Over the past few decades, the fossil fuel industry has subjected the American public to a well-funded, well-orchestrated disinformation campaign about the reality and severity of human-caused climate change. Borrowing from the Big Tobacco playbook, they have used a web of denial to confuse the public and decision-makers in order to delay climate action, protect fossil fuel interests, and defend libertarian, free-market conservative ideologies. 

Towards the same end but on a much narrower scale, forces tied to the fossil fuel and automotive industries have deployed disinformation to muddy discourse around certain solutions to climate and environmental crises – including those policy proposals that aim to clean up the transportation sector. 

At the federal, regional, state, and local level, the fossil fuel industry and its allies use advanced PR tactics to stall policy proposals that would reduce tailpipe pollution, increase public transit options, and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. 

One of the most popular and devious techniques is referred to within the PR industry as the “third-party technique.” SourceWatch5 describes the third-party technique as“putting your words in someone else’s mouth.”

These third-party validators can take a number of forms:

• Front groups

• Think tanks

• Lobby groups

• Academics

• Astroturfing campaigns

• Community leaders

• And many more

Being able to identify when the third-party tactic is being deployed within your community or on your issue is a critical first step to preventing the spread of disinformation and countering industry influence in transportation policy.

In 2017, for instance, reporters uncovered 16 front groups run by the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — the largest lobby group for Big Oil in the West. A leaked presentation by WSPA’s president revealed that the Association was using these fake organizations to create the illusion of public opposition to climate policies.

So how can you tell when some new public-facing group or Facebook page or other branded organization is, in fact, a front group or astroturfing effort?

Opposition Research 101: How to Unearth Front Groups and Unbranded Campaign Backers

Oppo 101: How to Unearth Front Groups and Unbranded Campaign Backers

Figuring out who backs a front group is more of an art than a science. Sometimes it is like peeling back layers of an onion, where no single piece makes sense on its own but you can eventually see what’s inside at its core.

That said, using some or all of these tactics can help you figure out what forces are behind shadowy front groups or astroturfing efforts. One note of caution: in some cases, you may not be able to say who backs the front group with 100 percent certainty. Utilizing these steps should at least, most of the time, help you determine who the final “candidates” are.

Here are some best practices, complete with visual aids, to help you crack the code and find out who is paying for or coordinating these opposition efforts.

Closely Analyze Websites and Social Media Pages

When phone numbers or addresses are listed

If they do list an address, note where it is and, in all cases, Google and DuckDuckGo the address and/or the phone number (like this “773-998-5678” and also “(773) 998-5678” and also “7739985678”) to see what other companies or organizations share (or have shared in the past) that same address or phone number. Washington, D.C. is home to many of the nation’s largest professional PR and lobbying groups, and often one firm will operate several front groups with different corporate interests out of the same address. 

Similarly, within states, PR firms and lobbying groups are generally located in capital cities. If you find other groups share the same address, look up those groups on DeSmog.com, SourceWatch.org, Energy and Policy Institute, LittleSis, Wikipedia, Google, and DuckDuckGo to see if they are already known front groups or if people associated with the front group have been documented to have been paid to work in front groups in the past. 

Also, here it’s worth looking to see if the group lists its members. Sometimes front groups are, paradoxically, oddly transparent on their websites. Make sure to click around everywhere you can on the website in the quest for clues.

The Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) is a front group for a wide range of fossil fuel corporations, trade associations, and sometimes even the host of other offshoot front groups. CEA is administered by the Houston-based lobbying and law firm HBW Resources. Here’s how we know. 

HBW Resources “Contact Us” Page (notice the Houston address and phone number). 

Consumer Energy Alliance “Contact Us” Page (again, notice the Houston address and phone number). 

Tellingly, the staff names match for both HBW Resources and the Consumer Energy Alliance, too. Sadly, it’s not usually this easy. But sometimes it really is quite easy, and just takes a bit of snooping around.

Further, Consumer Energy Alliance lists its members on its website. This is not common, but always worth checking.

