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posted by cmn32480 on Monday July 27 2015, @10:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the when-does-activism-become-terrorism dept.

I was saddened to hear that two individuals who released fur animals and vandalized fur farms across America were busted: http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/fbi-arrests-activists-accused-of-releasing-mink/article_6c169b5d-dbbc-5dd1-adb0-534ee46af88b.html

But the arrest is sort of beside the point and there are two interesting tidbits in there. First and less interesting, is the ridiculous charge of terrorism under the "Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act" -- seriously, what they did is just plain old crime. Before you know it, going 10 over on the freeway will be considered an act of terrorism.

More intriguing, despite a lack of details on how they got busted, is this tidbit:

The indictment states that they covered their tracks by avoiding phones or logging into known online accounts and email. Instead, they used public Internet computers and encrypted email and cash for purchases while traveling. They would allegedly withdraw hundreds of dollars while back home in the San Francisco Bay Area before another trip.

The FBI states that they drafted communiques and posted them online to publicize their actions on websites associated with "animal rights extremists."

I'm going to guess automatic license plate readers were involved. Pure guess.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday July 27 2015, @02:34PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 27 2015, @02:34PM (#214324) Journal

    I think you'll agree that terrorists are rather partial to car bombs and suicide bombs. They like to set these bombs off in places like markets, where they kill anyone who happens to be standing around, or passing through. Often enough, these bombs are set off by Muslims, who simply don't care that they might kill a dozen of their own, for each of the "enemy" that they might kill. They don't care about age, gender, political affiliation, occupation, religious alignment, or much of anything else.

    Oops. I disagree. I think there might be something to the accusations that you are in the habit of oversimplifying things. Just because you don't understand the strategy, doesn't mean that the strategy doesn't exist.

    Those acts are very very different from these two yokels who targeted a very specific set of people and businesses, all of whom are involved in the fur trade.

    Just because they are very different in some ways doesn't mean that they aren't similar in others. A key similarity here is that this is the use of force on targets which are not expected to deal with that sort of force.

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