The farm industry spied on animal rights activists; pushed FBI to treat them as ‘bioterrorists’
Since at least 2018, documents show, the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a nonprofit trade group representing the interests of US farmers, has been supplying federal agents with intelligence on the activities of animal rights groups such as Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), with records of emails and meetings reflecting the industry’s broader mission to convince authorities that activists are the preeminent “bioterrorism” threat to the United States. Spies working for the AAA during its collaboration with the FBI went undercover at activism meetings, obtaining photographs, audio recordings, and other strategic material.
DELL CAMERON: Hundreds of emails and internal documents reviewed by WIRED reveal top lobbyists and representatives of America’s agricultural industry led a persistent and often covert campaign to surveil, discredit, and suppress animal rights organizations for nearly a decade, while relying on corporate spies to infiltrate meetings and functionally serve as an informant for the FBI.
The documents, mostly obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit Property of the People, detail a secretive and long-running collaboration between the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD)—whose scope today includes Palestinian rights activists and the recent wave of arson targeting Teslas—and the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a nonprofit trade group representing the interests of US farmers, ranchers, veterinarians, and others across America’s food supply chain.
Since at least 2018, documents show, the AAA has been supplying federal agents with intelligence on the activities of animal rights groups such as Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), with records of emails and meetings reflecting the industry’s broader mission to convince authorities that activists are the preeminent “bioterrorism” threat to the United States. Spies working for the AAA during its collaboration with the FBI went undercover at activism meetings, obtaining photographs, audio recordings, and other strategic material.
The group’s ties with law enforcement were leveraged to help shield industry actors from public scrutiny, to press for investigations into its most powerful critics, and to reframe the purpose and efforts of animal rights protesters as a singular national security threat. The records further show that state authorities have cited protests as a reason to conceal information about disease outbreaks at factory farms from the public.
Zoe Rosenberg, a UC Berkeley student and animal cruelty investigator at DxE, says she’s hardly surprised that powerful private-sector groups are working to surveil the organization, but she finds their work with the police paradoxical. “If anyone should have the ear of law enforcement, it’s animal cruelty investigators exposing rampant violations of the law leading to real animals suffering and dying horrific deaths,” she tells WIRED.
Profiled by WIRED in 2019, DxE is a grassroots animal rights organization dedicated to nonviolent direct actions, including covert operations that often involve rescuing animals and documenting practices at factory farms that the group considers inhumane…
To gather intelligence on DxE, records show, the Animal Agriculture Alliance has surveilled the group for years. Confidential documents obtained separately by WIRED reveal undercover operators for the AAA embedded within the animal rights group and fed the trade organization daily reports about protests and meetings, as well as photographs, audio recordings, and other documentation. SOURCE…
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