Greenpeace Fights for Survival Against a Fossil Fuel Giant’s $345-Million “SLAPP” Suit

The Kill Step, Part One: “They’re Waiting for Someone to Wink”

SLAPP’d: An Indigenous Nation Fights for Its Water

It’s been a decade now since members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe launched a historic movement to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline – but somehow details of the pipeline company's efforts to undermine the movement are still coming to light.

I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled. Last year we brought you SLAPP'd, from reporter Alleen Brown, the story of the pipeline company Energy Transfer's massive lawsuit blaming Greenpeace for the Standing Rock movement. Energy Transfer won that suit, and the judgement was so large it puts the future of Greenpeace in the US at risk.

Standing Rock started out as one Indigenous nation’s attempt to protect their drinking water, sacred sites, and treaty rights. Then thousands of people showed up to camps at the edge of the reservation to support them. But for Energy Transfer’s brand, the STORY of Standing Rock was as dangerous as any protest.

So Energy Transfer’s lawsuit wasn't just about sticking it to Greenpeace. The company used a big-swing legal case to retell the story of an Indigenous-led water protector movement. And that effort didn’t start in the courtroom, but in an incredibly well-documented ground campaign. Alleen’s back to tell you the story of that campaign.

: Hi, Doug. Uh, my name's Alleen Brown. Um, I had reached out to you a while back. Um, I'm a reporter working on a story related to the protests back in 2016 and 2017 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. 

 and some guys at Rusty's Tavern, uh, said that you would be a good person to talk to

: Good day, Francesca Well, I can't believe you were digging in the sewers at Rusty's

   This past spring, some guys at a bar in Morton County, North Dakota told me that if I wanted to understand the impact the Standing Rock movement had on nearby communities, I should call up the rancher Doug Hille. And Doug got right to the point.

Doug lives on a dead-end road, and part of the Dakota Access Pipeline route runs nearby. Unusual stuff started to happen.

There was a, a group, uh, out-of-state car, somebody sitting in the backseat with a big camera lens sticking out. I asked them what they were doing on the road here, and they said, "It's a public road." And I said, "Well, we watch who drives in this neighborhood, and, uh, w- we wanna know the reason that you're here."

 The strangers wouldn't answer many questions.

So I went, uh, I come back into the yard and, uh Uh, picked up a rifle they were taking pictures of the yard, and the mailbox, and everything.

And, uh, I said, uh, "I think you should leave." And they said, "Are you gonna make us?" I said, "No, but my friend here," and I raised my rifle, "will probably help me." And they left.

 Doug told me that they posted images of him online. He began hearing other stories from his neighbors. A group of protesters blocked a school bus from taking their normal route

 A grandma and her grandkids hid in a safe room for four hours, because they were worried about protesters. The new traffic made it difficult for Doug and people he knew to drive semi trucks loaded with hay down narrow country roads.

 I and several other people, um, just got in the habit that, uh, we carried, uh, we carried, uh, weapons for personal protection with us.

 Doug said, even a decade later, those wounds haven't healed.

Some of us, myself included, have not been on Standing Rock, uh, since.

 On my trips to North Dakota, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this place was all about.

I wandered the streets of Bismarck and the town across the river, Mandan, and drove down the County highways that connect the cities with the reservation. The roads are bordered by grassy, rolling hills, and occasionally these dramatic buttes. It's really pretty. There are a few tiny towns on the way, and dirt roads leading to ranches like Doug's.

When Energy Transfer’s private security contractors first touched down in this area in 2016, they found a community that was already pretty angry and freaked out about the pipeline protests. And the company developed a social media campaign aimed at hardening those divisions.

This all went down at the start of an era of social media misinformation that would transform Americans’ relationships with each other. These days, versions of the Facebook propaganda campaign that hit North Dakota get used around the world.But what's different in this case, is that I got ahold of the receipts.

Through a public records request, I obtained over 100 pages of internal email and WhatsApp chat records where Energy Transfer’s propagandists talk about exactly what they were trying to do -- and why.

I'm Alleen Brown for Drilled and this is The Propagandist,  the inside story of a narrative war between a pipeline company and an environmental movement..

Back in 2016, a private Facebook group called “Defend Bisman” became the place for neighbors to exchange their negative experiences with the Standing Rock protests.Bisman stands for Bismarck and Mandan. And Kay LaCoe was the administrator of the group. At that time, she was also a spokesperson for a coal industry group.

I met her at a locally owned coffee shop in Bismarck.

 No, not a problem. Um, and my voice projects quite well, so

 I just wanted to ask you about two things about your own biography. Um, one is, uh, you know, just 'cause I think people who understand that you work for this 

 Coal company might be like, well, you know, clearly she was doing this out of her, like love for the fossil fuel industry.

