The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

250 the world according to monsantowhat is being said online. . . . Once you are plugged into this world, it is possibleto make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolvedthird party. ...Perhaps the greatest advantage of viral marketing isthat your message is placed into a context where it is more likely to be consideredseriously.” A senior executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivingssite, thanking the PR firm for its “outstanding work.” 18“Do you know who Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek are?” I asked,feeling as though I were in the midst of a detective novel.“Well,” the director of GMWatch said with a smile, “The Guardian, towhich I sent my findings, summed it up well: they are ‘phantoms’ or ‘fake citizens.’19 I spent a lot of time trying to find out who these two ‘scientists’ whohad launched the campaign against Ignacio Chapela were. As for Mary Murphy,she has posted at least a thousand e-mails on the AgBio World site. Forexample, she put online a forged Associated Press article criticizing ‘anti-GMO activists.’ When you trace back to find the address of the server hostingher e-mail address, you find: bw6.bivwood.com. So ‘Mary Murphy’seems to be a Bivings employee. When it came to ‘Andura Smetacek,’ Ithought it should be easy to find a scientist with such an unusual name, especiallysince she claimed to be writing from London. She was the one whohad initiated a petition demanding that José Bové be incarcerated. I wentthrough the electronic phone directory, the electoral registry, and the list ofcredit card holders, but it was impossible to find any trace of her. I hired aprivate detective in the United States, but he didn’t find anything either. Finally,I examined the technical details at the bottom of her e-mails indicatingthe Internet protocol address: 199.89.234.124. When you type it onto adirectory of Web sites, you come upon ‘gatekeeper2.monsanto.com,’ with theowner’s name, ‘Monsanto Corporation, St. Louis.’”“Who do you think is hiding behind ‘Mary Murphy’?”Matthews responds, “George Monbiot of The Guardian and I think it’s JayByrne, who was in charge of Monsanto’s Internet strategy. At an industrymeeting in late 2001, he stated that it was necessary to ‘think of the Internetas a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does,but somebody is going to get killed.’” 20“Fake scientists and fake articles—it’s incredible!”“Yes, they’re really dirty tricks that represent the exact opposite of thequalities Monsanto claims it stands for in its Pledge: ‘dialogue, transparency,sharing.’ 21 These methods reveal a firm that has no desire to persuade with