When staff names are listed 

Search for staff names on Google and DuckDuckGo with quotation marks, e.g. type in “Bill Gates” or “Jeff Bezos,” and make sure to try every possible iteration of the name, including nicknames, middle names, middle initials, etc. 

If the staff is large, try a few of the most prominent names. If it’s small, try them all. See where else they have worked, as well as if any news articles include hints about their corporate ties. 

Make use of LinkedIn during this process, as well as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media sites. Cast a wide net, as each website may only offer a partial picture but looking at them as a collective may offer a fuller look at all of the pieces of the puzzle. 

On Twitter/X, it’s also worthwhile to check out who follows the page and who has retweeted content (both individuals and groups), as that too can offer clues. Look at who the front group interacts with and whose content the group shares on various social media sites. If it’s the same web of groups or maybe even just one group or corporation or trade association, it’s a telltale sign of whose interest the group ultimately serves. 

Finally, check out who else is sharing the content that the group is sharing. That can be done on the search bar of websites like Twitter/X and Facebook, located at the top of the website and app. For example see figure 5.

When no phone number or address is listed 

If the group’s website does not include a street address, phone number, nor a staff roster, be suspicious. Likewise, if the site only uses a contact form or offers a way to donate by credit card but gives no fixed office to which you can mail a check, be suspicious. That said, gather any and all information you can from the donation section of the group’s website, as sometimes that can offer key clues about who backs the organization. You could even give a tiny donation to see what shows up on the email confirmations. 

Look for any links that might provide further details. Documents that can be downloaded from the website can be particularly useful, because you can look at the “properties” of a document and learn more about who created them.

Download PDFs and JPGs from the website, and search them for metadata. This can be done on Adobe Acrobat for PDFs and MetaData2Go.com for both PDFs and JPGs. Metadata, in essence, shows who the last saved author of the document is. Sometimes those authors may be staffers for key industry trade associations, PR/public affairs firms, or companies. 

Here is an example of how you can do it. On Adobe Acrobat, you hit “command” and “D” or go to File and click “Document Properties.” In the case below, a Consumer Energy Alliance report published in September 2023, there is no author listed. In other words, a dead end. But here we have a successful example for you to examine, see figure 6.

This Western States Petroleum Association-funded front group illustrates this tactic well. Their website doesn’t list any contact information, and only features a form fill for contacting the organization. 

However, the group’s “About Us” section has a “Download Sign-up Form” option, which created a PDF. That PDF lists an author with the name of Brooke Armour. Armour, according to her LinkedIn page, is the Executive Vice President of the California Business Roundtable. This is a telltale sign that this is likely a California Business Roundtable front group. This does not mean other groups are not also involved. 

Here’s what the successful metadata search looks like:

What can you learn from Youtube videos?

In examining YouTube, make sure to check out the contact information. As an example, here’s the American Trucking Association’s Youtube page:

Find press releases and other media alerts on the website

Check out press releases and media alerts. Sometimes those offer points of contact: either phone numbers or email addresses. Look those up using the tactics described above.

This group sure sounds like it supports electric vehicles, but its activities prove otherwise. So who is behind it? One of its press releases from April 2023 offers a clue. Someone from APCO Worldwide, a firm with ties to Big Tobacco and Big Oil according to Sourcewatch and DeSmog.com, is listed as the point of contact on that press release. See below:

That contact, Alex Adams, formerly worked for one of the oil and petrochemical sector’s largest trade associations, according to his LinkedIn profile: American Fuel & Petrochemcal Manufacturers (AFPM). This is far from a “smoking gun,” but it could be a hint that AFPM may have some tie-in to the campaign. It helps to know that AFPM, too, has for years opposed vehicle electrification (as the DeSmog profile on the group makes clear).

Reverse image search on websites 

Reverse image search tools can also come in handy here.The three best free ones are Google Images, Yandex, and TinEye. Just right-click and save the image and then upload it back into the search engine to try to figure out its origin. Maybe it’s just a stock photo from another website that ties the front group to a parent organization. You never know where the photo journey will take you until you plug it in and find out.

