Thanks Jason. We thought it was clear from context as well, but have edited the post to ensure that no one could construe it any other way. We are indeed working on volunteer labor and on a tight budget. Your assessment of our current stage and reason for our desire for confidentiality is accurate.
Society for the Protection of Insects
Karma: 77
Thanks Hugh. For the purpose of clarity, we are editing the words “pending cases” on the prior post and noting that it has been edited. The original ambiguity was not deliberate, for what it is worth. We meant it the way that your Claude session explains it, but we understand that there is a specific legal meaning.
Re: Litigation: It sounds like your read of “much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation, which we keep confidential” was something akin to “we are actively engaged in one or more already-filed lawsuits,” which is not how it was intended. What we meant was that litigation as a general strategy is one of our current efforts (as opposed to some other strategy, for example), and that confidentiality is important to us in that strategy. At this stage, this practically means things like researching issues and causes of action, searching for plaintiffs, consulting with potential witnesses, and other tasks performed in preparation for litigation. With that said, in the interest of disambiguation, we will edit the original post for clarity and note how it has been edited.
Re: Confidentiality: As for why confidentiality is important, this is because opposition could take more effective countermeasures to lower the effectiveness of our interventions if they knew exactly what we were doing or preparing to do.
Re: Pending cases: As others have noted in this thread, there are multiple reasonable interpretations of the phrase “pending cases.” We thought it understandable from the context of the post, but again, to be as clear as possible, we will edit the original post and note how it has been edited.
Re: Policy advocacy: The types of policy advocacy actions we engage in range from organizational outreach, public outreach, and legislator/regulator outreach. These are ongoing initiatives and not yet fully realized outcomes. We do not think that having the words “Reform Pesticide Use” on our website next to our other initiatives implies that we have already finished the initiative. Again, we are a very new organization run on volunteer labor trying to effectuate positive change.
Please feel free to let us know if there is anything else that you feel would help ensure clarity. Thank you.
This updated review contains multiple false statements that we must address directly.
False Claim: “SPI Uses ‘Confidentiality’ to Mislead the Public” SPI has never used confidentiality to mislead anyone. Our operational security concerns are legitimate and not uncommon to organizations doing legal and policy work.
False Claim: “SPI Used ‘Confidentiality’ to Mislead Vetted Causes” SPI had genuine concerns about how confidentiality was discussed in VettedCauses’ draft. However, we had no knowledge their review would be posted to the EA Forum. Only after seeing the forum post and the resulting confusion from our supporters did we feel obligated to explain why our work wasn’t more publicly visible, where we then made the decision to discuss it. We were responding to the community’s legitimate questions, not executing some deceptive strategy.
Mischaracterization of “Pending Cases”: VettedCauses claims we “legally never had a ‘pending case.’” Our use of “pending cases” refers to potential litigation in development and preparation—which is a common colloquial usage of the phrase. Legal work includes extensive preparation, research, and strategy development before any court filings occur, and this preparation can take months or even years.
False Claim: “It is impossible to reform pesticide use with $0” This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of advocacy work in general. Public advocacy, policy research, coalition building, and strategy development can all be done on a volunteer basis at zero cost. We have engaged in advocacy and continue to do so as volunteers.
False Claim: “SPI secures donations with inaccurate claims” We have been completely transparent with our donors about our stage of development, our accomplished tasks, our volunteer status, and our work. We have never made inaccurate claims to secure donations.
This strikes us as, assuming good faith, a misunderstanding. We would have appreciated the opportunity to clarify our statements before VettedCauses published these serious accusations. Addressing these false claims requires us to divert limited volunteer resources away from our advocacy work. We hope that in future reviews, VettedCauses will engage in follow-up dialogue when they have concerns about an organization’s statements.
As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions and we will be happy to provide information as transparently as we can. Thank you.
Thank you for the post about our organization. We’d like to provide some additional context that may help clarify to those interested.
SPI is indeed a very young, all-volunteer organization. We spent $0 in our entire first fiscal year (2024-2025) and remain underfunded in 2025, still operating on a volunteer basis.
Regarding our work: Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and preparation for litigation, which we keep confidential for operational reasons—sharing details publicly would compromise potential cases and policy advocacy strategies. This is not uncommon in certain arenas of legal and policy work. We are, however, happy to share information about our specific victories and interventions confidentially with interested funders who request it.
We understand VettedCauses’ methodology of requiring more transparency before making recommendations, and we respect that approach. However, we’d note that:
The nature of legal and legislative work often requires confidentiality
As a volunteer organization with zero budget in our first year, our capacity for public communications and website maintenance has been limited
We prioritize direct impact work over public relations when resources are constrained
To Eevee: Thank you for your support. We’re happy to provide you with updates; I’ve reached out on Slack.
We’re working to improve our public transparency as we grow, while balancing the operational security needs of our work. We welcome conversations with anyone who would like to learn more about our specific activities and impact. Thank you.
Edit: In response to VettedCauses’ concerns with our wording, we have changed the phrase “Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation” with “Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and preparation for litigation” and changed “sharing details publicly would compromise pending cases and policy advocacy strategies” to “sharing details publicly would compromise potential cases and policy advocacy strategies” to ensure clarity. The original wording was meant to convey that these are general strategies we employ, but given possible ambiguity on the meaning of “pending cases” and “efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation,” we think the edited wording will ensure there is a lower likelihood of misunderstanding.
Your implication seems to be that the filing fee is the only resource bottleneck, but there are other resource-consuming tasks involved (extensive fact finding, legal research, finding and consulting with witnesses, plaintiffs, hiring local counsel, etc.). These things take time and money, even when volunteers are working for free in their spare time.