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- [00:08]
Zach Goldbaum
In 2011, John Scott Railton, or JSR, was a grad student at UCLA working on his dissertation about climate change impacts in West Africa. Then the Arab Spring broke out, and it changed the trajectory of his life.
- [00:24]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
I looked for a way to engage and ultimately found a way to support by ensuring that people's voices got out. During the Egyptian Internet shutdown, to circumvent.
- [00:38]
Zach Goldbaum
The Internet blackout, JSR created a Twitter account and began broadcasting updates on behalf of Egyptian protesters. He kept at it as the Arab Spring spread to Libya and the country fell into civil war.
- [00:51]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
Somewhere in that process, I began to see what I felt really strong signs that the people I was talking to were getting hacked, probably by the Libyan government.
- [01:02]
Zach Goldbaum
In just a matter of years, social media had evolved from a place where you could rate how hot your classmates are to a tool that could foster democratic movements, to a weapon used by bad actors to repress or attack their enemies.
- [01:15]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
And it kind of blew my mind because I thought, okay, well, here technology has been this mechanism to get voices out to the world. It's undone a historic asymmetry between people and their governments and the ability to communicate. But here it is. At the same time, we still have risk, and governments are now trying to claw their way back. I felt like I was looking at a terrible thing that was coming for the future.
- [01:43]
Zach Goldbaum
JSR abandoned what he'd been studying for his PhD and decided to make this fight for a free and open Internet and his life's work.
- [01:51]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
And today, I'm a researcher at this place called the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and I lead our investigations into different kinds of threats against what we call civil society. And specifically, we're interested in things like hacking, phishing, disinformation, other sketchy stuff that targets journalists, truth tellers, dissidents, opposition politicians around the world.
- [02:19]
Zach Goldbaum
And that's how, in 2017, JSR found himself embarking on a strange new investigation with international implications.
- [02:28]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
So, like any good investigation, this one begins almost by accident. A journalist working on financial reporting got in touch with us and was like, hey, I think my email may be being targeted by somebody trying to take over my account.
- [02:46]
Zach Goldbaum
This financial journalist was receiving phishing emails, trying to scam him into clicking a link that would give the hackers access to his information. And early in the investigation, JSR and his colleagues stumbled on a mistake that the hackers had made. Suddenly, JSR could see not just the phishing links they'd sent to this one journalist, but all of the bogus links and fake websites. The operation had registered and all the people they were sent to.
- [03:14]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
And it was kind of a brain expanding moment because usually the investigations that we do, we may be working with a handful of targets, but in this case the scale was just enormous. And we began to get the sense that we were looking at, like a mercenary hacking operation.
- [03:29]
Zach Goldbaum
A mercenary hacking operation, as in a group of cybercriminals available for hire. That also means that JSR wasn't looking at a single victim, but a whole assortment of them. Then one cluster caught his eye. A bunch of recognizable environmental organizations and climate activists. And as JSR would later learn, they all had one thing in common. They were part of a campaign to go after one of the most powerful and profitable companies in the world. Exxon Mobil. From wondery. I'm zach goldbaum, and this is lawless planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.
- [04:25]
Kurt Davies
When I started getting that second wave of emails and they were being sent from colleagues, I'm like, oh my God, they have my contact list. There's no way for them to know that I know that guy unless they're already in my compute.
- [04:47]
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- [05:39]
Zach Goldbaum
On the Internet, it is getting harder and harder to know what's real and who to trust. Almost every day, I get messages saying I owe money to some mysterious creditor. Texts begging me for $5 to fight fascism, or emails about where to meet singles in my area, which, in the middle of a male loneliness epidemic, are kind of hard to ignore. We are living through an age of scams. And this issue isn't just about some dude firing off phishing emails from his mom's basement. These same techniques are being used on a much larger scale by state actors, criminal enterprises, and even corporations to achieve more sinister goals. They are influencing media narratives, spreading misinformation, and destabilizing trust in institutions. And there may be no one that understands this better than fossil fuel Companies, basically. Since the advent of climate science, oil and gas corporations have understood that controlling, suppressing, and manipulating information is one of the most effective ways to protect their profits. The arena may have changed in the age of the Internet, but it's the same game, and oftentimes many of the same players, too. First of all, I would like to congratulate Argentina for hosting this very important conference. In 1998, officials from around the world convened for the 4th Annual Conference of the Parties, or COP4. The mission that year was resolve any final issues in order to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the first of its kind International Greenhouse Gas Cutting Treaty. But not everyone had come to Argentina with the same goal.
