How the FBI and Big Ag Started Treating Animal Rights Activists as Terrorists
As COVID raged across northern California in March 2020, a pair of farm industry groups were worried about a different threat: animal rights activists.
Citing an FBI memo warning that activists trespassing on factory farms could spread a viral bird disease, the groups wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom to argue that their longtime antagonists were more than a nuisance. They were potentially terrorists threatening the entire food chain.
“The safety of our food supply has never been more critical, and we must work together to prevent these clear threats of domestic terrorism from being realized,” the groups wrote.
A coalition of transparency and animal rights groups on Monday released that letter, along with a cache of government documents, to highlight the tight links between law enforcement and agriculture industry groups.
Activists say those documents show an unseemly relationship between the FBI and Big Ag. The government–industry fearmongering has accelerated with the spread of bird flu enabled by the industry’s own practices, they say.
The executive director of Property of the People, the nonprofit that obtained the documents via public records requests, said in a statement that the documents paint a damning picture.
“Transparency is not terrorism, and the FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.”
“Factory farms are a nightmare for animals and public health. Yet, big ag lobbyists and their FBI allies are colluding to conceal this cruelty and rampant disease by shifting blame to the very activists working to alert the public,” Ryan Shapiro said. “Transparency is not terrorism, and the FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.”
Industry groups did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, the FBI defended its relationship with “members of the private sector.”
“Our goal is to protect our communities from unlawful activity while at the same time upholding the Constitution,” the agency said in an unsigned statement. “The FBI focuses on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”
A Federal Focus
The dozens of documents trace the industry’s relationship with law enforcement agencies over a period stretching from 2015, during James Comey’s tenure as FBI director, to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the more recent outbreak of bird flu, also known as avian influenza.
Animal rights activists have long said that federal law enforcement seems determined to put them in the same category as Al Qaeda. In the 2000s, a wave of arrests of environmental and animal rights activists — who sometimes took aggressive actions such as burning down slaughterhouses and timber mills — was dubbed “the Green Scare.”
The law enforcement focus on animal rights groups continued well after Osama bin Laden’s death, news clippings and documents obtained by Property of the People show.
In 2015, a veterinarian with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate told a trade publication, Dairy Herd Management, that eco-terrorists were a looming threat.
“The domestic threat in some ways is more critical than international,” Stephen Goldsmith said. “Animal rights and environmental groups have committed more acts of terrorism than Al Qaeda.”
Four years later, emails obtained by Property of the People show, Goldsmith met with representatives of a leading farm trade group, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, at a government–industry conference.
The meeting happened in April 2019, and within weeks the AAA’s president was warning Goldsmith in an email about planned protests by “by the extremist group Direct Action Everywhere,” a Berkeley-based group that conducts “open rescues” of animals.
Within months, the FBI was touting the threat from animal rights groups in stark terms in an official communication: the intelligence note partially produced by Goldsmith’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
The August 2019 note written with the FBI Sacramento field office said activists were accelerating the spread of Virulent Newcastle disease, a contagious viral disease afflicting poultry and other birds.
The note claimed that activists were failing to follow proper biosafety protocols as they targeted different farms, and could spread the disease between farms on their clothes or other inanimate objects. While the note did not point to genetic testing or formal scientific analysis to back up this assertation, it said the FBI offices had “high confidence” in their assessment.
Activists have rejected the idea that they are not following safety protocols, pointing to protests where they have donned full-body disposable suits.
The most withering criticism of the FBI note may have come from another law enforcement agency, however. Four months after the FBI document came out, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center rebutted the idea that activists were spreading disease.
Those activists, the Bay Area-based fusion center said in the note to local law enforcement, were nonviolent and posed a “diminishing threat to law enforcement.”
Citing the activists’ use of safety precautions and U.S. Department of Agriculture research, the fusion center said that “animal rights activists are probably not responsible” for any of the Virulent Newcastle disease outbreaks.
Links to Industry
Emails obtained by Property of the People suggest that the FBI regularly shared information with the Animal Agriculture Alliance, as both sought to spotlight the threat of animal rights activists. As new animal disease outbreaks occurred, the activists were regularly cast as potential vectors.
The nonprofit trade group, based in Washington, D.C., describes itself as an organization that defends farmers, ranchers, processors, and other businesses along the food supply chain from animal rights activists, on whom it regularly distributes monitoring reports to its members.
The industry’s concerns grew in 2020, as activists created a nationwide map of farms, dubbed Project Counterglow, that served as reference for locating protest sites.
The AAA’s president, Hannah Thompson-Weeman, sent out an email to industry leaders hours after the map was published.
“This is obviously extremely troubling for a lot of reasons. We are contacting our FBI and DHS contacts to raise our concerns but we welcome any additional input on anything that can be done,” she said.
In multiple emails, Goldsmith, the FBI veterinarian, distributed to other FBI employees emails from the AAA warning about upcoming protests by the activist outfits, including Direct Action Everywhere.
Another email from a local government agency in California showed that the AAA sent out a “confidential” message to members in June 2023 asking them to track and report “animal rights activity.”
The trade group provided members with a direct FBI email address for reporting what it called ARVE: “animal rights violent extremists.”
The AAA was not the only industry group using the FBI as a resource. The March 2020 letter to Newsom casting activists as potential terrorists was penned by the leaders of the California Farm Bureau Federation and Milk Producers Council. Those groups did not respond to requests for comment.
As the bird flu outbreak ramped up in 2022 and beyond, the industry’s claims that animal rights activists could spread disease were echoed by government officials, emails obtained by Property of the People show.
The Fallout
Animal rights activists say the claims by law enforcement and industry groups that activists are spreading disease have had real-world consequences.
In California, college student Zoe Rosenberg faces up to 5-and-a-half years in prison for taking part in what movement members describe as an “open rescue” of four chickens from a Sonoma County farm.
“It’s always a shocking thing when nonviolent activists are called terrorists.”
Rosenberg, a member of Direct Action Everywhere, has been identified by name in monitoring reports from the Animal Agriculture Alliance. For the past year and a half, she has been on an ankle monitor and intense supervision after prosecutors alleged in a December 2023 court hearing that she was a “biosecurity risk” because of ongoing bird flu outbreaks.
Rosenberg said last week she was taken aback by the similar allegations contained in previously private emails between law enforcement and industry.
“Instead of taking responsibility for what they are doing, they are trying to blame us. Of course, it’s always a shocking thing when nonviolent activists are called terrorists or framed as terrorists,” she said. “It just all feels backwards.”
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