8 ms·

ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

271 points by ohjeez 2y ago

gogaba 2y ago
[flagged]
sofixa 2y ago
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 2y ago
  And they knew about impacts of climate change in the 70s https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ 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.
  - immibis 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - christophilus 2y ago
      Would you? If you knew your actions would kill a billion people, you’d still do it for $1T?
      - immibis 2y ago
        Recent political events have proven that if I wouldn't, someone else would do it anyway, and then I'd have the disadvantage of not being them. The world is significantly more atomized than I'd like; you can either play the game that everyone else is playing, or forfeit by default.
    - Evil_Saint 2y ago
      No. No I wouldn't.
    - NegativeLatency 2y ago
      Can’t tell if this is satire but I most certainly would not, and I would hope that society would hold someone responsible for doing that.
    - artistic_regard 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - goatlover 2y ago
      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? Would the public have accepted a nuclear transition? For that matter, are there climate models predicting deaths on the order of 1 billion? Do they even make such predictions?
      - triceratops 2y ago
        > 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.
  - Bluestrike2 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
    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-century-ago.html https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen... 1: Popular Mechanics (Mar 1912): https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=PA341 https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=... 2: Nature (1882): https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0 https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0 3: Journal of Science (Apr 1896) https://doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846 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.pdf https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jeromechoo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Well, there is this Vietnamese billionaire https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68778636 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-controls https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8751267/iceland-capital-control...
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    >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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Can we change to the more reliable source, on which this article is based?https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack-for-hire-operation/?utm_source=www.vulnu.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=inside-exxonmobil-s-alleged-hack-for-hire-campaign-targeting-climate-activists https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massiv...
- pera 2y ago
  This is a more up-to-date article: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-investigated-over-hack-and-leak-environmentalist-emails-sources-2024-11-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-inves...
  - mikepavone 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  simply https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack-for-hire-operation/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massiv... works too
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
jl6 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled
  - jl6 2y ago
    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.
alsetmusic 2y ago
They bought a corrupt judge against this climate lawyer: https://www.freedonziger.com/ https://www.freedonziger.com/
foundry27 2y ago
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?
benbang 2y ago
[dead]
Chengdavid 2y ago
[dead]
williamsdavid 2y ago
[dead]

271 points by ohjeez 2y ago

[flagged]

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 2y ago
And they knew about impacts of climate change in the 70s https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ 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.
- immibis 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - christophilus 2y ago
    Would you? If you knew your actions would kill a billion people, you’d still do it for $1T?
    - immibis 2y ago
      Recent political events have proven that if I wouldn't, someone else would do it anyway, and then I'd have the disadvantage of not being them. The world is significantly more atomized than I'd like; you can either play the game that everyone else is playing, or forfeit by default.
  - Evil_Saint 2y ago
    No. No I wouldn't.
  - NegativeLatency 2y ago
    Can’t tell if this is satire but I most certainly would not, and I would hope that society would hold someone responsible for doing that.
  - artistic_regard 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - goatlover 2y ago
    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? Would the public have accepted a nuclear transition? For that matter, are there climate models predicting deaths on the order of 1 billion? Do they even make such predictions?
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > 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.
- Bluestrike2 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
  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-century-ago.html https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen... 1: Popular Mechanics (Mar 1912): https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=PA341 https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=... 2: Nature (1882): https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0 https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0 3: Journal of Science (Apr 1896) https://doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846 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.pdf https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jeromechoo 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Well, there is this Vietnamese billionaire https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68778636 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-controls https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8751267/iceland-capital-control...
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
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 2y ago
  >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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
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 2y ago

Can we change to the more reliable source, on which this article is based?https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack-for-hire-operation/?utm_source=www.vulnu.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=inside-exxonmobil-s-alleged-hack-for-hire-campaign-targeting-climate-activists https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massiv...

pera 2y ago
This is a more up-to-date article: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-investigated-over-hack-and-leak-environmentalist-emails-sources-2024-11-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-inves...
- mikepavone 2y ago
  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 2y ago
simply https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack-for-hire-operation/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massiv... works too
austin-cheney 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.

jl6 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled
- jl6 2y ago
  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.

alsetmusic 2y ago

They bought a corrupt judge against this climate lawyer: https://www.freedonziger.com/ https://www.freedonziger.com/

foundry27 2y ago

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?

benbang 2y ago

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Chengdavid 2y ago

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williamsdavid 2y ago

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