- [07:15]
Kurt Davies
These corporate guys were walking around with badges on that said the International Chamber of Commerce or other entities, but they were actually working for Exxon. And I thought, God, they're hiding in plain sight.
- [07:28]
Zach Goldbaum
That's climate activist and researcher Kurt Davies, who serves as the director of special investigations at the corporate accountability watchdog center for Climate integrity. Back in 1998, he was working at a nonprofit called Ozone Action, and he started to witness firsthand the forces trying to stop the burgeoning climate movement. One of those forces was another group that Kurt started to notice in his research back in the late 90s, the global climate Coalition. Now, a global climate coalition may sound great, but they were actually a front group formed by Exxon and other companies, including automakers and chemical manufacturers.
- [08:05]
Kurt Davies
And their founding principle was to stop the climate treaty from hurting American business, although they didn't say it that way. And Exxon was just there all the time as the worst case of a corporate entity and sort of, in hindsight, much more involved than any other corporation.
- [08:27]
Zach Goldbaum
Behind the scenes, the Global Climate Coalition was meeting with American politicians to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. They helped draft a Senate resolution opposing any emissions restrictions that could harm the US Economy, which passed unanimously. So even though President Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Global Climate Coalition and its allies would eventually get their wish. Three years after COP4 in Buenos Aires, George W. Bush would officially withdraw from the treaty. The Global Climate Coalition dissolved soon after, having fulfilled their singular mission of killing Kyoto. By then, Exxon had merged with their rival Mobile, creating what was at the time the world's largest company. And for Kurt Davies, they would become his white whale.
- [09:14]
Kurt Davies
So we had been collecting data on the web of entities that were speaking out against climate change, and we found in Exxon documents that they were paying these organizations, who were more radical science deniers, to say things that Exxon couldn't.
- [09:32]
Zach Goldbaum
Say in the early 2000s, Kurt was working at Greenpeace and channeled these discoveries into a new research project that would come to be called Exxon Secrets. And what he found was shocking. For over a decade, Exxon had funded scientists and think tanks to challenge the consensus about climate change. They had been taking out newspaper ads with titles like Unsettled Science and Climate Change. A Degree of Uncertainty. And at every turn, that is what they stressed. Uncertainty. Here's Exxon CEO Lee Raymond addressing the American Petroleum Institute in 1996.
- [10:09]
Lee Raymond
Proponents of the global warming theory say that higher levels of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, are causing world temperatures to rise and that burning fossil fuels is the reason. But scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect the global climate.
- [10:30]
Zach Goldbaum
The company funded seemingly independent scientists to sow doubt and and spread debunked claims around climate change. Then they disseminate those claims with the help of shadowy PR firms and hired lobbyists. One was an operation out of Washington, D.C. called DCI Group.
- [10:48]
Kurt Davies
The first time I became aware of DCI was an effort called TechCentral Station. They set up a corporate blog where they could post opinion pieces, op EDS from any direction, from anyone, all day long. And it looked like a News source.
- [11:06]
Zach Goldbaum
But TechCentral station wasn't a news source. It was a propaganda machine.
- [11:12]
Kurt Davies
And then it turned up in Exxon tax documents that Exxon had given money to the TechCentral Science Foundation. But that was all being run by DCI Group. It turned out.
