn't identify or find any record of him, so three of us met Ken in a Japanese restaurant and asked him if he was a spy. He denied everything, claiming that he'd lost his wallet and had no photo ID. We secretly recorded the meeting and took a photo of him leaving to show other groups - but still had no concrete evidence of who he was working for.

Then came the a breakthrough - a contact at Oxford University recognised a photo we'd taken. Our spy wasn't called 'Ken Tobias', but Toby Kendall - an Oriental Studies student from Wadham College. A quick google search revealed a Bebo page with a photo. Snap! It also took us to Linked In, a high-flying corporate networking site, where 'Ken' claimed to be an analyst at C2i International, working in "Security and Investigations".

fucking wicked

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

The firm has not shied away from buying distressed financial assets since the meltdown of Carlyle Capital, the highly leveraged, publicly traded European affiliate that collapsed last month after it defaulted on $21.7 billion in assets. Carlyle Capital got squeezed when the value of its mortgage-backed securities fell, prompting Carlyle's lenders to demand more cash to compensate.