This characterization of the AETA is not hyperbole: While the statute was ostensibly intended to protect research and commercial entities and their employees from violent attacks, criminal harassment, and vandalism by animal rights extremists, its broad, vague prohibition of "interfering" with an animal enterprise and affecting the profits of any related person or entity means that exposing the abuses of factory farms or successfully boycotting fur sales could be labeled acts of terrorism. Conceivably, some targeted activists could eventually prevail with First Amendment defenses at trial or on post-conviction appeal, but some would not. But all would suffer the panic of being targeted by a terrorism prosecution, and some would likely plead guilty to lesser offenses, surrendering their free speech rights to avoid imprisonment. CCR alleges that its clients (one of whom was previously convicted under an earlier version of the AETA), have simply ceased protesting, resorting to self-censorship to escape prosecution.

Why did Congress include non-violent advocacy in an anti-terrorism statute? Ten years after 9/11, that is essentially a rhetorical question. Fear mongering and the authoritarianism it breeds don't discriminate between actual and highly implausible or imaginary threats to security. Whatever dissenting or disruptive speech that authorities intensely dislike is increasingly liable to be condemned as terrorism. But the AETA also reflects a legislative trend simply not attributable to 9/11. To deter or punish particular acts -- like violent attacks on animal researchers -- Congress legislates in general terms, criminalizing speech or conduct barely related, if at all, to the evil it purportedly to seeks to control. Consider the Controlled Substances Act and its use by drug warriors against doctors who prescribe pain medication (and beware of any law enforcement crusade marketed as a "war.")

This is the "trust us" theory of legislating. It demands that we trust prosecutors to act in good faith, with a sense of proportion and respect for our rights to speech, privacy, and due process. It expects us to ignore overwhelming evidence that prosecutors are not inherently trustworthy, that they routinely abuse their broad discretion and persecute ordinary, generally harmless citizens for unwittingly violating over-broad laws.

The Supreme Court is sometimes complicit in these abuses; (the Court upheld the use of anti-terror, material support laws against peace activists.) But in U.S. v Stevens, Justice Roberts acknowledged and rejected the "trust us" approach to legislation. The animal cruelty video ban at issue in Stevens was "a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth," Roberts observed, and the government should not be trusted with it. The Court "would not uphold an unconstitutional statute merely because the Government promised to use it responsibly." The First Amendment "protects against the Government; it does not leave us at the mercy of noblesse oblige."