The chicken and the mole
A Tegel factory protest has left unanswered questions about possible collusion between police and private investigators.
Maybe she’s talking about the tracking device put on her friend’s car. Maybe it’s how her boyfriend turned out to be a paid police informant. Maybe that time a private investigator turned up at the community board meeting she was attending.
Or maybe it’s any of the many other times Rochelle Rees has been followed, photographed or spied upon over the past 15 years.
Whatever it is, she’s very laidback when asked how much she ever thinks about the fact she might be under surveillance: ‘‘With everything that’s happened,’’ she says, nonchalantly, ‘‘it’s very difficult not to think about that. I try not to let it affect the way I behave or what I do but it’s always in the back of my mind.’’
If you bumped into Rochelle Rees, you would never pick her as a target for the attention of police and private investigators. She works in IT, speaks calmly and quietly, and drinks soy lattes.
But it’s her role as a committed animal rights activist that has seen her watched. Often.
She gets that authorities may keep an eye on her activities. But she’s a fierce advocate for the right to lawful protest and worries that, when private firms engage in surveillance, lines can get crossed.
And lately there have been a couple of developments which have got this seasoned activist wondering where it ends, thinking that some of what has been going on is dangerous to democracy, fearing that the protections of the state towards its citizens are being undermined.
If there’s one private investigation firm which has come to gain notoriety for its tactics, it’s Thompson & Clark.
Set up in April 2003 by Gavin Clark and Nick Thompson, the company touts itself as being expert in corporate intelligence and protection, and offers threat analysis and risk assessments.
Stuff Circuit approached Thompson & Clark to ask for an interview or comment, but it declined.
‘‘We don’t comment on operational matters other than to say that we operate within the law and comply with the industry standards and code of conduct,’’ says Clark.
It has certainly never shied away from controversy.
Within a few years of its establishment, the company was facing criticism for hiring paid informants to go undercover and gather information about protesters for a client, stateowned coal company Solid Energy.
Then-prime minister Helen Clark described Solid Energy’s role in the whole mess as ‘‘unacceptable behaviour from a state-owned enterprise’’.
Mostly, things went quiet, but that didn’t mean government contracts dried up.
If anything, Thompson & Clark’s connections to state agencies tightened, with links to the Ministry of Health, the Department of Conservation, the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and the Security Intelligence Service.
In one case, Greenpeace discovered Thompson & Clark was spying on the environmental group’s staff on behalf of oil companies.
‘‘But in terms of who used the information it wasn’t only the oil companies, it was also . . . the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment,’’ says Russel Norman, Greenpeace NZ’s executive director.
This year it was revealed that the Southern Response Agency, set up to settle earthquake insurance claims, had been using Thompson & Clark to spy on claimants.
That revelation triggered a State Services Commission inquiry, initially focused on the Southern Response Agency. But in June, as details about other connections emerged, the inquiry was extended.
The widely held assumption was that it would look at all arms of the government. That assumption was wrong.
Not long after Rochelle Rees signed on as an animal rights activist, she realised she would come to police attention – even as 13-year-old when she started attending fur protests, she noticed a frequent blue uniform presence.
She understood the role of police in maintaining the law.
Troubling her, though, has been the interest of private investigation firms.
‘‘Thompson & Clark has been on our radar even longer than the police,’’ she says.
The reason it’s troubling is because, whereas the police have responsibilities to the public, Thompson & Clark ‘‘can act solely in the interests of their clients’’ (under the law and code of conduct which governs them, of course), she says.
In 2010, Rees and her friend Jasmine Gray came out of the district court in Levin and noticed something odd underneath their car. It was a tracking device, linked to Thompson & Clark.
Over the years, Rees says, she noticed that photographers hired by Thompson & Clark to observe their protests would be ‘‘chatting and very friendly’’ with police. But she never had anything conclusive to prove a link.
So she filed Official Information Act requests asking about the company and connections with the police.
She discovered that during Clark’s time with the police, from 1985 until 1998, ‘‘he may have had involvement with investigations into political activists’’.
But on the more critical question of whether police and Thompson & Clark shared information, police said her question was too broad and didn’t answer her.
In 2008, Rees discovered her then partner, Rob Gilchrist, was being paid to give police information about the activities of animal activists.
‘‘It makes you question whether you can trust the people you’re working with and are friends with and very close to,’’ she says.
A few years later, she started thinking about one particular man who had drifted into the activist movement then disappeared in 2003.
‘‘He said he was vegan, into animal rights and had been in Italy for eight years and had just come home and was keen to be involved.’’
Quickly, he became active in the animal activist group Rees and her friends were involved in. He said his name was Laurie Moore and that he was in his 30s.
