Over the past couple of months, documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act clearly show that TransCanada, builder of the much-contested Keystone XL pipeline, is engaged in more than a mere public relations campaign to discredit opponents of the tar sands conduit. The company has worked closely with both local police and with the Department of Homeland Security through its "fusion centers" —regional intelligence-gathering operations that come in for considerable criticism for wasteful spending, incompetence and violating civil liberties—to build dossiers on leading protesters and, in at least one documented instance, infiltrate organizers of a peaceful action against the pipeline. In Oklahoma, this led protesters to call off one action.

Government spying on dissidents, infiltrating their organizations and sometimes working as agents provocateurs to spur peaceful groups into violent acts in order to discredit them have all been long-time mainstays of efforts to defeat reform in America. But doing so specifically to benefit a corporation is a new wrinkle.

To be sure, state militias and National Guardsmen have in the past been called upon to put down strikes, sometimes brutally. But the overuse of modern methods of surveillance, the militarization of local police forces, the merging of bureaucracies into the DHS and the promiscuous assignment of the term "terrorist" to an array of peaceful dissident groups creates opportunities for law enforcement to behave the way the operators of the notorious and sometimes murderous CoIntelPro did from 1956 to 1971. We're not there yet, but without checks against abuse we could get there.

One set of documents acquired a few months ago via the FOIA by the anti-Keystone group Bold Nebraska found that TransCanada was spying on people walking on their own property and regularly presenting a PowerPoint slide show to law enforcement officials that included suggestions on possible charges that could be brought against protesters. Many of these amounted to simple harassment, the kind of things that can tie dissidents up in the courts for months and weaken their resolve to continue protesting because of legal fees:



“During construction, we have encountered a number of confrontations and trespasses on the company’s right-of-way (employees/contractors being grabbed, threats of serious physical harm and violence) that have required our company to take additional security precautions,” TransCanada spokesperson Shawn Howard told E&E News. That’s certainly not how activists, including Tar Sands Blockade spokesperson Ron Seifert, see it. “Although the rhetoric of the ‘corporate state’ gets thrown around frequently, it is quite alarming to see unequivocal evidence that both federal and local law enforcement are taking their cues from a multinational corporation instead of the local families and communities directly impacted by the potential destruction of their homes and the threats to their water and air,” he said.

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