What Climate Advocates Already Know in Their Bones

A Climate Tribe Social field report on the documented, public record of surveillance against climate advocates — and on what fear does to the people who carry this work.

I. What I Carried

For years, I lived with a low hum of fear. It wasn’t constant, and it wasn’t always rational, but it was real to me: a sense that my advocacy had a cost I couldn’t fully see, that somewhere out past my own front door, someone with more resources than I had was paying attention to people like me.

Looking back now, with a few more years of practice and a few more years of growth behind me, I can see that fear more clearly for what it actually was: two things braided together so tightly I couldn’t tell them apart at the time.

The first thread was real. I have spent a decade reading the public record on how the fossil fuel industry and its allies have treated climate advocates, and that record is documented, verifiable, and worse than most people realize. Hacking rings. Private military contractors turned loose on Water Protectors. Ex-intelligence operatives on retainer to watch a composer. Undercover police officers embedded in activist lives for years at a time. That is not paranoia. That is a paper trail, and I want to walk through it below.

The second thread was mine. I was carrying real insecurity in that period of my life — some of it about my place in this work, some of it about isolation, some of it about the ordinary human fear of being unseen that has nothing to do with pipelines or lobbying firms at all. I let that insecurity attach itself to specific fears about the people and things around me, and I wrote about it that way at the time. I don’t think that was fair, and it isn’t how I’d write it today. A person’s ordinary presence in a shared neighborhood is not evidence of a surveillance operation. I’ve grown enough since then to know the difference between naming a documented industry pattern and pointing a finger at someone without evidence, and I no longer want to do the second thing.

So this piece does something different than the one I first drafted. It tells the documented story — the one with court filings, FOIA releases, named firms, and public inquiries behind it — because that story deserves to be told with precision. And it tells my own story honestly: not as an accusation against anyone in particular, but as what this work can do to a person’s nervous system over the years, and what it took to set that particular fear down.

Let me show you the record.

II. The Hacking Ring That Targeted Climate Activists for ExxonMobil

In April 2024, Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport on an Interpol red notice. His extradition to the United States was approved in April 2025; the UK High Court denied his final appeal in March 2026, and he was extradited shortly after. On April 16, 2026, he made his first U.S. court appearance in the Southern District of New York and entered a not-guilty plea, released on a $1 million bond.

The charges: conspiracy to commit computer hacking, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and wire fraud. Combined, they carry a maximum sentence of 45 years.

The allegation, laid out in a federal indictment first returned by a New York grand jury in November 2022, is that from approximately 2012 to 2019, Forlit ran a hacking-for-hire operation targeting more than 100 individuals connected to climate litigation and advocacy. In extradition filings, Forlit’s own lawyers named the alleged client for the first time: DCI Group, a Washington lobbying firm that has represented ExxonMobil. Reporting has connected that commission to a project Exxon’s longtime lobbying partner allegedly financed in the same year the hacking is alleged to have been commissioned.

Targets reportedly included staff at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and environmental law organizations pursuing climate accountability litigation against ExxonMobil. Both DCI Group and ExxonMobil have publicly denied any involvement, and Forlit has stated in a prior deposition that he never commissioned or paid for hacking. The case is proceeding through the federal courts as of this writing.

This is not surveillance as paranoia. This is surveillance alleged as paid contract work, executed at scale, against people whose work was holding a polluter accountable in court — and it is now a matter for a jury to decide, in the open, on the record.

III. Standing Rock: When the Counterinsurgency Came Home

If the Forlit case shows what climate advocates face in courtrooms and inboxes, Standing Rock shows what happened to them in the open.

During the 2016–2017 #NoDAPL protests, Energy Transfer’s pipeline subsidiary paid the private security firm TigerSwan — founded by U.S. special-operations veterans — an amount that had reached roughly $17 million by a December 2017 invoice. TigerSwan, which had built its reputation in Iraq and Afghanistan, brought that counterinsurgency approach to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the largely Indigenous-led movement defending it.

