I wish people who insist on using the term terrorist from pure emotion would meet my friend Lauren.

She blogged about animal rights and was convicted as a terrorist in the US even before 9/11 because Big Pharma lobbied to classify interruption of their animal testing as terror.

When she finally got out of Federal prison, she was also banned from using technology. She didn't even know what social media was. She was taken from college.

My favorite moment was showing her all the old viral content she missed and reexperiencing it through her eyes.

And Lauren wasn't just put in Federal prison, but into something called a CMU. A Communication Management Unit restricts all communication. In person, mail and phone were all monitored and limited. Separated by glass and limited severely in time compared to others.

It's called the AETA, Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Enterprise_Terrorism_Act

(For clarity, the law was started before 9/11. Not the conviction.)

She'll tell her story though. And she's a white girl from Connecticut. Now imagine what your normalization of terror as some sort of meaningful legal status will do to the people our criminal justice systemically hunts.

If don't hand the future the weapon that will be used against you is too hard, don't hand the present with the weapons that will be used against the most vulnerable and targeted now. And guess what, that isn't white supremacists.

Words by Lauren. https://www.justsecurity.org/33874/animal-enterprise-terrorism/