The line between activism and extremism is crossed once illegal activities begin to affect farmers and the supply chain
Threats to the North American agricultural supply chain can come from a range of bad actors from international terrorist groups to domestic extremists to organized crime to corporate or academic espionage.
The threat landscape has only increased over the past 20 years, according to Andrew Rose, a strategic adviser to food and agricultural supply chains, during a recent talk hosted by Farm Journal, an American farm media outlet.
Past dangers such as the documented threats of terrorist groups weaponizing foot and mouth disease in the years following 9/11, and the hacking of beef processor JBS, which brought operations to a halt until extortion payments were made, point to challenges facing current agricultural supply chains.
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“This is so critical and sometimes I don’t think we get the attention that we really deserve,” said Rose.
Few North American critical infrastructure networks would affect people in the same way they would if parents suddenly couldn’t feed their children or themselves, said Rose.
The JBS cyber-attack was a taste of some of the devastation that could be wrought on continental food supplies, he said.
“JBS recognized that. That’s why they paid the ransom,” said Rose. “I think JBS recognized any disruption in animal processing would have massive cascading effects.”
Rose outlined how insider threats represent a weak point to security that can be exploited.
While there is infiltration by those looking to cause damage within a food producing or processing organization, a bigger threat could come from those not following best practises, such as avoiding dangerous internet sites or not clicking on emailed links.
“If something even looks a little bit suspicious, just slow down,” said Rose.
The ability of bad actors to compile a detailed profile of an operation through scraping information from social media along with sometimes innocuous information gathering through phishing or romantic inquiries can help build a database to identify security flaws, he said.
That data can even be used to track the daily routines of an operation, which could lead to bad actors knowing the best time and places to physically access a business, farm or ranch.
One of the current domestic activist groups that has recently gained notoriety is Direct Action Everywhere, a non-profit with the goal of achieving, “revolutionary social and political change for animals in one generation.”
A demonstrator with the organization recently disrupted a Monday Night Football game in San Francisco that ended when members of the Los Angeles Rams tackled the man running across the field with a smoke bomb mid-match.
Hannah Thompson-Weeman, president of the United States-based Animal Agriculture Alliance, said their organization is mandated to keep track of animal rights extremist groups.
“Some of the main trends we are seeing on the on-farm, on-plant level from animal rights extremists are break-ins and theft,” she said.
Thompson-Weeman said these groups describe such activity as “open rescue” and involves going into operations and taking animals.
“That obviously presents a lot of concerns about biosecurity, animal health, even the safety of the individuals themselves entering facilities without authorization,” she said. “Then we have organizations that have quite blatantly indicated that they want to disrupt the food supply chain with their activities.”
Some of the activism by such groups includes either infiltrating a farm or facility to obtain videos of operations or paying those already working in such places to garner images of mistreatment of animals.
“We’re definitely still seeing those tactics being employed both in the U.S. and Canada,” said Thompson-Weeman, adding that there is an effort to connect such images to name brands.
“The headlines aren’t necessarily about the individual farm. You have to read pretty deep into the press release — if they even name the farm at all. It’s about the restaurant, the retail brand they are trying to tie it to because a lot of those videos are being used for pressure campaigns.”
Thompson-Weeman said the impact of extremist animal rights organizations is negligible which is, “why they are being more and more extreme in getting more attention in the hopes of having more influence and are continuing to up the ante on their efforts.”
Those efforts also include a growing trend of utilizing online data collection to further the goals of animal rights organizations.
Thompson-Weeman said when it came to the JBS ransomware attack, “we saw a lot of chatter from the animal rights community applauding that, cheering for it and wondering how they could replicate it in an attack to disrupt the supply.”
While she said there is nothing wrong with groups having free expression, the line between activism and extremism is crossed once other people’s choices are being impacted through illegal activities.
