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

So what kind of drones to buy, what kind of heat sensing cameras to use to know whether people are inside the building or not, how to track trucks going from facility to facility to piece together the supply chain, just a ton of stuff there. And you know how to where to cut the plastic in a barn with plastic curtains so that people won't notice that you've been inside.

So they're putting it out there. They're telling us what they're doing. So it's up to us to be paying attention and mitigating all of those things. So we talk a lot just about basic things, you know, motion sensor lighting, our own cameras, no trespassing signage, locks and keypads that we actually lock. Having a process for verifying visitors to farms and plants.

being very strict about employees and always checking references and always doing background checks. So just being aware that these things are happening and taking those common sense measures is what we talk about a lot. And then we refer a lot of our members to more specific law enforcement agencies and then security focused firms to really get in the weeds.

I know some folks will come out and do security audits and actually walk around and tell them specifically what they need to be doing. But a lot of our recommendations are those kind of high level common sense things that we think everyone needs to be doing. Wow. Yeah. Mike, do you want to make any comments?

we probably have the right skill sets, but are they talking to each other is what our challenge is and what we try to bring folks together. Because a lot of times farmers or even large companies that deal with this, they don't know what they should report. They don't know who to report it to. They don't know what those guardrails are. And then vice versa.

Sometimes law enforcement doesn't know the bigger picture. Like, why is this important? What is the here? Or if they don't know about farms, if they don't know how farms are laid out, if they don't know some of the unique challenges about security in a farm setting, it can be hard for them to give advice.

So I think the knowledge bases are there, but we can definitely do more to connect them, which is we spend a lot of time doing that. We do a lot of presentations to law enforcement groups of what we're seeing in the activism space and then asking them, okay, what can we take back to our members and tell them, you know, we will report incidents when we find out about them to try to raise awareness.

But I think that's what we see is that the knowledge is there on both sides, but are they talking and are the right people talking to the right people? Probably not always.

Well, we try to play that role a lot and we do a lot like people in agriculture know us. They trust us, I hope, and they know that we have their back on these issues. So quite frankly, we're kind of the pass between of like, hey, can you vouch for me? Or, you know, law enforcement might say we're looking examples of this. Can you pull your membership?

And then we'll reach out to our membership and then kind of report back and vice versa. So I definitely think we encourage members to do that. So I don't blame them. You know, we tell them if somebody cold calls you or cold emails you, never take that at face value. You've got to vet them. So we encourage that. And hopefully we and others in our network can help.

make those connections of saying, you know, Hey, I've, I've met Andrew. I've met Mike. I know what their intentions are. I know what they're trying to do. Like we definitely encourage you to talk with them.

Uh, so it can kind of be that pass between some organizations that will join the Alliance just to be able to say like, we're, we're with you, you know, we support them too as kind of their, their credentials, their creds. So I definitely think that think that trust factor is big and we're, we're certainly encouraging that mindset of trust, but verify, uh,

And if we can help be part of that verification process, we're glad to do it.

Yeah, there's ones like that. And then in Oregon, which might be the same one where, you know, they let these mink free, but then they also destroyed animals. all these breeding records. So, you know, years of records are now gone and impossible to replicate. And mink don't exactly thrive in the wild.

So it's completely counterintuitive that these animals are not only not going to survive themselves, but also harm the ecosystem in that area. And we've seen a resurgence of the mink releases in the last year or two. There's one going on pretty prominently in Pennsylvania right now where an activist was allegedly

paid off by an activist group to trespass and release mink from this farm to disrupt the production of fur. So those kind of releases are big ones. And then the ones that really stand out for me are some of the ones that we have followed in Northern California, where it has been in conjunction with an activist conference that typically takes place in that area and kind of their big

crescendo of the event will be putting folks on a bus and busing them up to farms or plants so we're talking about hundreds of people and they will have a smaller group that has received training for trespassing and interacting with law enforcement they will wear certain colored armbands based on what level of like security access they have and what level of training they received

But then in court, they'll say, we didn't know we were breaking the law. I'm not sure how that works because I don't break the law on a daily basis. And I've also never received training about what to do when I get arrested. But that is what these groups, you know, they'll spend a day training. Here's what to say to police. Here's how to handle it.

If you get arrested, then they'll go put it in practice. So they'll bus, you know, hundreds of people to camp out for hours outside of a farm, a family farm, most of these incidents. And then they'll have a smaller group that goes inside, trespass, steals birds. And these are what some of those recent trials in California were focused on, some of these incidents.

And to your point earlier, you know, it's really a doomsday scenario for these farmers, but it's been reality for the handful. of folks in that area. And it's just a day long, eight hour, you know, we're watching the live stream. We're trying to coordinate with folks on the ground and help them deal with it as it unfolds.

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