Way back during the battle during net neutrality, you might recall all the sleazy shit telecom giants did to tip the scales in their favor.
Like making up dead and fake people to stuff regulatory websites with phony support for telecom giants. Or creating fake consumer groups to oppose net neutrality. Or hiring dodgy companies to hack the phones of activists to get an inside look at their strategic planning. Or bribing existing civil rights or community groups to publicly undermine the best interests of their constituents.
Most of this stuff has been memory holed, and curiously never pops up when the press discusses the history of the fight over net neutrality. But one of the groups Verizon and AT&T used for some of these shenanigans was a prominent lobbying firm known as the DCI Group. DCI Group is now under federal investigation for helping hack into the phones of environmental activists:
“The scheme allegedly began in late 2015, when U.S. authorities contend that the names of the hacking targets were compiled by the DCI Group, a public affairs and lobbying company working for Exxon at the time, one of the sources said. DCI provided the names to an Israeli private detective, who then outsourced the hacking, according to the source.
In an effort to push a narrative that Exxon was the target of a political vendetta aimed at destroying its business, some of the stolen material was subsequently leaked to the media by DCI, Reuters determined. The Federal Bureau of Investigation found that DCI shared the information with Exxon before leaking it, the source said.”
Lovely. The hacked data also gave Exxon lawyers inside insight into environmental activist legal strategies, helping them prepare for lawsuits over the company’s role in knowingly destroying a habitable planet.
Vice had previously tethered the DCI Group to the fake and “astroturfed” support for dismantling FCC net neutrality protections. Similar firms had previously targeted activism orgs like Fight For The Future and Free Press (the consumer group, not the Bari Weiss right wing propaganda effort) with phishing attacks.
Everybody involved in this is now playing stupid (Exxon claims it stopped using the DCI Group sometime around 2020), but this stuff is pretty common among K Street lobbying firms. Usually the folks involved are smart enough to never put any of it in writing, but once you involve too many people in your grand conspiracies to fuck the planet or the U.S. public, you never know what can happen.
I know for a fact that this investigation is likely only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this kind of behavior by lobbying firms, who increasingly offer a broader and broader array of dodgy services for corporations unburdened by ethics. The story provides some useful insight into why already outspent and outnumbered consumer groups and activists are routinely facing steep uphill climbs.
Ultimately the key players in this saga might face some accountability, but companies like DCI Group will likely be a name change, maybe a light fine, and a few months of marketing away from the press and public forgetting they were ever involved. Assuming the case proceeds at all under Trump 2.0.
