The public relations industry was born at war, and it bears the imprint of its origins. Early PR pioneers including Edward Bernays, Ivy Lee and Carl Byoir got their start with the Committee for Public Information (also known as the Creel Committee), which organized publicity on behalf of U.S. objectives during World War I. The Second World War also saw a proliferation of propaganda agencies, which in the U.S. alone included the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of War Information (which worked closely with Hollywood, sometimes going so far as to write movie scenes and dialogue), the Office of Censorship, and the Office of the Coordinator of Information (a forerunner of today's Central Intelligence Agency). Each subsequent military campaign has seen new forms of collaboration between government and private propagandists. In the 1950s, Bernays helped the United Fruit Company organize a U.S.-backed military coup in Guatemala. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration sought assistance from PR industry executives in designing its Office of Public Diplomacy to promote the war in Central America. In the 1990s, PR pros shuttled back and forth between the Bush administration and private PR firms like Hill & Knowlton as they worked to win public support for the war in the Persian Gulf.

Given this history, it is not particularly surprising that the repertoire of public relations tactics includes outright spying--sometimes in collaboration with government spy agencies. Libertarians like to imagine that governments are bad and private companies are good, but often the two are indistinguishable collaborators in a joint war against citizen groups and activists--a war, in short, against democracy itself.

As Eveline Lubbers shows in this issue of PR Watch, citizen groups that challenge the prerogatives of wealth and power risk falling prey to special operations orchestrated by their opponents. We are pleased to publish excerpts from her book, Battling Big Business: Countering Greenwash, Infiltration and Other Forms of Corporate Bullying, which shows how privatized spy shops are using the same surveillance tools as state secret service agencies. In the service of oil companies, a private firm linked closely to British foreign intelligence spied on environmental and human rights groups in Europe. Information from another private spy firm led to harassment and false charges of terrorism against Dutch journalists.

There is a danger inherent in these blurrings of the boundary between government and corporate surveillance of private citizens. The danger is not simply that individual rights are violated. What is worse is that a permanent, unaccountable propaganda ministry is emerging, whose "information wars" are being waged against numerous, vaguely defined enemies that turn out to be the very citizens whose rights their governments are sworn to protect. Once again, it seems Pogo was right when he warned: We have met the enemy, and he is us.