Check Website Domain Registration History and the Web Archive 

CentralOps.net Domain/Web Registration 

A great way to discover who set up a website, though not infallible, is the website CentralOps.net. If the website registrant was not savvy enough to mask who created the website, it can offer a look behind the curtain including phone numbers, addresses, and a name. Perhaps you will not find all three at once, but unwise website registrants sometimes leave behind bread crumbs.

In 2017, “Your Energy America” was a newly formed front group pushing Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast gas pipeline. By tracing hosting information for the group’s website, DeSmog discovered the PR firm behind the group: DDC Advocacy.

Once DDC Advocacy was revealed as the backer of the front group promoting the natural gas industry, it could be combined with the Web Archive and deep web searches to discover more information about the group. One important thing to note when utilizing CentralOps.net is to check all the boxes at the top and also to get rid of “https” or “http” and the double backslash before web domains. In other words, just plug in yourenergyamerica.com and none of the other stuff before or after it. Otherwise, the search will not work.

Using the Web Archive 

The Web Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine, is administered by a nonprofit known as the Internet Archive. For open source researchers, it’s one of the most important tools that exist, as it saves old versions of websites that can often be revelatory dating back to the websites’ origins. There are multiple ways to make use of the research repository. But first, let’s start with how to perform the two main methods of digging up old versions of archived websites.

1. Grab old versions of the websites as far back as they do, and go hunting accordingly. For Your Energy America, which goes back to 2017, the Web Archive reveals a website.

Color-coded blue calendar dates are historic versions of the website available for viewing and digging into. Green or yellow means it’s unavailable. See below from 2018:

Here’s what a 2018 version of the website looks like, depicting the power of the Web Archive.

The Web Archive is also a great place to look when links go “dead” and no longer function online. The link may have been archived and thus may still exist within the Wayback Machine. It’s never a guarantee, but in all cases, give it a shot. 

Web Archive enables another way to search archived websites besides by date. In addition to putting in a full domain, try searching it partially. For example: “IOGCC” instead of “iogcc.ok.gov”, like this:

Why is this useful? Two reasons: 

1) It enables someone to see older domain pathways for an organization’s website, which might be missed if the website domain was updated over time. This can be seen above via the example of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), which shows three pathways that direct to the IOGCC’s website beyond the current one with the “ok.gov” suffix.

2) The indexing function (circled above to show how to access it) can be useful, but it’s complicated. Indexing captures all of the portals and also all photos and videos posted within the website. This could have taken hours to search them all if you were to click around to all the old captured versions of the website.

So what are we seeing above? Circled on the “ok.gov” suffix, there are 21,629 versions of the website captured on a year-by-year basis between 1999 and2014, and within those captures there are 1,805 different website portals (or basic designs) and 818 photos.

But what do you do once you approach the index? The answer is: it depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for Board members, search “board.” If you’re looking for a specific form of oil drilling like hydraulic fracturing (“fracking” or “fracing”), search “hydraulic” or “fracking” or “frac” and see what pops up within the filter results bar. In this case, an easy approach is to simply utilize the first four letters to encompass all: “frac.” See below for a targeted look at how the organization engaged on this issue over its history via forensic examination of its digital footprint.

Broadening your Archive.org Search

The Web Archive is only one portal within Archive.org. As you can see on the homepage, one has the ability to run a search either through the Wayback Machine for internet searches or more broadly via Archive.org.

While Archive.org has many wings, one search will actually cover all of its nodes. Once again, the best practice is always to have a very precise search term. For our purposes, let’s use the law firm Nielsen Merksamer, which registers and administers front groups created by the powerful Western States Petroleum Association. Importantly, because we are looking for where that term appears within published texts, make sure to click the “search text contents” circle. Make sure to put quotation marks around the words like “Nielsen Merksamer,” as depicted in figure 17.

Here’s what that search will yield: the current number of results. These results pull from a wide universe of archived documents: books, government documents, historic lobbying registries, political almanac books, and court documents. 

Deep Web Searches 

You’ve heard “just Google it,” but for opposition researchers, that doesn’t cut it. First of all, there are many ways to use Google and lots of information indexed within the website. They include the regular search function, Google News, a newspaper archive, Images, Books, and many more. While results from all of these fields may pop up in an overall Google search, that’s not always the case, and they’re all worth focusing on if you have the time.