- [11:24]
Zach Goldbaum
In 2003, TechCentral Station received $95,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. It was run by a journalist who'd almost never commented on climate change before. But during his time at tcs, he published relentless attacks on both the Kyoto Protocol and the science of global warming. The Internet was just taking off as a major news source, but Exxon was already keenly aware of the ways that information could be distorted online. But regardless of how much harm Exxon was causing, as long as the company had plausible deniability, they could continue their misinformation campaign, which raised an important question. What did Exxon actually know about climate change? It would take years, but the answer would eventually come thanks to a group of reporters from an outlet called Inside Climate News.
- [12:16]
Inside Climate News Reporter
We want to turn to an investigative series which revealed Exxon knew that fossil fuels caused global warming as early as the 70s, but hid that information from the public. The reporting has alleged the company misled the public about what its own scientists found about the risks of climate change and greenhouse gases.
- [12:33]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
What Exxon chose to do was to fund and participate in a massive misinformation campaign to protect their business model and their bottom Line.
- [12:45]
Zach Goldbaum
In 2015, Inside Climate News released a blockbuster series called the Road Not Taken. Reporters Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr. David Hasemyer, and Lisa Song unearthed a trove of documents, memos, and climate models. Their reporting revealed that Exxon had long known about the impact of fossil fuels on CO2 in the atmosphere. That's because it was their own scientists that had conducted the research.
- [13:13]
Dr. Ed Garvey
We were doing science that we didn't think in any way, shape or form would be questioned.
- [13:19]
Zach Goldbaum
That's Dr. Ed Garvey, a chemical engineer hired by Exxon. In an interview with PBS's Frontline, he explains how the company embarked on an ambitious research project to measure oceanic levels of CO2.
- [13:32]
Dr. Ed Garvey
There was no questioning that the atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing, that atmospheric carbon dioxide was going to change the climate in some fashion. The question was how fast, how much, and what kind of impacts would it have?
- [13:46]
Zach Goldbaum
At the time, Exxon saw itself not only as an oil company, but but as an energy company. If in the future, the government caught on and curtailed the use of fossil fuels, it would impact their bottom line. So Exxon wanted to be one step ahead.
- [14:01]
Dr. Ed Garvey
I think at the time that we were doing the work, in 1979, 1980, Exxon wanted a seat at the table because it wanted to help to lead where things would go. I think it was the largest oil company in the world even at that point, and it saw that this was an opportunity to lead in the science. And I think in the discussion, the.
- [14:19]
Zach Goldbaum
Data from Dr. Garvey's study was clear. There were significant increases in carbon dioxide levels in the ocean. And Exxon slowly began to understand what that could mean. What followed were disturbingly prescient memos that predicted sea level rise, impacts to human health and agriculture, and increased human migration. They had accurately predicted what climate change could do to the planet. Perhaps the most unsettling part was that this research began as early as 1977. Exxon not only knew about climate change, they knew way before the rest of us. And rather than diversifying their business model or alerting the public to their findings, they set out to cover up what they had uncovered. It really recasts statements like this one from former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, who you heard earlier saying the evidence around climate change remains inconclusive.
- [15:15]
Lee Raymond
Many scientists agree there's ample time to better understand climate systems and consider policy options. So there's simply no reason to take Drastic action Now.
- [15:29]
Zach Goldbaum
Inside Climate News followed a galling paper trail that showed how in the years after their research program was shuttered, Exxon tried to build a case against their own research. Using groups like the American Petroleum Institute and right wing think tanks, as well as campaign contributions and its own lobbying, Exxon pushed a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions. But it's no wonder the science was unsettled. They were the ones unsettling it. Inside Climate News reporting made huge international news and created an immediate crisis for Exxon. Ironically, Inside Climate News is partly funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund, which was started by the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, the guy who started Standard Oil, part of which became Exxon. Anyway, as soon as the series dropped, Exxon fired back. Here's their spokesperson at the time on NPR's on the Media, responding to the claim that they offload the dirty work of spreading disinformation to outside groups.
- [16:32]
Exxon Spokesperson (Bob)
We don't fund those groups. As the science has emerged and become clearer, we're more committed than ever to researching this important topic.
