A decade after climate activists’ emails were breached, a court case is shedding new light on who allegedly orchestrated the hacking.
This story is published in partnership with the Guardian.
On a cold January morning in 2016, Kert Davies joined a group of climate advocates and lawyers at the Rockefeller Family Fund’s office in Upper Manhattan to discuss an audacious goal: holding Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, accountable for climate change. A few months earlier, a set of explosive media reports had revealed that the company’s own scientists determined as early as 1982 that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels caused climate change — but Exxon went on to fund climate denial campaigns anyway.
For Exxon, it was a public relations crisis that carried potentially devastating legal consequences. Davies, the founder of the Climate Investigations Center, a group that monitors the fossil fuel industry, had been strategizing with other climate advocates to make those consequences stick, using the hashtag #ExxonKnew to raise public awareness.
About a month after the meeting in Manhattan, Davies received the first fishy email. It appeared to be from Facebook and said, “Kert, you have 5 poke.” Similar messages arrived over the next few days — emails that looked like notifications from people on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
