Greenpeace v. Dow Chemical / Sasol Corporate Espionage ("D-Lines")

What happened

Between 1998 and 2000, according to a civil complaint Greenpeace filed in 2010, Dow Chemical and CONDEA Vista Company funded a multi-year corporate espionage campaign against Greenpeace's Washington, DC office, run through their respective PR firms, Ketchum for Dow and Nichols-Dezenhall for CONDEA Vista, which subcontracted the private intelligence firm Beckett Brown International (BBI). The corporate history matters here and is easy to get backwards. CONDEA Vista was then a wholly owned subsidiary of the German group RWE-DEA AG. Sasol Ltd. bought it on March 1, 2001, roughly a year after the alleged conduct ended, whereupon it became Sasol North America, Inc. and was sued under that name. Both courts called the company "Sasol" throughout as a labeling convenience and said in a footnote that they were doing so.

Two things have to be held apart. That BBI ran trash operations against environmental nonprofits is documented in BBI's own records, which a former investor in the firm gave to Mother Jones in 2008. That Dow or CONDEA Vista knew of or directed BBI's methods was alleged in a complaint and never adjudicated in either forum.

What Greenpeace pleaded was this. BBI conducted what its records called "D-lines": "more than 120 documented D-Lines at Greenpeace's offices" between July 13, 1998 and July 18, 2000, to recover discarded internal documents. Reciting the same complaint, the Court of Appeals gives two separate counts under two separate alleged conspiracies: more than 100 D-lines between September 1998 and October 2000 at the U Street and H Street offices for Dow, and at least 35 between July 13, 1998 and November 12, 1998 for the Lake Charles Project at U Street. A serving District of Columbia police officer, engaged off duty as a paid BBI subcontractor, is alleged to have taken part in at least 55 of them and to have been "expected to use his official police badge to gain access to dumpsters that were enclosed by a locked fence." He was never charged, and no source alleges a bribe. BBI is also alleged to have run office break-ins, an operative posing as a prospective volunteer, infiltration of an allied group, and wiretapping and computer intrusion. Nichols-Dezenhall paid BBI roughly $150,000 (October 1998 to July 1999) for the "U Street Project"; Ketchum paid BBI more than $125,000 (October 1998 to January 2001) for the Dow work; the related "Lake Charles Project" began May 26, 1998. Greenpeace learned of the operation in April 2008 through a Mother Jones investigation and filed a federal RICO and tort suit in DC district court on November 29, 2010. The RICO claims were dismissed in 2011; the state-law claims that followed in DC Superior Court were dismissed or given up with prejudice, and the DC Court of Appeals affirmed on August 21, 2014.

How it worked

Two corporate clients each retained a PR and crisis-communications firm, which in turn subcontracted a private intelligence firm to run a sustained physical-surveillance and document-recovery operation against a common target. CONDEA Vista Company retained Nichols-Dezenhall, renamed Dezenhall Resources in 2004; Dow Chemical retained Ketchum. Both engaged the same contractor, Beckett Brown International (BBI), which ran the work under project names: the "U Street Project" on the CONDEA Vista and Nichols-Dezenhall side, aimed at Greenpeace's office on U Street NW, a parallel Dow and Ketchum engagement, and a separate "Lake Charles Project" tied to CONDEA Vista's Lake Charles, Louisiana operations. The two conspiracies were pleaded as distinct. Greenpeace never alleged that the two client groups colluded with each other.

BBI's core method was the "D-line": recurring raids on Greenpeace's trash and recycling to recover internal documents, memos and correspondence discarded by staff who believed the material was gone. The physical setup differed by office, and the appellate opinion is precise about it. At 1436 U Street NW, through May 2000, the dumpster sat at ground level abutting the building and the recycling bins on a sheltered elevated loading dock, both on private property. After the May 2000 move to 702 H Street NW, trash and recycling were both inside the building in a locked ground-floor room. The locked fence that dominates most retellings comes from one specific allegation: that BBI engaged a serving District of Columbia police officer, off duty and performing security functions, who "was expected to use his official police badge to gain access to dumpsters that were enclosed by a locked fence." He is alleged to have taken part in at least 55 D-lines. No source states that 55 raids were accomplished by badge. Beyond the trash, BBI is alleged to have run office break-ins, a research consultant who posed as a prospective volunteer to tour and map the U Street office, a second operative she hired who took a board seat at the allied nonprofit CLEAN and forwarded its internal email, and electronic surveillance including wiretapping and computer intrusion. The layered structure, client to PR firm to intelligence contractor, is what let the clients take delivery of the product at a distance from the collection.

