Earth Liberation Front
From Wikipedia:
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), also known as "Elves" or "The Elves", is the collective name for autonomous individuals or covert cells who, according to the ELF Press Office, use "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to stop the exploitation and destruction of the environment".
The ELF was founded in Brighton in the United Kingdom in 1992, and spread to the rest of Europe by 1994. The ELF acronym derived from the original ELF guerilla group, the Environmental Life Force, that was founded in 1977 in Santa Cruz, California by activist John Clark Hanna. The Earth Liberation Front is now an international organization with actions reported in 17 countries and is widely regarded as descending from Animal Liberation Front because of the relationship and cooperation between the two movements. Using the same leaderless resistance model, as well as similar guidelines to the ALF, sympathizers say that it is an eco-defense group dedicated to taking the profit motive out of environmental destruction by causing economic damage to businesses through the use of property damage.
The ELF was classified as the top "domestic terror" threat in the United States by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in February 2001, and its members classified as eco-terrorists. Despite the lack of deaths from ELF attacks, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism has said, "I think we're lucky. Once you set one of these fires they can go way out of control." The name came to public prominence when they were featured on the television show 60 Minutes in 2005. The group was further highlighted in the 2011 Academy Award–nominated documentary If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.
FBI Terrorist Designation
John E. Lewis, the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, in May of 2004 made a statement regarding so-called Domestic Terrorism:
During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the domestic terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the United States. During the past several years, however, special interest extremism, as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and related extremists, has emerged as a serious domestic terrorist threat. Special interest terrorism differs from traditional right-wing and left-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect widespread political change. Such extremists conduct acts of politically motivated violence to force segments of society, including the general public, to change attitudes about issues considered important to the extremists’ causes. Generally, extremist groups engage in much activity that is protected by constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. Law enforcement only becomes involved when the volatile talk of these groups transgresses into unlawful action. The FBI estimates that the ALF/ELF and related groups have committed more than 1,100 criminal acts in the United States since 1976, resulting in damages conservatively estimated at approximately $110 million.[1]
When considering the litany of organizations that have been designated as "terrorism" by the FBI it is also important to remember that the FBI considered The Black Panther Party a domestic terrorist organization.
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI during the time of the Panthers, called the Free Breakfast For Children program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and authorized extremely grotesque police counter-measures to destroy it. These operations ranged from disinformation campaigns telling parents in San Francisco that the food was infected with venereal disease, to the Chicago police breaking into a Church the night before its first food services to mash up and urinate on the children's breakfasts.[2]