More than 50,000 pages of TigerSwan’s internal documents, obtained by The Intercept through public-records requests to North Dakota’s Private Investigation and Security Board, describe:

• Aerial surveillance by drone
• Undercover infiltration of camps and protest networks
• Continuous social-media monitoring and “persons of interest” profiling shared with Energy Transfer
• Coordination with the National Sheriffs’ Association and law enforcement across multiple states, including equipment purchases and shared intelligence

TigerSwan’s own internal language described the water protectors as fitting “the profile of a small unit insurgency.” That is the language of counterinsurgency, applied to people camped in prayer.

TigerSwan operated in North Dakota without the state security license the work required; after the state sought a $2 million fine, the company settled for $175,000. Documents also show the firm explored using RICO — a statute built to prosecute organized crime — against the water protectors, and later pitched its “counterinsurgency” playbook to other oil companies as a service.

IV. Welund, BP, and the Surveillance of a Composer

Not every target is a mass movement. Some are individuals ordinary enough that learning they were watched tells you something about how far this appetite for monitoring actually reaches.

Welund — a private intelligence firm founded by a former UK intelligence officer — was retained by BP beginning in 2019 to monitor Chris Garrard, a classical composer and member of the group Art Not Oil, who had campaigned against BP’s sponsorship of the British Museum.

A 2021 joint investigation by The Sunday Times and openDemocracy found that BP and Welund’s file on Garrard included CCTV images of him at a London train station, notes on changes to his appearance, and regular updates on his social-media activity, gathered from at least July 2019 to January 2021. BP confirmed to openDemocracy that it had used Welund “to monitor and review material in the public domain such as social media posts.” Garrard had committed no crime; his activity was peaceful campaigning and Freedom of Information requests, one of which was internally flagged by British Museum staff as coming from “an anti-BP activist.”

Welund’s other reported clients have included Shell and the Greater London Authority, which paid the firm for a year-long intelligence contract on activist activity. In Austria and New Zealand, journalist Nicky Hager’s reporting and Greenpeace Aotearoa’s investigations found that OMV — Austria’s part state-owned oil major and one of New Zealand’s largest oil and gas producers — was the primary client of the New Zealand firm Thompson and Clark, which infiltrated and surveilled student climate strikers and Greenpeace campaigners there, and separately retained Welund to monitor Fridays for Future organizers and Greenpeace campaigners in Austria.

V. The Older Pattern: Beckett Brown, Greenpeace, and the Trash on the Curb

The contemporary cases sit on top of an older foundation. Between 1998 and 2000, the private security firm Beckett Brown International — founded by former Secret Service officers — is alleged to have infiltrated and surveilled environmental groups on behalf of corporate clients, including going through Greenpeace’s trash, entering meetings under false pretenses, and obtaining internal campaign and donor documents.

In 2010, Greenpeace filed a federal lawsuit against Dow Chemical, Sasol, and their public-relations firms, alleging a coordinated effort to surveil, infiltrate, and steal confidential information from the organization to blunt its campaigns. Around the same period, leaked documents from the corporate intelligence firm C2i International described embedded “real-time intelligence assets” inside several environmental groups; separate reporting connected C2i to a Caterpillar-linked engagement following the death of American activist Rachel Corrie, and to a 2008 pitch of similar services to a property developer facing environmental opposition to a golf course project in Scotland.

These are older allegations, some contested, some settled quietly. But the pattern — private firms retained to monitor and disrupt environmental advocacy — has a paper trail stretching back decades.

VI. The Spy Cops: A Generation of Infiltrated Lives

In the United Kingdom, the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry has spent years documenting how Metropolitan Police officers from the Special Demonstration Squad infiltrated political and environmental activist groups from 1968 through at least 2010 — roughly 139 undercover officers embedded, largely in left-leaning and environmental circles.

The scandal broke open publicly in 2010, when activists discovered that “Mark Stone,” a trusted organizer, was undercover officer Mark Kennedy — a discovery that collapsed a criminal prosecution against activists accused of plotting to shut down a power station.

