The U.S. meat industry has engaged in intrusive surveillance of animal rights groups, including monitoring relationships between activists and tracking employees of leading charities. DeSmog’s new findings follow years of lobbying by the meat industry to institute increasingly harsh laws limiting animal rights activists. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about animal rights activists, or if you’re vegetarian. While this database is not publicly available, documents seen by DeSmog provide a snapshot of the information shared with the AAA’s meat industry members. The Intercept revealed in June that the AAA had lobbied the FBI to consider animal rights activists as a bioterrorism threat.