Burson-Marsteller to Use Cyveillance Technology

[seemslikeadream]

December 18, 2001

Burson-Marsteller, a global communications and public relations firm, is creating an alliance with Cyveillance to allow Burson-Marsteller's corporate and institutional clients to track and respond to that which is being said about them across the Internet. Cyveillance's technology is capable of scouring the entire Internet at high speed to locate, filter and prioritze company or institution-specific dialogue, offering clients the ability to address potential issues such as negative comments about the corportation, a brand, or their service reputations.

"Negative comments or dialogue, which can be devastating to large corporation, often begin unnoticed in the recesses of the Internet," said Eric Letsinger, director, channel development, Cyveillance. "Our technology provides an early detection system to identify these threats and gauge their potential impact, allowing Burson-Marsteller to alert their clients to critical issues far in advance of a crisis."
http://dc.internet.com/news/print.php/942201

Dirty hands - a few of Burson-Marsteller's less public clients

Regimes
Argentina's fascist junta
Indonesian Government
El Salvadorian Government
Nigerian Government
Saudi Arabia - BKSH, a Burson Marsteller subsidiary which deals with government lobbying, was hired on Septmeber 14, to promote Saudi interest in the US following the terrorist attacks
Mexican Government (to promote NAFTA)
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu
South Korea (to avoid discussion of human rights issues during the 1988 Olympics)
UNITA - The US sponsored Angolan guerrilla army

Corporate
Union Carbide (after the Bhopal disaster, which killed thousands)
Babcock & Wilcox (for Three Mile Island nuclear accident)
Exxon (following the Exxon-Valdez oil spill)
Europabio - a body representing the biotechnology industry
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/magazine/corpwatch/burson.htm

Edward Neys, former U.S. Ambassador to Canada is chairman of Burson-Marsteller. He is also a director of Barrick Gold Mining. George Bush Sr. just before leaving office gave Barrick $10 billion in gold mining rights on US public land for $10,000. Then he got a job with Barrick as an international consultant.

[DUreader]

1. Kick

People need to know this

[seemslikeadream]

2. Thanks DUreader

E-fluentials

"Burson-Marsteller has identified persuasive individuals who defy the limits of traditional viral marketing and spread the word about a company, brand or product to an average of 14 people. These are e-fluentials, defined according to their intensive use of e-mail, chat rooms, message board, company and opinion web sites. They make up 10% of the U.S. online adult population (11 million), but reach a total of 155 million U.S. adults online or offline as they tell on their experiences. E-fluentials are socially and politically engaged and vocal citizens in cyber and traditional spheres. They frequently interact with well-known news and media organizations. In doing so, e-fluentials connect the dots between companies, media organizations, policy makers and consumers."
http://oracle.zenic.net/

[seemslikeadream]

4. Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical,

Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're
Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!

[seemslikeadream]

3. Iraqi National Congress Seeks Enhanced Credibility

Burson-Marsteller is working to enhance the credibility of the Iraqi National Congress as it seeks to establish itself as a legitimate force in the postinvasion Iraq," writes the Holmes Report, a PR trade publication. "B-M has been working with the Congress, led by high profile Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, since 1999, under a state department contract. Chalabi and the Congress have close ties with the Bush administration, but some critics are concerned that their support within Iraq is shallow. "We've been the communications vechicle on the outside as the INC moved into northern Iraq, then to Nasiriya, and to Bagdad, ' K. Riva Levinson, who heads the INC account for Burson out of Washington, told reporters. "We were helping the INC get out statements and videos that made it clear that the exiled opposition was consolidating and moving. It's been a tremendous ride for them and us."

B-M is one of the largest public relations agencies in the world and also the most reviled due to its mercenary attitude in choosing clients and contracts, and its frequent run ins with activists for enviromental and other progressive causes. When helping its industry clients to escape enviromental legislation or sprucing up the image of some of the most repressive governments on Earth, B-M brings to bear state of the art techniques in manipulating the mass media, legislators and public opinion."
http://www.guerrillanews.com/print

[DUreader]

5. LOL I was just wondering what ever happened to this thread

You need to practice your headline writing

Scary stuff seems to work

[DUreader]

6. Repost this with a scary inflammatory Title, people need to know

[seemslikeadream]

7. I may try, friend

My previous thread was THREE MILLION LIVES LOST SINCE 1998. It did not get one reply. Sounded scary to me. It was about the lost world war. The Iraq war is not the only war being fought for our material benefit. Western consumers' seemily insatiable demand for mobile phones, laptops, game consoles and other luxury electronic goods, has been fuelling violent conflict and killing millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC is the most mineral rich place on earth. Coltan, a substance made up of columbium and tantalum, is a particularly valuable resource - used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and micro-capacitors. Barrick is there.


