For context, the article begins with these two paragraphs:
On Thursday, February 1 a strange tweet was sent from the Twitter account of Welund, a secretive multi-national surveillance company run by former law enforcement and intelligence operatives with a track record of spying on activists and public figures.
“Obstruction charge against Indigenous journalist Brandi Morin proceeds,” read the tweet, linking to an article on Welund’s intelligence platform — an article that can only be accessed by corporations, law enforcement agencies and governments who pay huge sums to access Welund’s “intelligence.”
Skipping further down, this revealing content appears as the news source tried to request comments concerning this tweet from the parties invovled:
Welund also did not respond to a request for comment sent last night, but within minutes of our request being sent the tweet referencing Brandi Morin was deleted from their Twitter feed.
Then, after we sent comment requests to the government bodies this morning, their entire site was locked down. Instead of the landing page detailing their services that previously greeted visitors, their site now leads only to a secure login portal for clients.
And Human Rights Canada had something to say about this:
“If it was a legitimate business, they wouldn’t have taken down the tweet and shut down their website and made it inaccessible to the public,” notes David Matsinhe, Director of Policy, Advocacy and Research with Amnesty International Canada. “What do they have to hide? It sounds like there’s something really nefarious behind the curtains taking place.”
Alex Neve, an adjunct professor of international human rights at both the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie, said “we have known for many years now that government and policing and intelligence agencies [in Canada] have regularly been keeping activists and journalists under surveillance simply because they are defending human rights, because they are Indigenous activists defending their land or territory, environmental activists concerned about the impact of pipelines, and also journalists who are, as we would want them to, reporting on all of the issues arising around that.”
Other related news stories referenced by this one:
And further controversies on Welund from reporting in the US back in 2018:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/09/welund-private-intelligence-oil-gas/
It’s disgraceful that Welund operates as it does.