The lure and the tell

There was no lure aimed at a human target in the phishing sense; the social engineering here was structural and physical rather than a message-based pretext. The closest analog to a classic pretext is the BBI research consultant who presented as a prospective volunteer to get inside the office, exploiting an advocacy nonprofit's normal openness to new volunteers. Her own report, quoted in the complaint, is the sharpest evidence in the file: "I asked for a tour of all 4 floors in order to assess which divisions were largest, and observe all employees in their work space. The public affairs/public education/writing department was the largest in terms of floor space and number of employees observed." The tell, reconstructed years later by journalists and by the complaint, was the persistence and regularity of the collection across two years and the involvement of a credentialed police officer: access no ordinary scavenger would have. Greenpeace detected none of it at the time. It learned of the operation in April 2008, roughly eight to ten years after the raids, from James Ridgeway's Mother Jones report "Black Ops, Green Groups," which was built on BBI's own company documents. The provenance is specific and worth stating correctly: Mother Jones says the documents were "provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm," and both court opinions describe the source as a former BBI principal seeking to expose its actions. BBI was defunct by the time of the litigation, but no source ties the release of the records to a bankruptcy.

Outcome

Greenpeace filed a federal RICO and tort lawsuit in the US District Court for DC on November 29, 2010 (Civil Action No. 1:10-cv-02037) against Dow Chemical, Sasol North America, Ketchum, Dezenhall, and four former BBI managers. On September 9, 2011, Judge Rosemary Collyer dismissed the federal RICO claims for failure to plead proximate cause and declined supplemental jurisdiction over the five remaining DC state-law claims: trespass, invasion of privacy by intrusion, conversion, trespass to chattel, and misappropriation of trade secrets. Greenpeace refiled in DC Superior Court on October 7, 2011.

On February 5, 2013, Judge Michael Rankin dismissed trespass to common areas, invasion of privacy, conversion and trespass to chattel, and allowed trespass to Greenpeace's offices and misappropriation of trade secrets to proceed. Those two surviving claims were never adjudicated. After the court refused to certify the dismissed claims for interlocutory appeal and to stay discovery, Greenpeace voluntarily dismissed both with prejudice in order to obtain a final, appealable judgment. Two different trespass claims are in play and are easy to conflate: trespass to common areas, the D-line claim, was dismissed and that dismissal was affirmed, while trespass to the offices survived and was then given up.

The DC Court of Appeals affirmed on August 21, 2014 (No. 13-CV-685; 97 A.3d 1053). It held that Greenpeace, one tenant among several, lacked the possessory interest, meaning the right to exclude, that a trespass claim to the buildings' common trash and recycling areas requires. It held the intrusion claim time-barred by a one-year statute of limitations and added, "thus we need not address Greenpeace's other two arguments." And it held that conversion failed on the independent ground that Greenpeace had no property interest in anything it purposefully threw away, treating intangibility separately and cautiously: "Whatever other protections the law may offer to protect intangible property rights, the common-law tort of conversion is generally ill-suited to that end." The proposition that a corporation has no right to privacy under DC law was one of three alternative grounds the trial judge gave, and the Court of Appeals expressly did not reach it. No defendant was held liable, no damages were awarded, and none of the underlying allegations was ever tested.

Why it matters

This is among the most fully documented accounts of sustained, corporate-funded dumpster diving against a civil-society organization. BBI's own records, surfaced in 2008, show a private intelligence firm treating trash collection against environmental nonprofits as routine paid work, which makes it a budgeted tactic rather than a hypothetical. Everything past that, the six-figure payments, the raid counts, and above all the clients' knowledge of the methods, comes from a complaint that was never tested. The case is worth teaching partly because that line is so easy to lose: it is the same over-attribution that turns a contractor's conduct into a client's conduct. It shows how intermediaries create distance, client to PR firm to private intelligence contractor. It shows that a physical control is only as strong as the credential that opens it, since the bypass alleged here needed no lockpick, only a badge carried by a paid subcontractor. And the litigation outcome carries its own lesson. One intermediate appellate court, in one jurisdiction, held that a tenant has no possessory interest in shared trash areas sufficient to sue for trespass and that discarded documents are abandoned property that cannot be converted. That is narrow law, and the court declined to say anything about corporate privacy rights, but it points one way: after-the-fact recourse for this tactic is thin, so secure destruction and access control, not litigation, are the defenses that work.

Defenses

Greenpeace's own after-the-fact defenses were limited because at the time it did not know it was being targeted; it only discovered the operation via the 2008 Mother Jones investigative report. Practical lessons drawn from this case for organizations handling sensitive documents: (1) shred all discarded documents rather than relying on bin-bag disposal, since paper trash is legally "abandoned" once curbside and carries no expectation of privacy in most US jurisdictions; (2) secure trash and recycling enclosures with access control that cannot be defeated by a single credential, and audit who holds keys, since the bypass alleged here needed only a badge carried by a paid off-duty officer; (3) treat outside contractors, temp volunteers, and unknown visitors with vetting given BBI's use of an operative posing as a prospective volunteer to gain office access; (4) recognize that corporate-funded opposition research/PR firms may subcontract private intelligence firms for multi-year human-source and physical operations against advocacy targets, so counter-surveillance awareness (varying disposal patterns, controlling document retention, secure destruction contracts) is a legitimate control; (5) note the legal aftermath: the DC Court of Appeals held that a tenant has no possessory interest in shared trash areas for trespass purposes and that discarded material is abandoned and cannot be converted, and it affirmed the privacy dismissal on the one-year limitations period alone, expressly declining to decide whether a corporation has a privacy right at all. Recourse after the fact is thin either way, which makes prevention the only real defense.