The other thing is you do horse riding with guns.

 Yeah. So, to your first point, um, I love coal. I love my community. Coal and oil are completely different things,

I had no stance on the pipeline. There was a void that I could help fill with my skillset of helping create and shape constructive conversation on a Facebook group.

Again, I'm about my community and my people. Um, and so yes, my favorite pastime, what I do in my free time is I shoot guns off of horses at high speeds.  And it's just the coolest thing in the world. (Laughs)

  Kay tells me the protests DID cause some genuine disruptions.

 There was vandalism, there was fences that were cut, there were animals that were, you know, run around pastures and stuff like that.

So there were things, there was just enough truth that you could really blow it up if you wanted to.

 Facebook Live had launched publicly that same year, and pipeline opponents and movement journalists were streaming videos from the frontlines of protests, where cops were sometimes firing tear gas or rubber bullets at unarmed demonstrators. It hit different when people could watch police violence unfold in real time. And the posts were getting re-shared by people around the world.

[AUDIO FROM VIDEO POSTED ON TWITTER – tape left long]

But a lot of people in Bismarck and Mandan are pretty conservative. Many have family or friends who are police officers. When they watched that footage, what they noticed was pipeline opponents  defying police orders or yelling at cops or throwing things. At one point, people lit a bridge on fire.

Kay and other local folks felt like their voices were being drowned out online. And some got doxxed for taking a position against the Standing Rock movement.

 I experienced it. I was, um, I was doxxed big time too. I received the death threats. And there was several locations that I got followed.

But then, another Facebook page appeared, that seemed to be aligned with Kay’s group. It was called Netizens for Progress and Justice.

 I, I remember Edison's came on the scene and it was like, boom, boom. I mean, like, it was like this, bam, bam.

Alleen Brown: They had a dramatic logo with an "N" and all these videos with titles like "Four reasons why Standing Rock is the worst protest in the last century." It hit a nerve for a lot of locals who felt like they didn't have media representing their views, the way the movement had.

Kay told me Netizens presented itself as a counterweight to all that pro-movement media.

 They have all of these, this is your counter. We're your friends. Trust us.

 A couple months earlier, after a video went viral of security dogs attacking pipeline opponents

, Energy Transfer had hired the private security company TigerSwan.

TigerSwan was founded by an ex-commander of the Army special missions unit Delta Force.  Its contractors were mostly veterans.

The more you understand this company's background, the more it makes sense that they would be doing propaganda. TigerSwan was started during this post-9/11 era, where something called counterinsurgency was the reigning military doctrine. One of the things that blew my mind about some of these internal documents I obtained is that TigerSwan explicitly called its efforts at Standing Rock a “counterinsurgency approach.” Counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes that convincing local people to take on the military’s priorities can be as important as armed force.

In this case, a big part of the battle for hearts and minds was being fought on Facebook.

The guy TigerSwan brought on to lead that effort didn’t serve in the military, though. His name is Robert Rice, and he’s more of a tech guy. His big thing is virtual reality and he even attempted to develop a virtual universe called Omniscape. Propaganda might also be about changing people’s perception of reality, but it’s not totally clear why he was the guy for the job.

When Robert Rice joined TigerSwan's anti-protest effort, he started searching for a new narrative that could replace the story of peaceful, Indigenous water protectors fighting for the environment. I know because I've read his emails. In one of them, he asked if security contractors on the ground could take pictures of the wastewater drainage system for the tribe's casino. The idea was to claim the TRIBE was the one polluting the river.

They all lead directly to the river, so if we can show a link or very close proximity, we can take the wind out of the "Water Protectors" line.

 That’s the voice of an actor we hired to play Robert Rice.

Robert also wanted photos of any dogs that got injured the day of the dog attacks.

I want to create a few fault lines between all the third party activists and the tribes. Highlighting animal abuse and attacking dogs will have some effect with a few groups.

 At the same time, he seemed aware that it's not actually a great look to go after an Indigenous movement.

We want to be careful of public opinion and sentiment towards Native Americans, so we want to focus on the issues specifically, or wiggle around to take the side of the Tribes.

 In other words, he wanted to attack a movement that was started by Indigenous people and supported by hundreds of tribal nations -- while also avoiding the appearance of antagonizing Native people.

Robert Rice wasn't just off alone in a weird corner coming up with this stuff.   He was deep in conversation with other TigerSwan contractors. And those guys had a LOT going on. TigerSwan was flying aerial surveillance drones over the camps, listening in on water protectors’ radios, and even sending TigerSwan operatives into the anti-pipeline camps undercover. They weren’t just collecting information.

