Josh is an activist from the Northwest who has participated in animal liberation, wilderness, and human freedom projects for more than ten years. After sitting through hundreds of boring meetings and lectures he decided that the issues he cared about were constantly being presented in the most tedious manner, and so he co-created Breaking Free Video magazine in 1997 and later began conducting speaking tours in 1999. Between working on alternative media and speaking to small audiences he also has found plenty of time to get into trouble with the law by sabotaging a whale hunt, defying grand juries, and contributing to confrontational protest campaigns. All of this made him a perfect target for the modern criminalization of dissent, and in 2004 he was indicted for violations of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
The evidence against him at trial was primarily two speeches he made. The first was in front of a large group of people in Little Rock Arkansas in 2001. He spoke about acts of political sabotage that had already occurred and voiced his support for those actions. The second speech took place at the University of Washington in 2002 in front of only 7 people (Unless you count the FBI agent in the audience.) Josh spoke about European campaigns against vivisection, said he was inspired by the lack of tactical dogmatism displayed by activists there, and again praised acts of political sabotage. He ended his speech by demonstrating how to participate in a form of electronic civil disobedience known as "black faxing," which involves sending multiple pieces of black paper through an opponentâs fax machine. For this he had his home raided by a Joint Terrorism Task Force and was later arrested by the Department of Homeland Security. Welcome to the true face of the Bush administrations "War on Terror."