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How the Farm Industry Spied on Animal Rights Activists and Pushed the FBI to Treat Them as Bioterrorists
For years, a powerful ‘Big Ag’ trade group served up information on activists to the FBI. Records reveal a decade-long effort to see the animal rights movement labeled a legitimate terrorism threat.
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. That same fall, Goldsmith’s chemical-biological countermeasure unit within the WMDD quietly circulated a presentation to state law enforcement officials pointing to “unsubstantiated reports” that PETA, the animal rights nonprofit, had played some sort of role in the 2015 avian flu outbreak—allegedly collecting “contaminated carcasses” in an effort to spread the virus. Payne suggests weaponizing the allegations to achieve specific policy goals here in the US, such as allowing farmers to declare livestock facilities “no fly zones.” “Combined with the assessment from the FBI indicating activist trespass is a real and present biosecurity threat,” he writes, the Chinese pig-gang claims hand the industry “ammunition” to ensure sheriffs do a “proper job” when responding to complaints.
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