Hannah Thompson-Weeman

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83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Hannah Thompson-Weeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Bites and Bytes Podcast · Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack · 4 Mar 2025 podcast

Or chaining yourself to a U-Haul outside of a poultry plant and literally saying, we want to disrupt the supply chain. We do not want chicken to be getting to the grocery store. That's when it becomes this food access issue for consumers. So we're seeing more and more discussion of this as we've seen the activists become more emboldened.

And, you know, they're talking about being inspired by groups like the Animal Liberation Front, being inspired by groups like Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. which are the type of groups and activities, things like arson, things like harassing people's family members, making those kind of threats, which is why the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act came about.

So we're definitely hearing more concern that these incidents as they escalate are going to get to that point. But a lot of times it's the economic damages that, again, it's a good thing that our food system is resilient and has been able to adapt around these challenges and that they haven't necessarily risen to that level. But that kind of stops cases from moving forward a lot of times.

There can definitely be challenges with really pinpointing what was a cause. A very recent example, one of the most extreme groups that we follow, Direct Action Everywhere, they had an ongoing criminal trial in California stemming from various incidents there. And during the trial, they went back to some of the farms that were involved in the trial.

to say oh this is these problems are still happening you know we still need to keep investigating and then there were avian influenza outbreaks on those specific farms that they had been to so the california department of food and agriculture put out one of their statements saying that that was you know it's hard to say definitively so even the cdfa statement doesn't say we know that this is what caused this because it's hard to your point to pinpoint but they said this is a probable

We have reason to believe that this could have been because it's very odd that these two farms, that these same people admitted that they went to within this timeframe, then had an outbreak within this timeframe. Back when this group really came on the scene, there was also similarly, it was on the heels of like the 2014, 2015 high path AI outbreaks.

And they had gone into an egg farm that that barn of birds had to be depopulated out of concern for what could have been introduced there. Unfortunately, it is hard to necessarily pinpoint and say, you know, this is exactly what this is attributable to, which also makes it difficult for them to face consequences.

There are definitely some examples we can point to. A lot of times it is more small scale incidents. Andrew, I think it might have been the panel that you were on at our conference where I learned the term. It's not catfishing. It's romance fraud. It's the official law enforcement definition for, you know, misrepresenting who you are to strike up relationships. But we have seen that happen.

where some of these extremists will have fake online personas to strike up relationships with plant and farm workers to get information about operations.

We've also seen that they will gain access and then get information off of computers, install spyware to, again, be able to piece together the supply chain and figure out when certain things will be happening on the farm that they want to quote unquote document or figure out what major customer restaurant retail this farm supplies to. So we've seen those kind of smaller scale incidents.

And then the other thing we've seen that's somewhat alarming is some of the bigger trends of, you know, we've seen feed mills be disrupted. We've seen, I believe it was JBS, be disrupted because of these large cyber incidents. And we see the activist groups admiring that. So they're saying, oh, we didn't do this, but we'd love it if we had.

And, you know, because if we can shut them down for a day, you know, that's exactly what they want to see happen. So there's definitely some concern. There's a group called the Vegan Hacktivists. They use hacktivist very loosely. They like code websites for people.

But there's definitely like leanings and, you know, seeing these big trends and how disruptive these ransomware incidents have been and them saying, how can we partner up with those people to do this in the name of our cause?

Well, one of the groups that I mentioned earlier that we follow very closely in order to be like a member of the group, you've got to, you know, show your bona fides. You've got to have your arrest record and you have to sign a liberation pledge that says I will not sit in a table or room where anyone is eating animal products.

You know, not just yourself, but family members, friends and, you know, obviously ideology behind that. But also it's a way to cut them away from their family members and from anyone that does have different beliefs than them to kind of herd them away. into this very extreme echo chamber. So it's very interesting, again, the way that this extreme mindset kind of permeates.

And back to what Kristen was saying too, you know, it is frustrating for producers that, you know, they're out here just trying to provide a product to people who want to eat it. And they have a lot of hurdles in between getting there. So for us at the Alliance, we're not a checkoff. We're not a trade association. We're not here to market anything. We're about choice.

So making sure that choices are available to people, whether that's animal protein or not. We you know, we love the corn and soy people, too. Whatever you want to eat is fine. Whatever aligns with your values and your budgets. It's when there's these extreme actors trying to influence what people even have the option to buy and eat. is when we get concerned and that's what we focus our efforts on.

So keeping choices available to people at a variety of price points is what we are here to do. But for these extremists, it's about the opposite. It's about taking choices away from people.

So there's some common sense things and probably from a risk management perspective, Mike would have things to add too. But a lot of what we talk about is making ourselves a harder target. So we don't want you to be paranoid, but we want you to take common sense measures because according to these people, it's so easy for them to get onto farms.

They actually released in the wake of the conviction of their leader in that trial I mentioned in California, they released a 149 page investigation manual. about how to get access to farms and plants.

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