Leaked Document Reveals Secret Conference on “Animal Rights Extremists”
Private security firm holds secretive conference on “animal rights extremists”, a leaked document reveals
Animal Liberation Front-line has been provided with a document, marked “CONFIDENTIAL”, detailing an invite-only meeting for animal abuse industries on the “threat” of the animal rights movement and the A.L.F.
The document was leaked by a client of security firm INA, and provides the schedule for their “security 
roundtable” titled “Managing Threats from Activist Groups“. The invite-only event is to be held on Tuesday, September 14th in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In attendance will be representatives of animal abuse industries who presumably consider themselves potential targets of the Animal Liberation Front, and other militant groups.
The event is organized by INA (Information Network Associates), a shadowy private company which has its niche investigating the animal rights movement. In future posts, I will cover this company’s nefarious history infiltrating and reporting on the movement, including the posting of more leaked documents never meant to be seen by activist’s eyes.
The Agenda
Here is the agenda for “Managing Threats from Activist Groups” (view the original document here):
“8:30 AM – 8:45 AM
Opening Remarks / Introductions
8:45AM – 9:45 AM
Current Issues and Trends in the Animal Rights Movement
The INA staff will provide an intelligence briefing on current activities, recent events and trends within the animal rights movement.
10:00 AM – 11:15 AM
Activist Groups
INA analysts will discuss key animal rights groups operating around the US. Key leaders, tactics, and capabilities will be discussed.
11:15 AM – 12:00 PM
Infiltrations
The INA staff will give an overview of recent infiltrations and the risk they pose to research laboratories. Discussion will include best practices for preventing infiltrations. Activists’ use of social networking sites and how the use of privacy settings may affect investigations will also be discussed.
1:15 PM – 1:45 PM
Legal Update
Updates will be provided on pending or proposed legislation affecting animal research. The status of recent activist legal cases will also be included. Discussion will be held on activists’ use of the legal system in attack laboratories, researchers and companies.
1:45 PM – 2:30 PM
Recognizing Improvised Explosive and Incendiary Devices
Devices, methods, and techniques used by extremists during terrorist attacks will be shown and discussed.
2:45 PM – 3:30 PM
The Anatomy of an ALF Attack
INA staff will discuss the phases of an ALF terrorist attack including target selection, surveillance, rehearsal, operational dry-run, actual attack and claim of responsibility.
3:30 PM – 4:15 PM
Open Discussion
This time is designated for the sharing of information regarding industry best practices. Discussion will include issues including protecting company supply chains and methods for security professionals to share information and intelligence.
4:15 PM – 4:30 PM
Closing Remarks”
Who is INA?
INA (Information Network Associates) promotes itself as experts in “eco-terrorism”, offering clients its unique “intelligence” on the animal right movement. The secretive investigation firm has occasionally been forced from the shadows, including having at least two of its agents who were posing as activists exposed and ejected from animal rights groups.
A few highlights from Information Network Associates’ history investigating the animal rights movement:
*Publishing the closed-circulation newsletter “Extremist Watch”, distributed to its clients in animal exploitation industries. The weekly publication covers the intelligence it gathers on animal rights activists, including animal rights activist’s home addresses, personal relationships among known activists, and more.
*Embedding at least two paid female spies in animal rights groups, and presumably more who have yet to be exposed.
*Publishing a leaked “Threat Assessment” for the 2007 Society of Toxicology Meeting in Seattle, giving personal information on Northwest animal rights activists.
*Receiving $2,288,166 from the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security since 2000.
Analyzing the “Security Roundtable”
Several things stand out about the agenda items for “Managing Threats from Activist Groups“:
First, INA’s “expert status” on the animal rights movement is an almost complete fraud perpetuated on its 
clients. This is evident in talks like “The Anatomy of an ALF Attack“, in which INA purports itself to be experts on subjects for which no one outside of the A.L.F. can have knowledge. This talk claims to cover the “target selection, surveillance, rehearsal” and “operational dry-run” components of an A.L.F. action. The absurdity being that the A.L.F. is anonymous, and therefore, nearly anything that could be said on these subjects is 100% speculative.
Over the last several years I have been compiling all known writings by those who have carried out A.L.F. actions. I believe at this point I have read the majority of “how it was done” articles, primers, interviews, and communiques by or with A.L.F. activists. From these writings, it is clear there is no consistency to be found among A.L.F. actions. Each action is as individual as the activists who carry them out. By the very nature of the A.L.F., no two cells have communication with each other, and many (if not most) form only to carry out a single action before disbanding permanently.
Yet INA, for the benefit of its revenue, perpetuates the myth of a single, non-nebulous “eco-terrorist” group with an operational system that can be studied and mapped. The unpredictability of the A.L.F. is as dangerous to INA as it is to animal abusers – without a cohesive group following a kind of organizational uniformity that can be decoded, there is nothing to analyze, and therefore – nothing to sell.
Talks like “Recognizing Improvised Explosive and Incendiary Devices” further highlight INA’s false expert status, fear mongering, and selling of a false hope for prevention. The talk offers information on “devices, methods, and techniques used by extremists during terrorist attacks”. What INA may never tell its clients is that incendiary devices are – as shown by history and mandated by the A.L.F. guidelines – only used in the total absence of humans, and primarily at night. What, then, is the value in knowing how to spot an incendiary device if they are only placed in empty buildings? And what person does not know a container of flammable liquid with either a lit fuse or timer attached is cause for concern? What exactly is INA selling?