What has followed in the inquiry has been one of the most disturbing chapters in modern British policing. Officers under fabricated identities entered into long-term relationships with women in the groups they infiltrated; officer Bob Lambert fathered a child with an activist who did not know he was a police officer. A founder of the London Greenpeace group has given testimony to the inquiry, as its hearings have continued into 2026, about how his group was targeted for infiltration while organizing climate protests decades ago — a reminder of how long the state has been watching people trying to protect the planet.

VII. The FBI, the JTTF, and the Word “Terrorism”

In the United States, climate advocates are increasingly encountering the language and machinery of domestic-terrorism enforcement.

In March 2025, several members of Extinction Rebellion Boston — including a Boston University environmental science professor — received home visits from FBI agents, WBUR reported. The activists’ only apparent common thread was participation in climate protest; none had federal arrest records.

In February 2026, Extinction Rebellion NYC said two agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force visited a former member at their home roughly 200 miles from New York City. The group’s attorney, Ron Kuby, described it as a significant escalation, noting that such visits are often how a person first learns a formal investigation exists.

This is unfolding against the backdrop of a September 2025 executive order directing agencies to “root out Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” — language civil-liberties advocates warn could fold constitutionally protected protest into a counterterrorism framework. It is impossible not to think here of the Church Committee of 1975–1976, which found that “an excessive number of individuals have been monitored by too many government entities” for their political views rather than any evidence of crime, and which led directly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Half a century later, the same questions are back on the table.

VIII. The Halo Over the Smokestack: Religion, Money, and Climate Denial

This is the part that, for me personally, is hardest to write, because I am a person of faith. I practice the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin, and I know what religious conviction is supposed to do for a person. I also know, from the public record, what has been done to religion in this country in service of a very different goal.

This story starts with strategy, not theology. In the 1990s, the fossil fuel industry — borrowing directly from the tobacco industry’s playbook — worked to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” Unlike the tobacco fight, it had a newly powerful ally: an evangelical political infrastructure that had merged closely with conservative politics through the 1980s.

The Cornwall Alliance

The clearest documented intersection of evangelical Christianity and fossil-fuel-aligned climate denial is the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, founded in 2005 by theologian E. Calvin Beisner. It began under the name Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, formed — by its own historical account and outside reporting alike — in direct response to evangelical leaders like Rick Warren beginning to organize their congregations around creation care and climate action.

The Cornwall Alliance has since:

• Stated there is “no convincing scientific evidence” that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing dangerous warming
• Produced a film series describing environmentalism as a “false religion”
• Argued that mandatory emissions reductions would harm the global poor
• Circulated an “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” that researchers Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright describe as designed to counter progressive evangelicals’ climate organizing

Its funding is difficult to trace directly, but researchers have connected it to Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund — donor-advised vehicles with documented ties to Koch-linked giving — and to organizational connections with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received ExxonMobil and Chevron funding. Critics, including researchers who study the group, have called it a front for fossil-fuel interests.

The Koch Architecture

According to Greenpeace’s tracking of IRS filings, Koch family foundations gave more than $145.5 million directly to 90 groups that have attacked climate science and policy between 1997 and 2018 — more, over that period, than ExxonMobil’s documented direct giving to the same network. Between 2005 and 2011 alone, Koch foundations gave $43.1 million to climate-denial groups, compared with $12.3 million from ExxonMobil in the same window. That money has fanned out to think tanks and advocacy groups whose material has, in turn, found its way into evangelical media and church-adjacent programming.

The result, after three decades of investment: survey research has repeatedly found that a large majority of evangelical clergy reject the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, at rates far higher than mainline Protestant clergy, and that only a minority of white evangelical Protestants believe climate change is human-caused. A 2024 study by NYU’s John Kane and the University of Oklahoma’s Samuel Perry identified end-times theology — the belief that world decline is part of a fixed divine timeline — as the strongest religious predictor of opposition to climate policy in their data.

