SHAC *is* an innocent "international campaign group".

The authorities were aware the campaign was very successful, and were also aware that there was a lot of illegal action being taken by unknown people in support of the group's aims.

Because they couldn't catch the lawbreakers, they decided to imprison the people running the lawful group on politically-motivated "conspiracy to blackmail" charges.

There was no accusation that the people in the SHAC campaign were responsible for any specific illegal acts.

SHAC is by no means a terrorist group. If they were, how come they are still functioning openly? - you can see many recent actions at http://shac.net/

They are a perfectly lawful group that got too successful in challenging the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry and were locked up on a spurious "conspiracy to blackmail" charge.

Don't you think there is a reason that they were never arrested, accused or charged with specific illegal acts?

It's because those acts were carried out by unknown people unconnected to them other than by a common goal. This was pure guilt by tenuous association.

With a rather loose definition of "violent criminals" and "physical attacks".

Do you believe everything you read in the mainstream media? The SHAC activists jailed were neither accused nor convicted of any specific illegal acts, let alone violence or physical attacks.

This is because they were never involved with anything like this. If you read the news carefully, you will see how clever they are never to say directly that the SHAC prisoners did it, but the way it is written is ambiguous enough to make the gullible and the casual reader jump to that conclusion.

The SHAC activists were convicted of conspiracy to blackmail purely because they ran a successful legal campaign where other people, unknown to them or the courts, committed illegal actions.

And what "terror" is that then? Answer: none at all, for the reasons outlined above. Do people always fall for the clumsy propaganda spoonfed to them by the media?

The real "terror" is that inflicted on monkeys, beagles, cats and other animals by Huntingdon Life Sciences to perform pointless CYA tests for products such has weedkiller and household cleaners, as well as largely useless drugs.

Are you begin sarcastic?

Animal rights protesters attack factory farming regularly. A few minutes of googling would confirm this. "Pest" controllers have been targeted in the past too.

It's not about equating two lives, it's about giving each life equal consideration.

To any animal, human or non-human, their life is the only one they have and they will fight for it.

Animals clearly are capable of suffering. Is it right that we make them undergo things like the barbaric tortures and brutal killings in factory farms just so we can enjoy the taste of their flesh?

I don't think so, and I think anyone who feels the need to flippantly disagree should think deeply about why that is.

Point of information: the original post in question wasn't a death threat; it just listed the private address of a judge.

Point of information: the original post wasn't a death threat. It gave the private address of a judge and asked people not to mention the fact that his son had been killed in an car accident last year.

Tasteless? Maybe.

Illegal? I don't think so.

Against Indymedia's policy on not showing personal information? Certainly, which is why Indymedia censored the post fairly soon after it was posted.

You are blindly falling for the line taken in much of the uncritical media that the people imprisoned were responsible for illegal acts.

They weren't, and a close examination of the news reports shows very clever use of words to insinuate those convicted were responsible for the harassment.

Why were they convicted of conspiracy to blackmail and not harassment or threats? Simple, because they didn't do that, nor were they accused of doing that.

This case was political, to punish the people running a purely lawful campaign for the actions of unknown others who did break the law in furtherance of the objectives of the campaign.

Regardless of what you think about the moral rights of wrongs of the campaign, that has to be a worrying development.

And as for animal liberationists not targeting factory farming, a few minutes googling will show you that the meat industry gets quite extensively attacked by animal rights activists.

Correcting some points of misinformation:

Firstly, the original post wasn't a death threat, it just gave an address of the judge.

Secondly, the SHAC prisoners aren't violent criminals. They were never accused of committing or being involved with any specific illegal acts against people or companies.

They were found guilty of a politically-motivated charge of conspiracy to blackmail, just for running a perfectly legal campaign where other unknown people broke the law.

The mainstream news reports do an excellent job of misrepresenting the facts, but if you read them with a critical eye, you can see that nowhere do they actually say those convicted were involved in illegal actions.

That is because they weren't - they were convicted purely on the basis of guilt by association with unknown others who DID commit illegal acts, quite independently.

This case will have far-reaching ramifications, because it basically says that legal campaigns are somehow responsible for what other people might do on behalf of the campaign's objectives.

Don't believe the biased reports you see in the mainstream media. If you read between the lines, you can see a glimmer of the truth: The SHAC members convicted were never accused nor found guilty of any illegal actions against people or companies.

They were convicted of conspiracy to blackmail just because other unknown people broke the law in support of their campaign.

This is pure guilt by association.

Irrespective of what you think of the rights and wrongs of vivisection, it is a chilling verdict that will have damaging effects in other areas.