Have You Signed A Petition Regarding Monsanto? Monsanto Might Have Your Information Soon.

Monsanto, the company behind a glyphosphate based herbicide ‘Round-Up’, has been targetted in multiple lawsuits representing people suffering from cancers that possibly resulted from exposure to Round-Up. Monsanto has managed to stall legal action against itself for years, with assistance from US Regulataors including executives at the US Environmental Protection Agency. 

Monsanto has also launched many lawsuits of it’s own, especially since the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded in 2015 that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic”.

The public exposure of Monsanto’s activities, and those of it’s government collaborators, has happened in slow motion, with little mainstream media coverage despite large scale protests in many cities and petition campaigns with signatures from all over the world. 

Now the fight against Monsanto could take a personal twist for individual opponents.

I recently received a notification from Avaaz.org, the popular online progressive campaign site featuring petitions on myriad subjects. Much of the e-mail was repeated requests for donations, but the information in between is cause for concern to anyone who has signed any of Avaaz’s petitions about Monsanto’s products.

“Dear Avaazers, 

We’ve just been hit with a 168-page court subpoena from Monsanto.

We have only days to respond, and it “commands” us to hand over every private email, note, or record we have regarding Monsanto, including the names and email addresses of Avaazers who have signed Monsanto campaigns!! 

This is big. They’re a $50 billion mega-corporation, infamous for legal strong-arm tactics like this. They have unlimited resources. If they get their hands on all our private information, there’s no telling what they’ll use it for. 

So we’re going to fight this. Because Monsanto may have unlimited resources to intimidate, but Avaaz has unlimited people power, and our members just aren’t afraid.

We urgently need to hire outstanding lawyers to go up against Monsanto’s best. Just fighting this subpoena will be costly, and it could be just the beginning. 

We don’t know Monsanto’s plan, but we know one reason why this is coming — Avaaz has repeatedly beaten Monsanto in huge regulatory battles, including blocking the long-term relicensing of glyphosate, the herbicide that is the cornerstone of their chemical empire. We’re winning. So they’re changing the game.

The subpoena indicates that Monsanto needs all our private information to fight class-action lawsuits against them claiming that their glyphosate caused people’s cancer. “

Avaaz is one of many petition sites that allow users to create their own petitions, and it is not the only one to host petitions regarding Monsanto and it’s activities. It is likely other petition sites and online campaign organizing hubs may also be pressured legally to turn over information about their users in the near future.