The Transom

This is what is coming over the transom of our offices here at crocodyl, FOIA requests, internal memos, leaked company documents and other exciting tidbits. Feel free to add your research dossier here by creating a new Digital Records page. There you can add a description and upload a set of documents to be culled by our researchers.

TWC Unemployment Claim

Last edited by Ian Elwood on June 12, 2008 - 10:23am
Organization: 
Texas Workforce Commission
Select quotations: 
  • "The claimant was last employed by a foreign entity, Service Employees International, Inc (SEII) which is working in Kuwait, Iraq, Bosnia, Macedonai, Uzbekistan, Chad and Nigeria."
  • "SEII is a foreign entity, incorporated in the Cayman Islands with its principal place of business in Dubai, United Arab Emirates."
Full Description: 

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/images/twc.jpg

Suterra LLC Cease and Desist Letter to IndyBay

Last edited by crocodyl on April 23, 2008 - 4:46pm
Full Description: 

This letter was received by IndyBay in October of 2007, and claims that Suterra LLC has intellectual property rights over the chemicals in their pesticide, and orders that they cease publication of these ingredients. The letter claims that an EPA employee illegally leaked the ingredients to The Santa Cruz Sentinal, and they were republished on IndyBay.org. These ingredients are now published on the EPA's website:
http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/biopesticides/ingredients/product/prod_lep_pheromones.htm#129019
http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/biopesticides/ingredients/product/prod_lep_pheromones.htm#128980
Letter republished on IndyBay:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2007/10/12/doc101207.pdf

Santa Cruz Sentinel Cites Trademarked Suterra LLC Ingredients

Last edited by crocodyl on April 25, 2008 - 2:35pm
Full Description: 

This news clip is from the Santa Cruz Sentinel lists the ingredients of its product "Checkmate OLR-F" (Z)-11-Tetradecenyl acetate and (E)-11-Tetradecen-1-ol, acetate(E) that the company did not want published, citing a trademark on their contents.

http://crocodyl.org/sites/crocodyl.com/files/checkmate_ingredients2.jpg
Republished on Indybay:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2007/10/11/checkmate_ingredients2.jpg

Textron Cluster Bomb Marketing Video

Last edited by crocodyl on April 23, 2008 - 3:19pm
Full Description: 

This Textron marketing video, explaining the way a cluster bomb works, was originally on Textron's web page as referenced by the below links but has since been moved. A truncated version of the file still exists on multiple video sharing sites, such as YouTube.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/09/323648.html?c=on
http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbforums/archive/index.php/t-6163.html
http://hsrl.proboards39.com/index.cgi?board=f4&action=display&thread=1144284888
http://www.f-16.net/f-16_forum_viewtopic-t-3261.html

WikiLeaks Gag Order

Last edited by crocodyl on April 23, 2008 - 9:33pm
Full Description: 

This file was obtained on February 25th, 2008 from Cryptome, and is the Gag order that Juliuis Baer Group issued to the website.

Filetype Submissions

Last edited by crocodyl on April 23, 2008 - 9:35pm
Full Description: 

Sources within company profiles are often a PDF, Word Document or other multimedia files. Crocodyl has just added a file handling extension to be able to illustrate the type of file, before you download it. For example, Ibiblio has a copy of the US Congressional Record from 2007, and you can see that it is a PDF file before you choose to click on it.

US Government Reports on China's Economy

Last edited by crocodyl on April 25, 2008 - 2:32pm
Full Description: 

Attached is a zip folder with reports on China's Economy and retail sector. Here are China's Top 100 Companies, according to an August 2007 CNN report:

  1. China Petroleum and Chemical
  2. Petro China
  3. China Mobile
  4. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
  5. Bank of China
  6. China Construction Bank
  7. China Life Insurance
  8. China Telecom
  9. Baoshan Iron and Steel
  10. China Communications Construction
  11. Lenovo Group
  12. China United Telecommunications
  13. CNOOC
  14. China Netcom Group
  15. Ping An Insurance
  16. Foxconn International Holdings
  17. Minmetals Development
  18. PICC Property and Casualty
  19. China Resources
  20. China Shenhua Energy
  21. Aluminum Corp. of China
  22. TPV Technology
  23. Angang New Steel
  24. Bank of China Hong Kong Holdings
  25. China COSCO Holdings
  26. Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical
  27. Dongfeng Motor Group
  28. CITIC Pacific
  29. China Southern Airlines
  30. Air China
  31. TCL
  32. Huaneng Power International
  33. Bank of Communications
  34. Shanghai Electric Group
  35. Wuhan Iron and Steel Processing
  36. Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel
  37. China Merchants Bank
  38. China Eastern Airlines
  39. Maanshan Iron and Steel
  40. China International Marine Containers Group
  41. Hunan Valin Steel Tube and Wire
  42. Sinotrans
  43. Shanghai Automotive
  44. China Shipping Container Lines
  45. China Coal Energy
  46. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank
  47. TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings
  48. Harbin Power Equipment
  49. China Minsheng Banking
  50. Yunnan Copper
  51. Tangshan Iron and Steel
  52. Shanghai Material Trading Center
  53. Jinan Iron and Steel
  54. COFCO International
  55. Chongqing Changan Automobile
  56. Jiangxi Copper
  57. Suning Appliance Chain Store Group
  58. Datang International Power generation
  59. GOME Electrical Appliances Holding
  60. Bengang Steel Plates
  61. Laiwu Steel
  62. Digital China Holdings
  63. Gree Electrical Appliances
  64. ZTE
  65. Handan Iron and Steel
  66. Beijing Shougang
  67. Sinofert Holdings
  68. Shanghai Construction
  69. Xiamen C and D
  70. Shanghai Friendship Group
  71. Guangdong Midea Electric Appliances
  72. Great Wall Technology
  73. Weiqiao Textile
  74. Qingdao Haier
  75. Eastern Communications
  76. Beiqi Foton Motor
  77. Sichuan Changhong Electric
  78. Anhui Tongdu Copper Stock
  79. Inner Mongolian Baotou Steel Union
  80. Huaxia Bank
  81. China Vanke
  82. Hunan Nonferrous Metals
  83. AviChina Industry and Technology
  84. Sinopec Kantons Holdings
  85. Sinopec Yizheng Chemical Fibre
  86. Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery
  87. An Yang Iron and Steel
  88. Lianhua Supermarket Holdings
  89. Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group
  90. China Mengniu Dairy
  91. Daqin Railway
  92. Panzhihua New Steel and Vanadium
  93. Nanjing Iron and Steel
  94. Sinochem International
  95. Anhui Conch Cement
  96. Henan Shuanghui Investment and Development
  97. Huadian Power International
  98. Shijiazhuang Refining and Chemical
  99. Xiamen International Trade Group
  100. China Aviation Oil

