'Terror' Group Web Site a Puzzle for Feds

May 5, 2003 -- -- Just days after the FBI raided an office of a group it calls a domestic terror threat, taking computers and files, the group's Web site proclaimed: It's business as usual.

"Even with their most dramatic efforts, the Feds are still always one step behind," a posting on the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA Web site said. "Well, we wish them fun times in combing through our stuff. In the meantime, it's business as usual and there's a campaign to be won."

SHAC, which the FBI has designated as a domestic terror group, focuses its attention on Huntingdon Life Sciences, a firm that contracts with other companies to do pharmaceutical testing. The group may be the most effective of the radical environmental and animal rights groups, or "movements," as both activitists and law enforcement officials call them.

Recently the group took its cause a step further — on the Internet. Like other movements that the FBI designates as domestic terrorists, such as the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, SHAC uses a Web site to report on the activities of its supporters.

But SHAC goes further, providing a clickable map of the United States for activists to locate the names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of companies that do business with Huntingdon. For some, names of executives or other employees are also listed.

Some of the people whose names have been listed by SHAC in the United States and Britain have had their homes or cars spray-painted or vandalized; they have faced demonstrations outside their homes at all times of the day and night, received harassing telephone calls or e-mails and in some extreme cases have been physically attacked.

Law enforcement knows what SHAC and other groups are posting on their Web sites. But the people who put the sites together seem to understand what the First Amendment will and won't allow.

"We're aware of the information that's on some of the Web sites, but when you start talking about postings on the Internet and their relationship to criminal acts, you have to be very careful, because you're talking about possible violations of First Amendment rights," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Phil Celestini.