- [16:40]
Interviewer
We don't fund them or we didn't fund them. You got out of the funding business 2009 or some such, but for 20 years before that you poured.
- [16:51]
Exxon Spokesperson (Bob)
I'm going to finish my thought here.
- [16:52]
Interviewer
Bob, please clarify this for me. Are not funding or did not fund them.
- [16:57]
Exxon Spokesperson (Bob)
We are not funding.
- [16:58]
Interviewer
Okay, so who cares? It's so simple. If you did fund these different disinformation campaigns to muddy the issues on climate science, the question is why?
- [17:12]
Exxon Spokesperson (Bob)
Bob, I reject that narrative.
- [17:14]
Zach Goldbaum
Other publications followed with their own in depth investigations. And for people like Kurt Davies, who had tracked Exxon for years, it was a bombshell.
- [17:24]
Kurt Davies
So we knew they were a negative force, but we didn't know in any measurable way the depth of their scientific program inside the organization. And this came out September of 2015, and it really changed everything.
- [17:41]
Zach Goldbaum
Almost instantly, a new movement was born. People were energized and they were angry. So seizing on the idea that Exxon knew about its role in accelerating climate change, activists created a campaign called exxon new. By November 2015, just two months after inside Climate News first article dropped, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed ExxonMobil to determine whether the company had lied to investors about what it knew about climate change and the risk it might pose to oil industry profits. Here's schneiderman explaining to PBS's NewsHour how his office was looking into the disparity between the company's public Statements and their private communications.
- [18:27]
Kurt Davies
We're interested in what they were using internally and what they were telling the world.
- [18:30]
Inside Climate News Reporter
And what law would be violated by doing this.
- [18:35]
Kurt Davies
Well, in New York, we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.
- [18:42]
Zach Goldbaum
The New York investigation was promising, but no one was taking it for granted. For this to be a real moment of accountability, there would need to be intense, sustained pressure. So on January 5, 2016, an email was sent out by an environmental activist named Kenny Bruno. You may remember him from our episode on the infamous Philly trash ship, the Kayan Sea. Kenny's email read. Dear all, if you are reading this message, we believe you are attending the meeting this coming Friday, January 8th, regarding Exxon. He continued to lay out an ambitious agenda that included making Exxon the central topic of the 2016 election cycle, discussing avenues for legal actions, and establishing that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity toward climate chaos. Among the people who received invites was Kurt Davies.
- [19:34]
Kurt Davies
We held a meeting at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund in New York City. And that meeting was private, of course. It was a roundtable of people who had all focused on the oil industry or climate change or climate accountability in one way or another. And the discussion was, you know, is there a citizen lawsuit? Is there a private law firm that could come in and help with this?
- [20:00]
Zach Goldbaum
For years, there had been talk about taking on fossil fuel companies in the same way that tobacco companies had been reined in in the 1990s. The Tobacco wars had established that corporations could be held legally accountable both for hiding or misrepresenting scientific evidence and for damages caused by their products. Just as the tobacco industry had knowingly imperiled public health, oil companies had imperiled the planet's health. And now there was proof that they knew. But just as activists prepared to escalate their campaign against Exxon, strange things started to happen.
- [20:38]
Kurt Davies
In February, a bunch of weird emails start rolling in to various people who are involved in this work. And they were kind of goofy, like, you know, a Facebook alert, you have been poked. I'm like, what the hell is that?
- [20:54]
Zach Goldbaum
Poking for the uninitiated is kind of a flirtatious old Facebook feature that predates reactions and likes. But for Kurt and the other activists who attended the planning meeting for the Exxon new campaign, there was nothing flirty about it. They were concerned, but it wasn't yet clear what these phishing attempts were about or who was behind them.