And what is the value of “recognizing” an “improvised explosive”? Does INA tell its clients there have been only (by my count) three incidents of explosives used in the 30+ year history of the animal liberation movement? And, again, that such devices would only be placed far from any humans, and therefore far from anyone to “recognize” them?
Any marketing expert will tell you: fear sells.
INA and the commodity of fear
By furthering lies INA itself must know to be false, it can dupe clients into paying large sums for inaccuracy-riddled “threat assessments” and peddle “the A.L.F. as a cohesive organization” fantasies, while laughing all the way to the bank.
By the ignorance of its clients, and the the smokescreen of a little internet-sourced, publicly available information, INA can just get by fooling ignorant individuals in the biomedical research and other industries into feeling a little safer under the illusion that if they just place their trust in the predictive ability of INA, they will be safe from an A.L.F. raid.
More leaked documents and infiltrators
In the coming days, the INA story will become more interesting. I will be posting additional articles on INA, including:
*Accounts of the INA’s use of women to infiltrate the animal rights movement, including how two of the women were outed.
*More leaked INA documents I have been given, exposing their investigation into the personal lives of prominent animal rights activists, fallacies in their reporting, and more.
INA “Security Roundtable”: the secret is out
The “Managing Threats from Activist Groups” agenda is marked “CONFIDENTIAL”. For a company that makes its money broadcasting the “secrets” of animal rights activists to animal abusers, it is only appropriate that today at least one of their secrets is broadcast to activists.
INA is watching us. Their September 14th “security roundtable” will now be held knowing that we have our eyes on them.
– Peter Young
Hello!
I am a devoted activist for animal welfare, but it’s not right to free caged animals to the nature! As they are not in their real habitat, the damage e.g. to birds nesting is obvious if 400 minks are let loose. Rather spray the animals so they are of no use to the farmers.
The point is to prohibit fur farming completely by the year 2025 in the whole world. This must be achieved through legislation as has been doen already in some European countries and more to come.
Are you serious “1Kristine”? Get REAL. So you would prefer that activists inflict death on the animals. When and How? By “spraying”… Bizarre. FYI–Many times, animals are rescued. When animals are released, it is not uncommon for some to survive despite an inhospitable environment (but the media doesn’t exactly report on that now do they?). Others are released into native or near-native environments. NEXT?
Moving on…The fact that corporations are trying to profit from the AETA legislation should NOT come as a surprise. There’s no stopping the disreputable, evil money-chasers. Any person who can torture a living being for MONEY is just as sick as a rapist, serial murderer or any other violent criminal. In fact, I would predict that if the animal torturers were unable to attack animals, they would instead use their sociopathic tendencies on other humans (who at least can engage in a “fair fight”). There’s no end to corporate extremism, corporate terrorism and corporate greed.
Hey Kristine, if you spray the animals, now you have an angry fur farmer who is going to take their anger on you out on the mink. They are still going to die, even more in vain than they previously would have. I agree that introduction of non native species is a threat, but the alternatives are slim, and as long as house cats exist, the balance of nature is already upset beyond repair.
Kristine, while I support your efforts to improve the welfare of animals and agree that we must completely end fur farming I feel that you are misguided in your concern for individual animals. For the hundreds and thousands of animals on each fur farm the concern is not simply whether and when they will be killed and used for their fur; the concern also expands to the days, weeks and months they will continue to spend in captivity unable to fulfill their natural desires and instincts.
When animals are released from captivity or returned to the wild the success rate is actually quite high. News agencies, police groups and those benefitting from animal enterprise will lead you to believe otherwise in order to demonize the activists and discourage further liberation. However, minks in particular have great survival rates as they tend to scatter and inhabit fields where they feed upon mice, bugs and crops.
Your argument hints at the often-propegated notion that freeing all of the animals currently farmed for industry would result in over-population; however, natural selection and habitat controls limit population sizes through diminished breeding and “thinning the herd” through starvation and other natural means.
Spraying animals to ensure their fur is not used is an unacceptable and overly-passive response to the injustice of fur farming; one would not cripple a death-row inmate to ensure he is not asked to work until the time of his execution. Why should we take a similar approach with regard to innocent animals by simply punishing the captor without liberating those unjustly imprisoned?
Until every cage is empty…
Rob
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” – Bishop Desmond Tutu
Mink actually are native to North America and have been shown in several large studies to adapt very well to life in the wild after being released. Spraying them would make them financially useless to the fur farmers, but it does not stop them from being killed.
I agree that the eventual goal is to put legislation into place that would make fur farming illegal everywhere, but there are animals dying right this second who deserve to be freed and given a chance at life. The short term battles and the long term war are not mutually exclusive. They are both part of the overall struggle and both deserve our support.
Thanks for exposing INA. I look forward to reading future posts on INA and other corporate front-groups for animal exploiters. Knowing our enemy will help us counter their propaganda and continue to work effectively to change individuals and society towards justice for nonhuman animals.
Do we have a location in Harrisburg? I happen to live close to the Capital area myself.
Actually there’s a lot of potential for spraying. Releasing is better of course; but if they’re sprayed as they’re released, maybe farmers will not try to recover the released animals. If it were possible, spraying wild animals in a hunting area would ruin them as trophies, no? Also, there’s a lot of young vegans (child and teen) who should be encouraged to get the education and training that would allow them to infiltrate organizations like the INA.
Can’t wait for more info on them!
=]
So what happened at the meeting? Anybody know?