Brethren spies on leavers
Church deploys controversial PIs for hundreds of hours of surveillance
The Exclusive Brethren church has been using the controversial private investigators Thompson and Clark to spy on former members of the church.
Over the past two years, Thompson and Clark has conducted hundreds of hours of surveillance on former members who have criticised the cult-like church.
The private investigators have watched ex-Brethren from cars and parked surveillance vans and have taken photographs of people entering and leaving their homes.
Thompson and Clark made headlines after spying on Greenpeace and Christchurch earthquake insurance claimants. A State Services Commission (SSC) inquiry was later launched into government agencies’ use of security consultants.
SSC head Peter Hughes condemned government organisations paying Thompson and Clark for “surveillance of a person just because they are lawfully exercising their democratic rights — including their right to freedom of expression, association and right to protest”. Government agencies were forbidden to use the private investigators.
But Thompson and Clark has continued the same operations for private clients, including the Exclusive Brethren. It has built dossiers on at least 20 ex-members, known or believed to be critics of the church. They contain information from monitoring social media, public records and information gathered from street surveillance — combined with information supplied by the church leadership.
Information about the Exclusive Brethren spying operations has been pieced together from confidential past and present Exclusive Brethren sources, information from industry sources and fieldwork.
The Exclusive Brethren is headed by Sydney businessman Bruce Hales, known as the Elect Vessel or Man of God. He must give his permission before members are allowed to marry, requires all members’ internet access to be controlled on devices leased from a Brethren company and, most of all, does not tolerate any doubting or questioning of his authority.
Members who express doubts or question the leadership face being “withdrawn from” (expelled from the church without right of defence) and cut off from seeing or communicating with the Brethren members of their family again.
Many ex-members around New Zealand have been separated in this way from their parents, spouses and children. The threat of severed families hangs over the membership. But ex-members say the church leaders still fear them, seeing them as a threat to their control.
The main allegations in this story were put to Thompson and Clark director Gavin Clark and he was asked “do you dispute this?”
He did not respond to the allegations. Instead he responded, by email, that it was “important to emphasise that [the 2018 SSC inquiry] report does not suggest surveillance can never occur”.
The company “provides services to protect individuals, operations and assets from being impacted by unlawful activity,” he wrote. Thompson & Clark “always strived to operate within the law and the rules and regulations of our industry”.