1.Anonymous Strikes and 'Ends' Monsanto PR Firm Bivings Group
2.Reclaim the Cyber-Commons 
3.AMAIZING DISGRACE – MONSANTO UP TO ITS DIRTY OLD TRICKS AGAIN

NOTE: Bivings were the Monsanto internet PR firm identified in an investigation by GMWatch founder Jonathan Matthews and the investigative journalist Andy Rowell, as key operatives in a major dirty tricks campaign targeting scientists and others critical of GM. The GMWatch investigation of Bivings helped prompt articles in The Guardian, New Scientist, The Ecologist as well as programmes on BBC radio and TV.
http://ngin.tripod.com/deceit_index.html

It's also worth noting that the man most often credited as the chief architect of the Monsanto dirty tricks campaign that Bivings helped undertake is still heading up his own internet PR agency with Monsanto as one of his clients. Jay Byrne was Monsanto's Director of Public Affairs and former Internet Outreach Programs Director before becoming president of V-Fluence. His former vice-president, Richard Levine, was part of the Monsanto team at Bivings. V-Fluence is based, like Monsanto, in St. Louis.
http://powerbase.info/index.php/Jay_Byrne
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1.Anonymous Strikes and 'Ends' Monsanto PR Firm Bivings Group
DJ Pangburn 
dt, December 6 2011 [shortened]
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/166429/anonymous-strikes-and-ends-monsanto-pr-firm-bivings-group/

The Bivings Group used to handle PR for businesses such as the multi-national biotech corporation Monstanto. Now, a group of Anonymous hackers are claiming they hit the PR firm until it shut down operations.

"Operation End Monsanto is still very much up and running. Pwnage will continue indefinitely," reads the opening statement of a paste at Pastebin from Anonymous.
http://pastebin.com/UZTcLMGT

The hackers are referring to efforts to strike at the "cyberstructure" of The Bivings Group, a now defunct PR firm which was known to have worked with Monsanto, according to Lobby Watch. Information on Bivings Group is scarce on the internet, but the links supplied by Lobby Watch to Bivings Group's website no longer exist or now link to a new PR firm The Brick Factory.

One can still find The Bivings Group's LinkedIn page, where its most recent post "Moved In" routes users to the new Brick Factory office space in Washington, D. C. (close to the action, as it were).

Yesterday, the Anonymous hackers claimed they had finally succeeded in taking down Bivings Group, quoting the following (supposed) Bivings Group communication, "Our Cyber Infrastructure has recently been put under attack. We are evaluating the extent of the intrusion, and apologise for any downtime and issues this may cause you. It is not yet determined what the motives behind the attack are, or what, if any data has been compromised. We will continue to keep you up to date, and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience."

It would seem that Bivings Group was in the business of trying to convince internet users that Monsanto is environmentally and socially conscious.

Whether or not the Bivings Group hack actually precipitated the shut down is unknown, though it could have indeed been one of the factors.

Nevertheless, perhaps this fresh start as The Brick Factory, and the attention they got from hackers, will convince the former Bivings Group employees to work with ethical businesses instead of those of the Monsanto variety.
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2.Extract from Reclaim the Cyber-Commons
George Monbiot
published in the Guardian, 14th December 2010
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/12/13/reclaim-the-cyber-commons/

*The internet is being captured by organised trolls. It's time we fought back.

I first came across online astroturfing in 2002, when the investigators Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews looked into a series of comments made by two people calling themselves Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek(4,5). They had launched ferocious attacks, across several internet forums, against a scientist whose research suggested that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen.

Rowell and Matthews found that one of the messages Mary Murphy had sent came from a domain owned by the Bivings Group, a PR company specialising in internet lobbying. An article on the Bivings website explained that "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organization is directly involved ”¦ Message boards, chat rooms, and listservs are a great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party."(6)

The Bivings site also quoted a senior executive from the biotech corporation Monsanto, thanking the PR firm for its "outstanding work"(7). When a Bivings executive was challenged by Newsnight, he admitted that the "Mary Murphy" email was sent by someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services"(8). Rowell and Matthews then discovered that the IP address on Andura Smetacek’s messages was assigned to Monsanto's headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri(9). There's a nice twist to this story. AstroTurf TM real fake grass was developed and patented by Monsanto.
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3.AMAIZING DISGRACE
MONSANTO – UP TO ITS DIRTY OLD TRICKS AGAIN 
Jonathan Matthews
The Ecologist, Vol 32 No 4, May 2002 
http://ngin.tripod.com/deceit2.html

*A dirty tricks campaign leads straight to the door of a Monsanto PR company, says Jonathan Matthews in the launch of his new column 

The journal Science reporting recently on how the Mexican "maize scandal" was driving the battle over GM crops "to new heights of acrimony and confusion", noted the part played by, "widely circulating anonymous e-mails" accusing researchers, Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, of "conflicts of interest and other misdeeds". 