The Faithful Resistance

I want to be precise here, because I refuse to flatten an entire faith tradition into one story. Evangelical climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has spoken plainly about what she describes as the hijacking of faith by politics. The National Association of Evangelicals has urged its members toward climate engagement on biblical grounds. A growing number of younger evangelicals have broken openly with older denominational denialism. The capture is real, but it has never been total, and the people resisting it from inside deserve real respect.

IX. The Legal Weapons: SLAPPs and the Criminalization of Conscience

When surveillance and infiltration don’t silence a movement, the next tool is often the courtroom.

EarthRights International has documented well over a hundred cases in the past decade in which fossil-fuel-linked companies have targeted environmental advocates with Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — SLAPPs, whose purpose is less to win than to exhaust.

The most consequential SLAPP of this era is Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace. After a federal RICO suit was dismissed in 2019, Energy Transfer refiled in North Dakota state court — one of a minority of states without anti-SLAPP protection. In March 2025, a Morton County jury awarded Energy Transfer roughly $660–667 million in damages; that October, the trial judge reduced the award to approximately $345 million after finding parts of it duplicative or unsupported. Greenpeace is appealing and separately pursuing a case against Energy Transfer in the Netherlands under the EU’s newer anti-SLAPP directive. In May 2026, the North Dakota Supreme Court, in a 4–1 ruling, ordered a lower court to block much of that Dutch litigation, finding it an improper attempt to collaterally undercut the North Dakota verdict — a decision Greenpeace has said it will continue to contest.

In Europe, the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe has documented more than a thousand SLAPP cases from 2010–2023, with environmental issues among the most targeted categories.

Separately, since 2016, roughly two dozen U.S. states have passed laws creating enhanced penalties for protest-adjacent conduct near pipelines and other “critical infrastructure” — conduct that, in many cases, existing trespass and disorderly-conduct law already covered.

X. The Toolkit: What Surveillance Actually Looks Like

Drawing on the documented cases above, here is the operational toolkit that has been used against climate advocates, in corporate, governmental, and blurred-line contexts:

The Neighborhood Layer

There is one more layer worth naming, because it explains something real about why this fear takes such a personal shape for so many advocates.

Welund has openly marketed subscription intelligence platforms to oil and gas clients that track local activist activity — built from social media, public records, and online communications, capable of producing a profile on someone without any physical surveillance at all. Separately, geofence warrants, which sweep up every device in a defined area without individualized suspicion, have been used by law enforcement around protest activity; the ACLU has argued to the Supreme Court that they are never a permissible investigatory method under the Fourth Amendment. And leaked materials from the corporate-intelligence industry have described tactics aimed at fostering internal conflict within activist groups to wear people down.

I share this not to confirm any individual advocate’s specific fear about a specific person nearby — I’ve learned that leaping from a documented industry pattern to a conclusion about one neighbor isn’t fair reasoning, even when the underlying unease is understandable. I share it because the architecture, the contractors, and the incentives are real, and advocates who feel a general unease about visibility aren’t inventing that unease from nothing. The right response to that unease is documentation, legal counsel, and community — not certainty about who, specifically, is responsible, absent real evidence.

XI. What To Do If You Suspect You Are Being Surveilled

I write this section as someone who has lived with this fear for a decade. Take what is useful; leave what isn’t.

Document what actually happens, not what you infer. Keep a factual, timestamped record of concrete events — not interpretations of them. Memory drifts; records don’t.

Consult a civil-rights attorney if something concrete happens. The ACLU, EarthRights International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers Guild all have relevant experience.

Secure your communications as ordinary good practice. Use end-to-end encrypted messaging, and verify unexpected requests through a second channel — the Forlit case shows how convincing a phishing attempt tied to real relationships can look.

Report credible incidents to press-freedom and advocacy organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press or the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which track patterns across many advocates rather than one.

Connect with larger networks. Isolation amplifies fear and makes it harder to tell a documented pattern from an anxious inference. Organizations like Earthjustice, Greenpeace, and 350.org have institutional experience here.

Take care of your nervous system. This is not optional. Chronic vigilance is its own injury, whether or not any of it turns out to be warranted. Sleep. Move. Pray, if prayer is your way. Talk to people who know you well enough to help you tell fear from fact. If the fear itself is becoming hard to carry, a therapist or counselor is not a sign of weakness — it’s the same kind of resourcing as a lawyer or a mentor.