In a WhatsApp chat that included TigerSwan’s founder as well as Robert Rice, another TigerSwan contractor floated the idea of sabotaging the porta potties by somehow removing the antifreeze element so waste would freeze. He told Robert that they should make lots of noise all the time and maybe pay some kids to fly drones over the camp with speakers playing Scandinavian Death Metal.

This is the kind of stuff the U.S. government has done when they want to break down groups they see as dangerous. In fact, this TigerSwan contractor described his ideas as psychological warfare.

Personally, I think 24 hour floodlights are good. I would also get some directional jammers to disrupt wifi, but not cell. They may need that for emergency calls, and if they want the internet, let them chew up their data.

Despite his spicy suggestions, Robert gives off a kind of try-hard energy. Like when a well-known military veteran announced he was joining the Standing Rock movement. Robert Rice made a point to complain.

 I mean shit, I did four years of JROTC and I feel  like I got more out of it playing soldier than he did and now he wants to fight against law enforcement? Kind of pisses me off. I missed my chance to serve and this nutjob is going to shit on things.

Sorry, this sort of thing really annoys the hell out of me.

All of this was happening right around the time Donald Trump was elected.

Trump:   We're going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions Including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the United States rule. Okay? Remember that.

Trump held investments in both Energy Transfer and Philips 66, another company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. As he was going around yelling about “American energy dominance,” social media disinformation was flooding the internet like never before. And a lot of it was favorable to him.

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but TigerSwan’s propaganda team launched the Netizens Facebook page the same day that Trump declared victory.

They posted videos featuring plain text over images with the kind of sappy, inspirational music you might hear in a video by a yoga influencer. Like this:

[PUT IN SOME OF THE DUMB MUSIC FROM THE EARLY NETIZENS VIDEOS?]

Its first videos claimed the pipeline posed no risk to water or sacred sites and that the movement was full of paid protesters and criminals.

One early video flashed a bunch of mug shots of water protectors, which were actually sent to Robert by a PR guy for the National Sheriffs' Association.

The videos hit their mark. Here's from one comment, from a couple of weeks after the Netizens' launch: “Thank you Netizens for getting ‘the rest of the story’ out there!!!! North Dakotan’s are so fed up with being invaded by the violent protesters,”

And Robert Rice started to notice that a lot of traffic to the Netizens page was coming from the Bismarck and Mandan area.

Jim we are pushing various things on Facebook (primary) and website (secondary). Definitely contributing to some infighting and factions, both internal and on the bigger scope (like anti protestors in Bisman).

Robert had a cool idea about how they could increase traffic further.

If we had some Kardashian or celeb nudes, we would have half a million followers in two seconds.

11/23/16, 7:04 PM - R2: Just sayin' heheh

Alleen Brown:  He maybe got something even better that celeb nudes. I don't know if Robert knew it, but his timing was pretty good.  Not long after Netizens launched, locals’ frustrations with the protests came to a head.

The morning of Thanksgiving, area residents got an emergency alert on their phones, indicating that protesters had blocked the intersection connecting the two cities.

Alleen Brown: Honestly, videos from this protest seem sort of tame. People set up a long table in the middle of the road, with pumpkins and a banner painted to look bloody that said No Dakota Access Pipeline. But they were blocking traffic on a holiday. And there was one other thing that really got the Defend Bisman crowd mad.

Kay LaCoe: That was the day that protestors gathered in Mandan and placed 

 pigs, heads on sticks, and made it very well known that they were going to be aggressive towards our law enforcement officers.

Alleen Brown:   Images circulated on social media of a demonstrator carrying a pig’s head mounted on a stick. Residents like Kay took that as a threat to police.

 I think that Thanksgiving day, I spent more than six hours on the phone with people who were just outraged by all of this.

And I think our Facebook group numbers request to join jumped threefold.

 Our First Amendment right is to peaceably assemble.

You're on private property. They do not want you here. You will leave immediately. Or else you will go to jail.

"Water is life! Water is life! Water is life!"

Move! Move! Now! Turn around and go. I'm not gonna ask you again.

Alleen Brown: The next day, Black Friday, water protectors marched into Bismarck’s Kirkwood Mall and formed a prayer circle before being arrested. One local right-wing blogger claimed it was a “war on the Bismarck/Mandan community.”

Kay LaCoe: The average citizen was like, you know what, okay, we'll tolerate this for a while. Now it's the holidays, it's getting cold. Get the hell out.

Transcription

As protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline began to grow in North Dakota, a new seemingly grassroots Facebook page emerged. In this episode we meet the hired gun behind it, Robert Rice, who was working for the pipeline company's private security company, Tiger Swan.

This mini-series was reported in partnership with High Country News, and a print feature accompanying it is 

The Propagandist Documents

SLAPP’d