Activists who expose animal abuses on factory farms face the risk of being prosecuted as domestic terrorists.

Using the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in November 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has kept files on animal rights activists who have recorded incidents of cruelty towards animals on large farming operations. Now, though, a bureau task force has even recommended trying these individuals as terrorism suspects.

Activist Ryan Shapiro, who used the Freedom of Information Act to discover what the FBI was up to, told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s simply outrageous to consider civil disobedience as terrorism.”

“Civil disobedience” he added, “has a long and proud place in our nation’s history, from Martin Luther King to Occupy Wall Street, and the AETA takes that kind of advocacy that we celebrate from the civil rights movement and turns it into a terrorist event.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the AETA as unconstitutional, claiming the law is too vague and is discouraging political activism.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

USDA Sides with Humane Society to Stop Slaughterhouses Using Disabled Calves for Veal (by David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)