These accusations surfaced first in late November on the day of Nature's publication of Chapela and Quist's findings of GM contamination of maize varieties in Mexico – the global heartland of maize diversity. Samples of native criollo corn were found to contain a genetic 'switch' commonly used in GM crops and one sample was even found to contain a commonly inserted gene that prompts the plant to produce a poison. The results were particularly surprising as Mexico banned the growing of GM maize in 1998, and the last known GM crops were grown almost 60 miles from where the contaminated maize was found. 

For the biotech industry this could not have come at a worse time. Its efforts to lift the European, Brazilian, and Mexican moratoria on GM seeds or foods were all coming to a head. 

Chapela and Quist came under immediate attack in a furious volley of e-mails published on the AgBioView listserv. AgBioView correspondents calling themselves 'Mary Murphy' and 'Andura Smetacek' claimed Chapela and Quist's research was a product of a conspiracy with "fear-mongering activists". The conspirators' aim, apparently, was to attack "biotechnology, free-trade, intellectual property rights and other politically motivated agenda items." 

These claims prompted a series of further attacks from others. Prof Anthony Trewavas, for example, denounced scientists like Chapela who had "political axes to grind". Trewavas demanded Chapela be fired unless he handed over his maize samples for checking. 

This was not Trewavas's first controversial intervention in the GM debate in response to material put into circulation on AgBioView. Last October, for instance, Trewavas was named in the High Court as the source of an anti-Greenpeace letter at the centre of a libel case. Trewavas subsequently claimed that the letter originated on AgBioView. 

The piece in question was posted by one Andura Smetacek, who regularly posts vitriolic attacks on critics of the biotech industry. In Smetacek's early posts, interestingly, repeated reference is made to one particular website, CFFAR.org. Ostensibly, CFFAR – or the Center for Food and Agricultural Research, to give it its full title – is "a public policy and research coalition" concerned with "food and fiber production." But despite links to CFFAR.org from the websites of US public libraries and university departments, there appears to be no evidence this organisation really exists. 

To judge by the frequent usage of words like "violence", "terrorism", and "acts of terror", the real purpose of the site is to associate biotech industry opponents with terrorism. This mission is faciliated by fabricated claims. In its "vandalwatch.org" section, for instance, CFFAR.org accuses Greenpeace of engaging in multiple attacks on British farms. Greenpeace is accused of commandeering farmers' tractors and crashing through fences in pursuit of farmers' families. 

The domain registration details for CFFAR.org show the registrant to be one 'THEODOROV, MANUEL'. Among early signatories to a pro-agbiotech petition launched by AgBioView list editor, Prof CS Prakash, the following details can be found: NAME: emmanuel theodorou. POSITION: director of associations. ORGANIZATION: bivings woodell, Inc. DEPARTMENT: advocacy and outreach. 

What kind of "advocacy and outreach" do Bivings Woodell, Inc., aka the Bivings Group, do? According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, "The Bivings Group has developed 'Internet advocacy' campaigns for corporate America since 1996... Biotechnology giant Monsanto [is] among the Bivings clients who have discovered how to make the Internet work for them." 

As part of its brief, Bivings designs and runs Monsanto's websites and Theodorou is believed to have been part of Bivings' Monsanto team. Mary Murphy would also seem to connect to Bivings. Or so it would seem from the evidence of a fake Associated Press article on the bulletin board of the foxbghsuit.com website. It was posted by "Mary Murphy (bw6.bivwood.com)". 

Between them Smetacek and Murphy have had 60 or more attacks published, often very prominently, by Prakash on the AgBioWorld listserv. Prakash presents AgBioWorld as a mainstream science group reliant on the support of individuals and philanthropic foundations. However, a website design specialist who took a detailed look at the AgBioWorld site reported that there appeared to be evidence that part of its content was held on a Bivings' server. Furthermore, agbioworld.org, vandalwatch.org and the Bivings'-designed thebivingsreport.com, all seemed to be the work of the same designer. 

Perhaps it's time for Prakash to clarify where AgBioWorld finishes and biotech industry PR begins. Come to that, the Royal Society might like to tell us why Trewavas, one of its media advisors, seems so keen to promulgate PR industry smears. And, finally, Monsanto needs to explain how its much vaunted pledge to abide by principles of openness, transparency and respect tallies with a dirty tricks campaign.