Green Eyes: Corporate Surveillance of Environmental Activists

Abstract

Author of Secret Maneuvers in the Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists (2012), Eveline Lubbers has brought attention to a new field of research called activist intelligence and covert strategy which focuses on corporate involvement in political policing and spying. In her research, she has uncovered the furtive methods of corporations to avoid reputational harm and has proposed that corporate intelligence gathering has shifted from being defensive to proactive. This shift has sparked the need for research on the ways in which corporations gather information from environmental groups and the drivers of such conduct. As a relatively new field, the literature on this particular topic is minimal. This research aims to identify which aspects of this topic remain unexplored, pose new questions to guide future research, and to provide an overview of the different features of environmental corporate surveillance. Since the literature on this subject is still in its early phases, it’s important to provide a general but broad overview of the various aspects of corporate intelligence. This review will probe the legal conception of privacy which will be explored in the context of surveillance, the drivers of this surveillance, the ways in which surveillance is carried out, and its connection to social media. Proceeding an introduction to the literature, it is important to define central terms and offer guiding questions for the topics that will be discussed. How do we as a society understand privacy in both legal and colloquial terms? How do those notions affect the interpretation of my findings? Privacy is a term that is difficult to properly define and operationalize. Historically, privacy has been viewed in two competing aspects: as a positive or negative right (Waldman, 2018). Privacy as a positive right would constitute a more proactive outlook that grants us the freedom to “make choices, to formulate ideas beyond the prying eyes of others, or to realize