- [21:15]
Kurt Davies
And then, you know, out of the blue, in February, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Amy Harder calls. And we were pretty hyped up because we're like, oh, the Wall Street Journal is going to cover the Exxon new. That would be excellent. And then she starts calling people cold, calling people that she should not have known about. Like, there's no way that she would have known these people were talking about Exxon Nu at all. People who were quietly involved, but not public spokespeople in any way. And then eventually she admitted that she had the full invitation to our private meeting in January. In front of her, she said, I know you had a meeting, and I want to know what happened at that meeting, and I want to know what the budget is for your campaign. And we just shut down. Like, you're kidding. You know, where'd you get that? What are you doing with our private meeting agenda?
- [22:08]
Zach Goldbaum
The Journal published their story in mid April. Their piece focused mostly on Exxon's defense strategy, with the campaign against it and the private meeting getting a passing mention. But then, just a day later, a conservative news website called the Free Beacon published their own story with the headline, memo Shows Secret coordination effort against ExxonMobil by climate activists. In the report was a link to Kenny Bruno's original email inviting his fellow activists to the meeting and laying out the agenda. The report framed Exxon as the victim of some sinister, secretive campaign. The activists were painted as a cabal, intent not just on holding Exxon accountable, but destroying them. In the aftermath, Kurt Davies wondered, how did the Wall Street Journal and the Free Beacon have that info and what else was out there? Whatever the answers, Kurt knew that their group had been compromised, and whoever was behind it would stop at nothing to end their campaign against Exxon. In 2017, John Scott Railton, or JSR, was deep into his investigation of a sprawling international hacking operation. Jsr, by the way, is the guy we met earlier in the episode who got into this work after the Arab Spring. And if you recall, their investigation started with a single financial journalist, but soon expanded to include all of the hacking victims that were targeted. Here's how they were able to do it.
- [23:52]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
My colleague Adam makes this big discovery very early on in looking at the messages that this journalist has gotten, which is, oh, whoever is targeting him is using, like, a URL shortener, but they've set it up themselves.
- [24:07]
Zach Goldbaum
A URL shortener is exactly what it sounds like. You plug in a long web address and it'll spit out a simpler custom URL that will take you to the same website. You might have used one like Bit Ly or T co but these guys got a little sloppy when they built their version of the URL shortener.
- [24:24]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
And the way that they've set it up means that we can figure out every other link that they have shortened. So suddenly we're not just seeing the phishing link that he was sent, we're seeing phishing links sent to everybody else that whoever this group is is targeting. Well, that was really interesting because the links contained the email addresses of the target. So suddenly, starting with this one journalist having this kind of spiral web of new cases and possible targets.
- [24:54]
Zach Goldbaum
And the list of targets included celebrities, high profile divorce cases, other international companies, you name it. So trying to zero in on a singular motive in this soup of victims wasn't easy.
- [25:06]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
We didn't really understand what we were looking at until we actually spoke to the targets themselves.
- [25:12]
Zach Goldbaum
And that opportunity would come soon enough. In the midst of his investigation, JSR traveled to rural Virginia to attend a conference. During one of the sessions, he stepped outside for some fresh air and struck up a conversation with another attendee. When it's time to go back inside, the stranger tells JSR his name.
- [25:30]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
And I have this, like, out of body moment where I realize that the person who has sat with me at this table, I'm pretty sure I've just seen his email address and his name and in my set of targets. So I sort of say, like, listen, really nice to meet you. Do you have a card? We should really talk.
- [25:50]
Zach Goldbaum
JSR preferred not to name the person that he met that day. But when they eventually connect, the stranger from the conference is already well aware he's being targeted. And he tells jsr, you really need.
- [26:01]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
To talk to, like, Kurt Davies.
- [26:03]
Zach Goldbaum
And the timing could not have been better because in the spring and summer, summer of 2017, a new wave of hacking had begun.
- [26:14]
Kurt Davies
In 2017, these emails start flooding in.
- [26:18]
Zach Goldbaum
That's climate activist and researcher Kurt Davies again.