Photographs of guns and flame
Scarlet skull and distant game
Bayonet and jungle grin
Nightmares dreamed by bleeding men
Lookouts tremble on the shore
But no man can find the war

Is the war across the sea?
Is the war behind the sky?
Have you each and all gone blind:
Is the war inside your mind?

Humans weep at human death
All the talkers lose their breath
Movies paint a chaos tale
Singers see and poets wail
All the world knows the score
But no man can find the war

Tim Buckley

[DUreader]

8. I am Hip to the blood minerals , no cell phone or wireless shit for me

organic locally grown and fair trade food, trashpicked clothing and

I'm trying to learn how to make my own shoes

[seemslikeadream]

9. Rep. Cynthia Mcinney in 2001 convened

a special congressional panel to explore the role of U.S. covert forces and private interest in Central Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow is an international journalist and photographer. He presented expert testimony before that panel. In 2000 he spent seven months investigating the conflicts in Angola, Congo, Rwanda and Sudan.

Innocent civilians have been brutalized, massacred, raped and tortured by all parties to the conflict. It began with the U.S. sponsored invasions of Rwanda 1994, and followed with two subsequent U.S. sponsored invasions of Congo (in 1996 and 1998). These are not the simple "civil wars" declared by the western press. Even the Rwanda "genocide" (in 1994) has to some extent been manufactured in the American mind to seerve mythology of tribalism. Meanwhile, American green berets and military advisors and Pentagon officals have participated from blackboard to battlefield.

Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo/Zaire are war where fractions are armed with U.S. made weapons (M16s, SAMs, tanks); where U.S. covert forces undertake brutal secret missions and psychological operations; accountable to no one; entrenched in subverting democracy and orchestrating chaos that is expediently advertised; as such; by our dubious media. At the roots, however, these are wars like any other war.

McKinney was not silenced because of statements about George Bush knowing about 911. She was stopped because she was trying to save the life of Tundu Lissu, an internationally famous lawyer who was reporting about the clearing of Tanzanian properties and bulldozed mine shafts....burying about 50 miners alive.

Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan let McKinney swing. They could have helped her. But guess what, according to Greg Palast they are on Barrick's payroll.

Thanks again DUreader

[JM]

10. This is nothing new

I worked for a web development firm a few years ago that had a client that did the same thing. They had people who scoured the internet on behalf of clients looking for positives and negatives, then provided a summary each month. they wanted to automate the process.

I wound up working on the prototype for that project. It did not work very well because of the norobots protocol, which allows site owners to prevent search engines from crawling them. The only workaround is a custom solution that ignores the norobots protocol. The bosses forced me to write the workaround ("don't be the one to lose this project for us") so I wrote a time delay into the code to prevent the software from locking up servers it was crawling.

Hopefully these assholes develop something that ignores norobots and crashes servers hosting, say, CNN or Dow Jones, who then turns around and sues them, or at the very least blacklists their IP addresses.

Later,
JM

[JackRiddler]

11. kick

k

[DUreader]

12. Not new, agreed, but also not well known how much pro-disinfo is around

people need to know especially on a forum such as Du

[seemslikeadream]

13. Kinda missed the point, didn't he?

Of course it's not new, note the date. The extremely important thing is who is doing the surveilance, Burson-Marsteller. They deal with the far less public side of 'perception management'. Burson-Marsteller is expert in 'crisis management', giving it the opportunity to work with many of the most unpleasant and controversial governments and corporate bodies. When the public has lost faith in a government or corporate organization, one of Burson-Marsteller strategies is to generate 'third party support', a tactic which involves recuiting apparently impartial groups and individuals to support its cause. "The first stage of this is lobbying at government level; the second is the recuitment of experts as public supporters. Most interesting for the consumer movement is that a third tactic, generating 'grassroots' support, is becoming increasingly popular. Consumer campaigns are victims of their own success in that, as the public place significantly more trust in campaign groups than they do in either governments or trade bodies, they have become a useful tool for corporate PR.
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/magazine/corpwatch/burson.htm

They're Chalabi's PR guys

[DUreader]

14. good link, thanks

[althecat]

15. Expensive tools for tiny minds that seldom work...

Damn right, technically this sort of spider operation runs slam bang into webmasters all over the place. For example should a robot start to crawl DU on a regular basis (and it would have to be regular for it to be effective) then even with a time delay it would quickly show up as a bogie in the logs... and most webadmins response to badly behaving robots is just to lock out their IP..

Plus there are all the forums that require registration before you can look around.

Of course there are ways around these things too, but they would be complicated difficult to implement and expensive to maintain. And from what I can see about these PR monkeys the priority will be getting their clients to fork out the dollars, not developing a genuine effective datamine technology to deal with the no-robots rules.