Here’s where you have to have a basic understanding of so-called Boolean searches. Don’t worry about what “Boolean” means. It’s just a way of organizing and formatting your searches to refine results. 

The most important tactic here is the use of quotation marks around the term you want to search, as well as including the word “and” in between words when searching multiple things. Since both the Western States Petroleum Association and Nielsen Merksamer are mentioned above, here’s an example of a search that ties them together utilizing a Boolean search inquiry.

The top five results include, among them, a lot of key information that would allow one to begin to map the relationship between the firm and the front group.

Another useful search function is utilizing Google to pull from specific websites. Want to see what the Western States Petroleum Association has posted about fracking over the years?

• First, find the website domain.

• Second, plug it into Google next to the function “site:,” as in: site:wspa.org “fracking” as depicted below.

Google News is surprisingly tricky to use, and it’s not worth going directly to it to search. Instead, hit the “news” button on Google after running a general search. From there, make sure to organize by the past year and by date chronologically within the “tools” bar see figure 20.

Don’t hesitate to try the same searches in Images, too, as well as Books. Dig, dig, dig. Keep digging. Of course, Google isn’t the only search game in town. See: DuckDuckGo, which can sometimes be more comprehensive than Google and less prone to being “gamed” by search optimization professionals over the course of time. DuckDuckGo doesn’t offer a site search function, but you can also conduct a Boolean search using quotation marks and the word “and” on the platform just like you can on Google. Other far more in-depth Boolean search tricks for both Google and DuckDuckGo can be found at those links.

One more useful search tool is WorldCat, a repository of all of the world’s library catalogs. Sometimes good old-fashioned libraries contain some amazingly useful materials. Give it a shot and remember again to Boolean-optimize the search. As you can in figure 21, a “Nielsen Merksamer” search yields 28 results. A quick glance at the results shows some potentially valuable materials for actionable intelligence on the law firm, including oral history interviews with the firm’s founding members in which they (likely) lay out the firm’s founding philosophy, clients, and tactical/operational practices.

Digging into Corporate Records

Incorporation Searches 

Not all front groups are businesses or have official corporate documents, but sometimes they are. It’s always worth checking. Why? Because it can offer a business address or addresses as well as important contextual information about when the front group was formed and who the executives that registered the front group are.

So how do you do it? Every state has a Secretary of State’s Office, and that’s where you go. While you could click around on the websites of each of the individual Secretary of State Offices to figure out how to run the search you need, it’s far easier just to type in the state name and then “division of corporations entity search” to pull up the page you need to run the search.

Here’s how that looks:

From there, just search for the name of the business entity. For the front group in question, here’s what results:

Can’t find it in the state you think it should be in? Try the search function at OpenCorporates.com, a website that trawls all of the state registries and some international ones too, like this

One useful note about OpenCorporates.com: you can also search by executive, an option generally not available on the state sites. However, OpenCorporates.com is more like a directory or docket: you can find the results of where records are located, but you can’t pull the records themselves. So, for Consumer Energy Alliance (shown above), you would then have to go to the Texas Secretary of State website to pull those records (and pay a small fee to view or download those records; unique to Texas, as far as fees are concerned).

Warning: front groups generally DO NOT register as corporations. That’s what makes these groups deceptive: not knowing who backs them. But sometimes they do, as the case above shows, so it’s best to always check.

Identifying Personal Details About Staff

So you have some names associated with a group, and want to find out more about them. Most leave a pretty big digital footprint, but the majority of that information probably isn’t going to be very useful. How do you find out what matters to you: where they have earned paychecks? Who have they worked with in the past? Are they on a Board of Directors with anyone noteworthy? 

Here are a few ways to try to find relevant information for your cause.

LittleSis.org

LittleSis is great for figuring out a bit about who people are and also who they’re connected with via their jobs, Boards, organizations, campaign contributions, and more. The site calls itself an “involuntary LinkedIn,” as well as “the opposite of Big Brother” in that it puts this information out into the world for the public good rather than for corporate benefit.

