Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty ran one of the most effective pressure campaigns in movement history, driving investors and suppliers away from the animal-testing giant Huntingdon Life Sciences — largely through a website that reported on protests and posted targets' information. In 2004 the government indicted six organizers and the campaign itself under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, charging them not with any act of property destruction but with running the website and giving speeches: conspiracy by publication.

Convicted in 2006, the SHAC 7 received sentences of up to six years — Kevin Kjonaas, Lauren Gazzola, and Jacob Conroy the longest — for what their lawyers argued, unsuccessfully, was First Amendment activity from beginning to end. Congress responded to industry lobbying the same year by expanding the statute into the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, criminalizing campaigns that cause businesses "loss of profits" and formally attaching the word "terrorism" to animal-rights advocacy. The case remains the movement's starkest precedent: activists imprisoned as terrorists for a website, while the conduct they publicized was lawful protest.