FBI Adds Environmental Terrorist to Most Wanted List

In a double first for the FBI, a domestic terrorist has been included on the international most-wanted list, and he’s an environmental activist too.

The man in question is Daniel Andreas San Diego who’s 31 years old and describes himself as an animal rights extremist. The crime that got him onto the list is the planting of nail bombs in San Francisco in 2003. It’s alleged that San Diego was involved in the campaign that targeted researchers involved in animal testing.

San Diego also has links to SHAC: Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, and in January, in the UK, lengthy prison sentences were given to seven members of the organisation after an investigation over several years by Kent police.

Terrorist, extremist or activist – who decides?

What does this mean for environmentalists and environmental politics? The British case has highlighted the difficult balancing act required of police and the judiciary in allowing democratic public protest while protecting individuals from harm, harassment or threat in carrying out lawful (if sometimes unattractive and unpalatable) business.

In the USA, the largely untested Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act forbids ‘force, violence, and threats involving animal enterprises’ but not ‘any expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) protected from legal prohibition by the First Amendment to the Constitution.’

It’s clear to even the most limited intelligence that planting nail bombs and embracing trees threatened by developers are totally different forms of protest. The former threatens the innocent and unknowing and only an extremist would see it as anything but an atrocity – but there’s an increasingly grey area around the latter: if a protester chains herself to a tree, is she threatening anybody but herself with harm? Most people would say no, but if her protest became an economic threat …? If she and other protestors were able to stop a developer building a power station that could bring jobs to a depressed area …? Suddenly the situation isn’t so clear.

Public protest gets media attention, private protest may be harder to scrutinise

As we’ve seen in the UK, the police have been taking a hard line against eco-demonstrators: pre-emptive arrests of people accused of planning mass demonstrations, for example, and ‘kettling’ protestors at G20 for hours on end in public places without giving them a chance to leave the protest, to use toilets or to obtain food or drink. Recent public awareness of this limiting of the right to protest may cause a reversal of policy for public events, but where the line will be drawn on individual and private forms of protest is harder to determine.

In the meantime if you think you may know San Diego, he had distinctive tattoos that may now have been worked over to change their appearance: originally his chest bore a circular image of burning hillsides with the words ‘It only takes a spark’ printed in a semicircle below, plus burning buildings on  his abdomen and back and a leafless tree rising from a road on his lower back. He is vegan, has worked as a computer network specialist (LINUX), wears spectacles, is a good sailor and travels internationally.

G20 police courtesy of spiraltri3e at Flickr under a creative commons licence