Masks come off in Chevron charade

Spoof preempts Chevron ad campaign

(10-19-10) Even as I type, several news outlets continue to distribute a spoof from environmentalists that preceded a genuine effort from Chevron. The fake press releases include a link to chevron-weagree.com where a slick slide show presents a message that would be a complete turn-around for the oil giant. Chevron has launched an effort to take it down. The entire press release was published as an article at the Imperial Valley News and many other small dailies. Some distributed the story in print with the headline: Radical Chevron Ad Campaign Highlights Victims. The 4 slides from the site are posted below, and the original site currently has poster size versions that are being printed and distributed on street corners in a nationwide campaign. An example can be found in the twitter feed of the Yes Men from 11:01 AM yesterday: http://twitter.com/theyesmen/. The New York Times claims that

the Rainforest Action Network, sent an e-mail on Monday afternoon claiming credit for the spoof, along with Amazon Watch and the Yes Men.

I haven't seen anyone publicly take credit yet, and the spoofed site has a domain name with a private regstration. Theoretically, this should slow down the take-down efforts by Chevron. The site is physically located on a server at Rackspace, a company that has proved to be spineless in the past when confronted with threats from Authorities. But the site has been designed so that mirrors can easily be made - I have posted one here: http://dogspot.us/chevron/ and you can download the entire site as an archive. The archive unpacks as a directory named "chevron", and displays exactly like the original site.

The live site at http://www.chevron-weagree.com/ now has a signature:
"This punking of Chevron brought to you by Rainforest Action Network and The Yes Men" and links to the new site at http://changechevron.org/, which boasts "We just punked Chevron", but quickly gets down to business and introduces the board members.

Expect to see the new site gain some polish soon - meanwhile, make sure to print some posters from the large images linked to Monday's slide show.

David Roknich,

DOGSPOT