LittleSis.org also features a very useful database of “oligraphs,” or graphics it creates that depicts these interconnected webs. If you’re lucky, the person you’re looking up will have made an appearance on one or more of those. (You can also make your own, which is a nice way to map out connections between the influential people working against your campaigns).

SourceWatch.org

SourceWatch is a progressive Wikipedia of sorts, specializing in front groups, lobbying associations, PR firm watch-dogging, and more. Unlike Wikipedia, it is less influenced by corporate PR firms, and it is administered by those whose job it is to challenge corporate power. It’s been around for decades, and it is especially great for finding early practitioners of deceptive PR practices and for finding web links that may not be dead that can be plugged into the Web Archive for prospective further reading.

DeSmog.com Denier Database

Exclusively focused on climate deniers and those who do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, DeSmog’s site is continuously growing and regularly updated. 

Revolving Doors Project

A relatively new project, Revolving Doors releases comprehensive opposition research reports that lay bare the networks behind causes beneficial to corporate power, and often that also includes the fossil fuel industry. At the very least, it’s worth reading their reports for research orientation and inspiration. For example, check out these two reports (report one and report two) on “certified natural gas” as one exemplifying their stellar deep-diving work. Their recent work on hydrogen also exemplifies their stellar deep-dive work. See some of their recent work at here: example one and example two.

Energy and Policy Institute (EPI)

Energy and Policy Institute does, hands down, the best watchdog work on fossil fuel utilities. That includes making profiles of key companies, industry trade associations, and front groups. If there’s a major state, regional, or national effort, it’s likely EPI has a profile on either the group or some of the people that lead it. 

Global Energy Monitor (GEM) Wiki

Like SourceWatch, GEM maintains incredible profiles on utility companies, oil companies, coal companies, and sometimes the people who run them. 

Wikipedia

You’ve used it hundreds of times, and it’s always worth examining. But remember: Wikipedia is contested ground, and major PR firms pay staffers money to keep entries well curated for powerful vested interests. 

The first four resources listed above are all progressive organizations with helpful staff. Contact them if you have questions or need help. It’s their job to help you learn more about these opposition figures! If your case is interesting, you might even convince them to do some research for you. 

While these are all great places to look, they ultimately rely on people to keep the profiles up to date. This means that even the best websites can’t keep up with the steady stream of front groups and astroturf organizations that keep springing up.

Social Media Digging

What if you want to find personal details about people involved in front groups on social media? You might find some outrageous statements that discredit them as messengers on your issue, or maybe their posts will reveal other things that could be used against them. You can search the sites and platforms themselves and then scroll their feeds, but there are some other useful tools you can also deploy.

SkopeNow

SkopeNow is prohibitively expensive for most, but it’s worth asking your partners if anyone has a membership. This is an incredibly effective, efficient way to search a person’s name and find all of their social media accounts in one spot, and it will even include accounts on platforms you wouldn’t have thought to search for.

Twitter/X

Search the person’s name with the word “Twitter” on Google (e.g. “Elon Musk Twitter”) to find their profile. That’ll usually do the trick, but not always. Sometimes you have to go directly to the website to find the person, especially if they have a locked profile. Of course, if they have a locked profile, the only way you’ll be able to see it is if you request access to it and connect with them. Generally, that’s not something you’ll want to do for someone you’re running an opposition campaign against.

What makes Twitter/X useful is figuring out what this person stands for and what kind of content they “like” and retweet. Once you figure out their username, here’s how to run a search for something specific you’re looking for – and you can then click “latest” to show the most recent results first. See figure 25.

LinkedIn

This is the single best platform for figuring out someone’s career experience and work background as well as how they portray themselves to a professional audience. Sometimes, their posts or what they “like” can also be illustrative.

Most usefully, LinkedIn can reveal where they have worked in the past, what company they currently work for, and who their colleagues are, which you can figure out by clicking the company name and/or logo within the subject’s professional history and then clicking “People.” For example see figures 26 and 27:

A word of caution: unless you have a paid profile on LinkedIn, people can see if you’ve viewed their profile. If you’d rather operate in stealth, then get a free professional version trial and remember to cancel it before you get charged. Of course, that person may not even notice unless they check the platform regularly, which only a small percentage of users do. Operate accordingly with that knowledge.