Backups of Media

Last edited by crocodyl on April 23, 2008 - 10:23am
Full Description: 

Creating backups of sources is crucial to secure information that might be removed from a website you are citing. Uploading a backup to Crocodyl is one way to do this, perhaps displaying an icon as the secondary download link might be an elegant solution.

Citations of News Stories?

Last edited by crocodyl on April 25, 2008 - 2:33pm
Full Description: 

Often times news stories display at one url on a webpage, then after a few months go into an archive. This changes the url of the news story, and sometimes puts it behind a login or pay wall. This is problematic for a website like Crocodyl, because we routinely use online news stories as sources. If the link is broken then the source is no longer useful in verifying our factual assumption.

One technical fix to this problem is using a Mozilla Firefox extension called, Zotero, which was created by a great media democratization organization called The Center for History and New Media.

Zotero allows users to create a "Snapshot" of a web page, that is more robust than a simple screen capture. The snapshot maintains the linking structure, original files and HTML of the page, along with a time stamp of the when the page was accessed. All of this information is saved in a folder on your hard drive. By clicking "view snapshot" on the saved news story, you can later see the web page exactly as it was at the moment you read the story originally. Alternatively, you can click "Show file" and the location of the folder on your hard drive will be displayed. This is especially useful for web pages that might change as a result of a controversy. Taking a snapshot of the page prevents later changes from discrediting your source.

I am currently working on an elegant solution for displaying Zotero snapshots on crocodyl pages. Ideally, you could upload snapshots of news stories to serve as "clips" then link to them from the body of the company profile text. This way, we could avoid the problem of having links to other web pages change, or at least have a backup source if they did.

I have not seen other websites that integrate this functionality, so it would be a great new feature that would solve a fairly large issue for the online press. Anyone with ideas about an solution, please comment on this post.

Attached is a sample Zotero snapshot, in a zip folder.

Make the dirt stick

Last edited by crocodyl on April 25, 2008 - 2:34pm
Full Description: 

One of the questions that keeps coming up when we introduce people to the idea of Crocodyl is, "What do you do when the company tries to edit its own profile?" Our response has always been that we apply our standards of quality to the contributions, not the contributor. We are continually rethinking our strategy on how to offer accurate and timely information on corporations, while maintaining an open, community based framework. One recent development on Wikipedia illustrates a shift in the ecosystem of information online significant to this debate.

Wikipedia recently began altering the structure of articles on companies with a lot of controversy surrounding their activities. Perhaps because many companies police their Wikipedia pages, the site has taken to creating separate pages from the company profile. Royal Dutch Shell has successfully dodged a few pieces of bad PR by having a separate page for controversy, even though the page appears to have been created by a well meaning activist. Even the New York Times has a separate page, labeled "Criticism of The New York Times." This trend is problematic because it severs this important information from the pages that get the most traffic--the main company profile. We might be able to fill a void here by assuring that the "mud sticks" on our company profiles, adding a critical voice to the conversation. I think a critical part of this is trusted individuals and organizations acting as "sponsors" of a set of profiles by subscribing to the page, and checking the quality of new submissions, but I am curious to hear what other people think. Please feel free to add comments in response.

I recently had a conversation with Daniel Souweine, who has been working on a project to better integrate the environmental record of companies into their main Wikipedia profile, and he had some advice about how we could address this issue in Crocodyl. In an email he explained the phenomenon:

"What we have tried to do is avoid the controversy frame, which as you note ends up sluffing the important information to another article. Instead, we have tried to establish sections like "Environmental record" or "Health and safety record". These section headings are basically neutral, but with a company like Shell will end up skewing critical. But it is really hard for anyone to argue that they don't belong in the main article." He added,

"That said, if there is enough controversy, or really enough of any kind of information, it is actually consistent with WP guidelines to split it off. Put another way, it would be unwieldy to have all the stuff that is in controversy put in the main article. In those cases, I think the key is having a really clear summary of controversial issues in the main article. For example, the summary controversy section that is in the main Shell article right now is kind of all over the place and doesn't succinctly lay out the basics about what bad stuff they have done. For a list of all the articles we have worked on environmental issues, check out the task force page."