Pictures from the time show him heavily involved in activities, painting signs, banging a drum at protests, helping hand out brochures on the street.
He said he was a landscaper so had flexible hours which meant that he always seemed available, including travelling with the group to Christchurch.
‘‘Animals rights activists from around the country travelled down there for a week of protests and Laurie came along, stayed with us on the marae where we were staying, came to all of the events, and got to know animal rights people from around the country,’’ Rees says.
Laurie Moore lived in an apartment that was sparsely decorated, and he had no signs of family or other friends. In October that year, 2003, he was involved in a protest at Tegel, where members of the group went to the company’s headquarters and scattered hay.
One of the group was arrested the next day after a raid on his house.
The next month, Moore told the group he was going to Australia to do some fruit picking, something he hadn’t previously talked about doing.
‘‘He sent us emails, sort of further and further apart . . . and a few years later I tried to contact him and my email bounced back,’’ Rees says.
It was, with hindsight, strange behaviour, says Jasmine Gray. ‘‘Given the closeness of our interactions . . . that was kind of weird, to just sever those ties.’’
But at the time, none of them thought anything of it.
When the case of the arrested activist went to court, documents revealed that Rees and her friends had been observed by a police group called the Threat Assessment Unit.
The unit is responsible for ‘‘collecting information to help make threat assessments regarding the current criminal environment, or to assist planners for major operations or VIP visits’’, police say.
Job sheets showed officers had been watching members of the group as they left Tegel,
noting down things such as number plates. One person’s number plate wasn’t noted down, despite being observed by police – Laurie Moore’s red Toyota.
So how did the police know about the Tegel protest?
In a search warrant application, a member of the unit says he was in the area ‘‘on an unrelated matter’’ when he saw a group running away from the area, heard a call over the police radio about the protest, and then followed the group, observing their movements.
Just coincidence, then, according to that document and the officer’s job sheet. But in an OIA response to Stuff Circuit about whether police received information which led to officers from the unit being in the area at the time, Detective Inspector Paul Berry says: ‘‘Police did receive information regarding the protest action.’’
He refused to say from whom. Given Thompson & Clark’s history of infiltrating protest groups, could the Tegel protesters have had a mole in their midst?
A police source told Stuff
Circuit that, at times, police collaborated with Thompson & Clark about animal activists, at one point sharing a paid informant. The source did not know about this particular protest, so we asked police. Berry told Stuff
Circuit: ‘‘It is not police practice to indicate either way whether they did or did not receive information from any person or group.
‘‘However, in this case, and as an exception, it is important to state . . . police could find no evidence to indicate that, in respect of the ‘Tegel Foods’ incident, information was obtained from any private investigator or like company.’’
He did not answer whether police had ever received or paid for information from Thompson & Clark about the animal activists in 2003.
There certainly seems to be a reluctance from police to answer questions about their dealings with Thompson & Clark.
They didn’t answer our questions, inviting us to lodge a new OIA request, warning us, though, about asking broad questions.
They told Rees her questions were too broad. And when Greenpeace asked about connections between the company and police in relation to Greenpeace, they didn’t get far either.
‘‘The police refused to release the information on the basis that there was too much of it and so they said just looking at a single email address showed many hundreds of emails,’’ Norman says.
The reason he is so indignant about a relationship between the company and the police is that he fears police could be using information gained improperly.
Surely the inquiry under way will get to the bottom of the links, right? Here’s the kicker: the police are not included in the investigation.
The inquiry, headed by Deputy State Services Commissioner Doug Martin, is looking at whether there have been breaches of the State Services Standards of Integrity and Conduct.
Police are not covered by the code of conduct because of police independence.
Norman thinks if the SSC inquiry can’t find the answers, someone should.
‘‘I think if you are going to be engaged in genuine surveillance to protect people, obviously there’s a role for the Government and for the police if they have genuine fears about what people might do,’’ he says. ‘‘You go through a proper process. Thompson and Clark don’t go through any of those processes.
‘‘They pay people who then turn up at groups and pretend to care about whatever the issue is and then if they’re passing that information on to the New Zealand Police without ever getting any proper judicial oversight of what the police are up to, that is very problematic.’’
Rees agrees, saying police should be open about their dealings with Thompson & Clark. ‘‘They shouldn’t be having those dealings in the first place because Thompson & Clark are not impartial, they’re working solely in their clients’ interests.’’
It’s no wonder Rees struggles to maintain trust in all the people she had dealings with. She thinks back to the Tegel protest. ‘‘We actually kept it quiet because it’s one of those things that you’re happy to open up and admit to afterwards, but we didn’t want to be stopped from doing it. ‘‘So it was a bit secretive and there were only seven people and we trusted all of them.’’
Seven people, including Laurie Moore. Where is he now?