Facebook

Facebook is only really valuable in seeing what type of content a person shares and if they are moderators of any pages or members of any groups. The savviest operators working for professional PR and public affairs firms will make themselves completely unsearchable on the platform, but most users don’t know how to do this.

Instagram

Similar to Facebook, this is really only useful for seeing how a person presents themselves personally to the online world. As Instagram is entirely oriented around sharing photos, videos, and graphics, it can paint a much less complete portrait than other platforms. If they post photos with others, it’s a good chance to figure out who their friends and family are, too. Generally, if it’s very personal in nature, it’s not of much use or interest. Sometimes, Facebook posts are either deeply ideological or may show them attending events. This can be useful and actionable intelligence.

TikTok

Across all platforms, search all of the usernames you find on Google and DuckDuckGo, and if you find one on one platform, you can try that same “handle” or username on the others, including TikTok.

Follow the Money

Digging through 990s

In short, a Form 990 is a tax filing that is, by law, a public record that nonprofits must complete each tax year. If a group has incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit under U.S. law, 990s can be a great source of information about the organization. And even if the group hasn’t incorporated in this way, it’s highly possible they’ve received funding from other nonprofits or foundations that list said funding on their 990s.

With that in mind, ProPublica has created a one-stop shop for the vast majority of 990s filed with the IRS dating back to the past two decades or so. If you need something further back than that, IUPUI’s philanthropy archives is another great hub for historic filings.

ProPublica’s database can be searched by nonprofit entity or by keyword. The former searches for organization’s filed documents, while the latter crawls all of the 990s on file for the keywords searched. Below is what searches look like both by nonprofit and by keyword:

As can be seen above in figure 29, a search for the Western States Petroleum Association shows the lobbying trade association appearing on others’ forms, an indication those groups receive funding from WSPA. One would have to actually click on those hits to determine the precise nature of the funding relationship.

So that’s exactly what we’ll do next, to answer the most fundamental question: how does one actually glean information from these filings, and what do these documents look like?

One key section to check out in every case is the first page, which contains a business address, a phone number, and the leader’s name and address.

The next section, Part I, also offers an overall look at an entity’s spending. Do they have a lot of money? What kinds of things do they spend it on thematically? This is the bird’s eye view of the organization’s finances.

The top of Part VII of the Form 990 shows who leads the group, which isn’t always readily apparent or comprehensive on groups’ websites if it’s available at all. If these people receive compensation, that too is disclosed.

Organizations with paid staff also list their top-paid staffers who work at the executive level within this section, as WSPA does below in 2021 Form 990:

Further, top independent contractors associated with the organization are worth checking out, as those often include the five highest paid entities. Also found in Part VII, that can include law firms, PR firms, advertising services companies, and other key people.

Searching Lobbying Databases

Lobbying databases exist in three buckets: federal, state, and local. At the federal level, you can search OpenSecrets.org or the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database. The former is maintained by a third party, the Center for Responsive Politics, while the latter is an official government website. Both are worth tapping into for different reasons. 

Open Secrets does an amazing job of collating and collecting data and presenting it in visually appealing ways. If using the LDA database, make sure to search by client as depicted below. Once you get results, you can click into the quarterly filings to see what various companies and trade associations lobbied for within Congress, federal agencies, the White House, and its internal agencies.

Once you access the forms, what’s most relevant to learn here is information about their lobbying agenda. Sometimes they will only list broad issues, but sometimes it gets very specific. In some cases, they even note specific bills. Here’s and example from a Koch Industries-funded advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, from Q3 2023.

Every state has some version of what the U.S. Senate maintains, with varying qualities. The same goes for most major counties and cities, again to varying qualities and disclosure levels. There is, however, no central repository, and these websites are sadly often difficult to navigate.