- [26:22]
Kurt Davies
And they were sometimes pretending to be from your friends, but often they were so and so has tagged you on LinkedIn or Facebook or there's a Google alert on an article you might want to see. So they tried every different mode that a person might pay attention to, every different platform. And then you would click on the thing and it would say, you're not logged into Google. And you're like, ah, frustrated. Why am I not logged in? And you start jamming away at passwords and they're collecting everything you type at that point.
- [26:55]
Zach Goldbaum
The hacking attempts spiked. Whenever the Exxon new campaign was making progress, the first wave of attempts had appeared a few Months after the New York Attorney General launched his investigation into Exxon and the onset of the larger Exxon new campaign. Now this new flurry of phishing emails had suspiciously aligned with another major development. In June of 2017, New York introduced new accusations against Exxon in their investigation. Specifically, they alleged that then Secretary of State Rex Hillerson had knowingly misled investors about climate change when he was CEO of Exxon. This time, the phishing emails were frighteningly specific and targeted.
- [27:38]
Kurt Davies
Personally, I was kind of freaked out by this. The most frightful thing was we had no idea if they had been successful, except, you know, we knew they had tried really hard. And some people had said, oh, my God, I think I fell for it. What should I do? Should I blank my computer? You know, what did I do when I started getting that second wave of emails and they were being sent from colleagues at Greenpeace and people I worked with, I'm like, oh, my God, they have my contact list. There's no way for them to know that I know that guy unless they're already in my computer. So meeting John Scott Railton was incredible because it gave me hope. We met for coffee in D.C. and I remember sitting outside with John, and he opened his laptop, and he had this extensive spreadsheet of thousands of email addresses. And I just remember the mosquitoes were biting us, and I was just mesmerized, like, scrolling through this spreadsheet.
- [28:40]
Zach Goldbaum
To Kurt's surprise, he recognized name after name and email address after email address. Friends from NGOs and environmental organizations like the Rockefeller Family Fund, Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, 350.org, Public Citizen, and more.
- [28:57]
Kurt Davies
The effort was quite broad. Had targeted many, many organizations and had targeted people on their personal addresses as well as their work emails. But we didn't know who they had been successful with.
- [29:10]
Zach Goldbaum
The other major unknown who was doing the hacking. But JSR was about to find out.
- [29:17]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
We start putting the pieces together to try to solve not only what's the objective of these hackers, but who are they? What are they really? What's really behind this campaign?
- [29:28]
Zach Goldbaum
The major break in the investigation came at a less than opportune time.
- [29:34]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
I can remember being on a train and my colleague Adam, who was just working at every moment on this, as I was, you're living and breathing this stuff for months. And he's like, we gotta talk. I just found something, and I just have no privacy. Like, where am I gonna find privacy? We gotta talk about this. So I finally just like, take over a train, restroom and so I'm sort of standing back against the door, got the door locked, got my earphones in, balancing my laptop, shouting over the train at Adam. And, you know, every couple minutes somebody knocks on the door and it's like.
- [30:06]
Zach Goldbaum
Busy with his back against the bathroom door and his hands balancing his phone and his laptop. JSR gets the new info from Adam. He thinks he knows where the hacks are originating from India. The hackers had left behind some not so subtle breadcrumbs. First, the phishing attempts always took place during normal working hours in India's time zone. And I for one, am pleased to know that this illegal hacking operation respected their employees. Work, life, balance, take note, Amazon.
- [30:39]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
Second, Adam spots some new registration and some text on these, like, staging sites as they're being set up. And the staging sites have like, happy Holidays, but it's specific Indian holidays.
- [30:54]
Zach Goldbaum
With these clues, the investigators from Citizen Lab were able to pinpoint the company they believed to be behind the hacks. Beltrox. They're a little known Indian IT firm that advertised themselves as a medical transcription and cybersecurity service. But the company's director, Sumit Gupta, was indicted in California in 2015 for his role in, you guessed it, another hack for hire scheme. So with a company to dig into, JSR's team were led to another clue.
- [31:25]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
One of the most surprising things that we discovered as we and some other researchers were kind of closing in was on this group was that the group actually had a LinkedIn presence.