XII. Adaptive Resiliency: What This Movement Builds Anyway

Here is what the documented surveillance in this piece has never managed to do: stop the work.

You cannot watch your way out of a climate emergency. You cannot dossier your way out of a heat dome. The movement being surveilled — the climate movement, the Indigenous land-defense movement, the youth strike movement, the scientists who refuse to stay quiet — is not a threat to the future. It is trying to build one.

The practice I work under, and try to live, is Adaptive Resiliency: becoming, through dialogue, cooperation, and the disciplined use of every constructive tool available — including AI — the kind of person who can hold the truth of this emergency without collapsing into despair, denial, or violence. It doesn’t depend on any single advocate staying unbroken. It depends on the network learning faster than any surveillance apparatus can map it.

I’ve carried real fear in this work, and I’ve also carried some of that fear further than the facts supported. Both things are true, and naming both is part of what it means to grow up inside a movement instead of just aging inside it. The response to fear, documented or not, isn’t to hide it — it’s to metabolize it into something more useful: better documentation, better community, better boundaries, and a clearer eye for what’s actually been proven versus what’s still just a feeling.

If you are a climate advocate reading this and you’ve felt alone in carrying this weight — you’re not. The documented pattern is real, it has names attached to it, and it is now part of the public record. And if you’ve also, like me, let that real pattern bleed into fears about people who never earned them — that’s worth examining honestly too. Both are part of being human inside a fight this large.

Addendum: To Those Waiting for the End — and Those Building a Future Anyway

I mentioned earlier the finding from researchers John Kane and Samuel Perry: that belief in an end-times theology is the strongest religious predictor, in their data, of opposition to climate policy. I don’t want to leave that as a statistic. It’s a sincerely held worldview for many people — and it is also the worldview the fossil fuel industry has spent decades cultivating and protecting, because a population that believes the planet is meant to burn is a population less likely to interrupt the burning.

Not everyone has chosen that road. Millions of us, across faiths and outside faith, have chosen instead to instill hope in our children rather than dread, and to act as though the future is real — because it is.

I am not here to take anyone’s belief away. I would defend the right to hold it. But the line I do draw is where a private conviction stops being a compass and starts being used to justify harm to someone else’s water, someone else’s lungs, or someone else’s right to organize peacefully without being watched, sued, or visited by federal agents at home.

To my fellow climate advocates: keep going. The record shows we’re not imagining this. It also shows — and I include myself here — that fear this large deserves scrutiny, including scrutiny of ourselves, not just of the people we’re afraid of.

Choose the children. Choose the biodiversity. Choose the living world. That choice doesn’t require certainty about every shadow — just honesty about what we actually know, and the discipline to keep telling the difference.

Tito is the owner and Content Curator of Climate Change Community LLC and the founder of Climate Tribe Social (ClimateTribe.Social), a community platform built for connection, learning, and Adaptive Resiliency in the face of the climate and ecological emergency. He is an SGI Buddhist, a conguero, a salsa lover, and a writer who has spent years studying — and, at times, fearing — the reach of the forces this piece describes. He’s decided that fear doesn’t get to write the rest of the story.

A note on sources: The factual claims in this piece draw on reporting from NPR, DeSmog, The Intercept, Grist, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, openDemocracy, Reuters, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Aotearoa, Baptist News Global, and others, along with public court filings, the U.S. Church Committee record, the UK Undercover Policing Inquiry record, and peer-reviewed survey research. Figures and case statuses were checked against current reporting as of August 2026; several matters (the Forlit prosecution, the Energy Transfer/Greenpeace Dutch litigation) remain active and may have developed further since.

A personal note: I practice the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin, and that practice has shaped how I see the world and how I try to face this emergency. I don’t speak for, and I’m not speaking on behalf of, any organization associated with Nichiren Buddhism. The views, judgments, and lived experience in this piece are mine alone.

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