Campaign Finance

If you can figure out who’s backing a front group, it is always worth checking out how they are spending on political campaigns. This can be in your local city or county, as well as at the state and federal level.

While Open Secrets maintains this data, so too does the U.S. Federal Election Committee at the federal level. Make sure to search by contributor as in the example below.

Beyond national data, a good one-stop shop for state-level data in all 50 states is FollowTheMoney.org. Like Open Secrets, it is maintained by nonprofit staffers, and the data comes in a bit later than the state campaign contribution websites will post it. If you’re seeking the most up-to-date information, just Google your state’s name and “campaign finance database” and you should find the state resource. Then plug the information you seek into the website’s search function tool. 

Local information can be found the same way. Generally speaking, the bigger the city, the better the quality of the information posted online.

Elected Officials: Personal Financial Disclosures

If the person you are seeking information on is a former or current elected official or someone who worked for the federal government, you can find personal financial disclosure information. At the federal level, these are made available via a FOIA request from the U.S. Office of Governmental Ethics for senior federal agency staffers. They’re also available for congressional members in the recent past and in the present day via OpenSecrets.org here. If you’re seeking senior staffer personal financial disclosure forms, those can be requested via the Office of the Clerk for the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate Financial Disclosures (eFD) website, respectively.

States and local municipalities also have their own versions of these databases, but they are generally less easily searchable than at the national level (with California’s Form 700s being a rare exception).

Facebook Ad Spending

Ad spending is generally opaque, but Meta (the company that operates Facebook and Instagram) made it transparent in 2018 via an online library In the library, you can search by entity, and it tracks the date(s) of the ad buy, the price paid, and all of the ads run on those respective dates. Facebook ads are far cheaper than other forms of advertising, and they are often used by front groups trying to target their message geographically to a very specific audience. 

If you are seeing advertising on Facebook or Instagram on an issue related to your campaign, it is definitely worth digging into the campaigns to learn more.

In 2018, a front group called Energy4US organized a Facebook campaign to rally against Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Energy4US.org described itself as a “coalition of consumers, businesses, and workers united in the belief that energy empowers us, allows us choices and improves our quality of life.”

“The Obama mileage rules will add $3,000 to the cost of your new car. Tell Washington to FIX the Obama MILEAGE RULES,” the ad read, linking to an online petition.

Through the Facebook ad database, you could discover that Energy4US sponsored a series of similar ads opposing CAFE standards. One example below:

Using this example, how did we find out who was behind Energy4US?

Using the Web Archive, we figured out that, as of 2015 the Consumer Energy Alliance’s former website, SecureOurFuels.org, redirected to Energy4US.org.

Now, SecureOurFuels.org is currently owned by an industrial supply company, but the Web Archive showed us the domain used to redirect to Energy4US.org.

But how do we know that SecureOurFuels.org was once a Consumer Energy Alliance project? Using the Web Archive, we find that the first and second blog posts at the Energy4US website confirm that Energy4US.org grew from CEA‘s SecureOurFuels campaign.

Reaffirming that connection, the Web Archive also revealed that before SecureOurFuels began redirecting to the Energy4US website in 2015, contact information at the SOF website listed names of CEA staff members Casey O’Shea, Michael Whatley, and David Holt. Michael Whatley and David Holt are two of the three founders and partners listed at HBW Resources. (See the very first case study above as a reminder of how we know that CEA and HBW are essentially the same organization).

But as we keep digging on the domains, what did we learn? According to old WHOIS website registration information, Energy4US was formerly registered to Victor Adams, head of websites and marketing at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM). Other deviations of Energy4Us.com and Energy4Us.org were also registered to Victor Adams.

Using the very tools we’ve outlined in this section, we were able to find out that Energy4US, a campaign with no formal incorporation records (a.k.a. a front group), was created by some manner of partnership between the Consumer Energy Alliance (which is itself a PR project of the PR and public affairs firm HBW Resources) and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers. The Big Oil trade group tried its best to cover its tracks and use Energy4US as a fake “third-party” voice to fight against clean car standards, but this basic opposition research exposed these ties. By unearthing this, advocates ultimately got them embarrassed on the front page of the New York Times.