- [31:36]
Zach Goldbaum
Their employees proudly listed skills like corporate espionage, conducting cyber intelligence operations, and my personal favorite, email penetration. And those pages had hundreds of endorsements from people who worked in corporate intelligence and private investigation. So when you put all of that together, these clues start to seem less like a breadcrumb trail and more like an entire loaf. But that is where the trail ran cold, which left one crucial unanswered. Who hired Beltrox? Kirk Davies had his suspicions immediately.
- [32:15]
Kurt Davies
We thought it was Exxon. Exxon had to be behind it because a lot of the phishing emails were about Exxon. They were like, hey, here's the Exxon document you wanted. Or, you know, one of them was from the attorneys that were looking into this. And it's like, here's some Exxon material.
- [32:30]
Zach Goldbaum
But if Exxon was indeed involved, the hacking victims figured that they were probably a few degrees of separation away from the hackers. And at that point, they had no idea who the intermediaries were who were.
- [32:42]
Kurt Davies
Paying for all this work until 2019, when this guy named Avram Azari is arrested at JFK Airport by the FBI and taken into custody.
- [33:08]
Zach Goldbaum
In September of 2019, Aviram Azari, his wife and two of their three children had flown to the US from Israel on their way to Disneyland. It was their last big family trip before Azari's daughter enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces. But on a layover at jfk, Azari was approached by immigration officials. Disney would have to wait. Azari is the owner of Avraham Hawk, a private intelligence firm based in netanyah, Israel. From November 2014 to the moment he was arrested, the FBI believes he was paid nearly $5 million by a variety of clients for intelligence gathering and phishing campaigns. Here's Kurt Davies.
- [33:52]
Kurt Davies
We knew very little, but we knew that he was a former Israeli army and then police in Israel and then a private investigator in Israel. And he's put in jail in Brooklyn in the fall of 2019. And then Covid hits and then he's. He basically sat in jail for almost four years and we thought, oh, well, that's that.
- [34:15]
Zach Goldbaum
Finally, in 2023, Azari is sentenced to over six years in prison, most of which he had already served. The trial had connected him to Beltrox, the Indian hacking operation. But the information Kurt, John, Scott Railton and others had been after, as in who had hired Azari, was still a mystery.
- [34:36]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
Stuff kind of stayed quiet for years. And I think a lot of people began resigning themselves to the idea that we would never learn more. And then all of a sudden, speak of the devil, there's a new arrest, a new detention in the UK.
- [34:54]
Zach Goldbaum
In the spring of 2024, a few months after Azari was sentenced, another Israeli private investigator named Amit Forlet was arrested in Heathrow Airport and charged with wire fraud and computer hacking. But where Azari had pled guilty and was forced to languish in a Brooklyn jail, Amit Forlett decided to fight his extradition to the U.S. we reached out to both Forlet and Azari through their lawyers, but never heard back. During his extradition hearings, US prosecutors explained how Forlett was paid $16 million between 2013 and 2018 to do work, quote, on behalf of one of the world's largest oil and gas corporations, centered in Irving, Texas, in relation to ongoing climate change litigation being brought against it. The reference was clear. They were talking about Exxon Mobil. The hearing also gives a vague reference to the intermediary who hired Forlet, simply calling them a D.C. lobbying firm.
- [35:57]
Justin Peterson
Thirty years ago, DCI opened its doors with one client and one goal, to provide innovative Strategies that deliver wins.
- [36:06]
Zach Goldbaum
That's an advertisement released last year for the Washington D.C. based public relations firm DCI Group, a longtime Exxon lobbyist with a list of clients that also includes big tobacco, the coal industry and Myanmar's repressive military regime.
- [36:21]
Justin Peterson
Today, DCI has grown into an unrivaled public affairs and business advisory firm. Our very first client remains, and so does the bedrock culture of existence. Execution that drives us. Outthinking and outworking our opponents, executing on the tactics that help our clients win their toughest fights.
- [36:43]
Zach Goldbaum
DCI has been obediently waging one of those tough fights on behalf of ExxonMobil for years. Remember the climate misinformation blog Tech Central Station? Yep, that was DCI. 2. They've been at this for a while.
- [36:58]
Justin Peterson
DCI was in the influencer business before it was cool, and it's now the hallmark of our industry, one we're proud to lead.
- [37:09]
Zach Goldbaum
In November 2015, less than two months after the Exxon new campaign launched, DCI's managing partner Justin Peterson was in Washington D.C. having breakfast with none other than the Israeli private investigator Amit Forlet. According to the Wall Street Journal. After the breakfast, Peterson sent an email to Forlet saying he wanted to operationalize the research on the bad guys. It is the beginning of a project that will come to be known as Operation Fox Hunt. By early the following year, ExxonMobil was facing an existential crisis. Not only had New York's Attorney General subpoenaed the company, but In March of 2016, 17 attorneys general launched AG's United for Clean Power, a coalition of top law enforcement officials who were vowing to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change. Just three months after DCI Group's secretive operation launched, Kurt Davies and his colleagues would receive a call from the Wall Street Journal saying they were aware of the private planning meeting to take on Exxon. And soon after, conservative media started running with the story. When one of those articles dropped containing stolen information, DCI's Justin Peterson allegedly emailed a link to executives at Exxon. Then he fired off another email to colleagues at DCI about the article with the subject line boom. Justin Peterson has not been charged with wrongdoing and Neither DCI nor ExxonMobil responded to our request for comment. But both have previously denied any involvement in the hack for hire scheme. To this day, neither has faced any consequences, but John Scott Railton hopes that may change soon.
- [38:55]
John Scott Railton (JSR)
I'm just very hopeful that whatever the final outcome is of this particular plot arc one consequence is like, okay, Companies that are drawn to the idea of hiring mercenary hackers at least have to conduct a little risk analysis, right? Like, let's make them a little bit scared. And those who maybe did business with these players in the past, may they still sleep unsoundly.
- [39:23]
Zach Goldbaum
It's just a small dose of what their victims experienced. In the trial of Avi Ramazari, Kurt Davies delivered a victim impact statement. He described experiencing not only sleeplessness, but anxiety, paranoia, depression and fear. His work suffered. He worried about reaching out to allies, about using the Internet for things like Google Drive, even about opening an email.
- [39:48]
Kurt Davies
It was very personal and very much of a, you know, an invasion of privacy. And when you find out that your kids were targeted, your spouse was targeted, not in my case, but in dear friends of mine, young children's emails, addresses were targeted trying to get to dad's information. And so you're living in this sort of cocoon of fear of how far in are they?
- [40:15]
Zach Goldbaum
But despite the hackers best efforts, Exxon is still facing lawsuits for deceiving the public about climate change in Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut and Colorado. And Kurt Davies is more energized than ever.
- [40:31]
Kurt Davies
We are not yet done. I'm not done. I'm not giving up. I'm from the edges of South Philly. We have long memories and we keep the receipts in my neighborhood. And it's not something I'm gonna, I'm gonna forget because it's.
- [41:05]
Zach Goldbaum
On the next episode of Lawless Planet. The battle over public lands reaches a fever pitch when a fundamentalist family takes over a wildlife refuge.
- [41:14]
Kurt Davies
There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them.
- [41:20]
Zach Goldbaum
For today's episode, we relied heavily on on Citizen Lab's investigation Dark Basin uncovering a massive hack for hire operation as well as Inside Climate news report the Road Not Taken and reporting from the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. We'll include links in the show notes. Lawless Planet is written, produced and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum, our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Wondery is Andy Herman, our senior managing producer. Producer is Lata Panya. Our managing producer is Jake Kleinberg. Our associate producer is Lexi Piri. Sound design by Kyle Randall. Music by Kenny Kuziak. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Versan Sync fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our legal counsel is Margo Arnold and Deb Drews. Executive producers are Marshall Louie and Jenny Lauer. Beckman for One Dream. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
- [42:13]
Kurt Davies
Sa.