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EUGENE — An arsonist who avoided federal prison five years ago by helping lock up Earth Liberation Front activists is headed to state prison for selling heroin. ... He was on probation under a 2007 plea deal for his role in arsons by an ELF band known as The Family. Targets included a meat-packing company, car dealership, ranger station and lumber company. Ferguson is depicted as the leader of the group in the documentary "If A Tree Falls." He faces a probation revocation hearing July 14 in federal court.

Stephen James Murphy was detained in Texas by the FBI in connection with an incident in 2006 at a construction site for townhouses.The FBI has arrested an environmental activist in connection with the attempted arson of unfinished town homes in Pasadena in 2006, authorities said Thursday. Stephen James Murphy, 43, was arrested without incident Wednesday at his home in Arlington, Texas, after being named in a criminal complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court, said FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller. According to the complaint, the Pasadena Fire Department responded to a construction site on Sept. 19, 2006, and found what...

A group cited by U.S. officials as a domestic terrorism threat claimed responsibility Friday for knocking down two radio station towers in Snohomish County, Washington. Much of the tower system, owned by radio station KRKO, was "flattened like a pancake," the manager said. Much of the tower system, owned by radio station KRKO, was "flattened like a pancake," the manager said. The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) issued a statement saying opponents of the towers argue that "AM radio waves cause adverse health effects including a higher rate of cancer, harm to wildlife, and that the signals have been interfering with...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://detroit.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel09/de032709.htm The United States Attorney's Office Western District of Michigan Press Release SENTENCING IN 2001 ECO-TERRORISM ATTEMPT AT MICHIGAN MARQUETTE, MI—Ian Jacob Wallace, 27, of East Setauket, New York, was sentenced on Monday by U.S. District Judge Robert Holmes Bell to serve three years in Federal prison for his role in the November 5, 2001, attempted fire-bombing of U.S. Forest Service property located on the campus of Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, U.S. Attorney Donald A. Davis announced today. Wallace, who committed the offense on behalf of the activist environmental group known...

A radical activist who helped set a $1 million fire to protest research on genetically modified crops was sentenced Thursday to nearly 22 years in prison _ even more than the prosecution recommended. Marie Mason decided to "elevate her grievances beyond the norms of civilized society" through fire and destruction, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney said. The case _ which was prosecuted as domestic terrorism _ was "about an abandonment of the marketplace of ideas," he added. -snip At MSU, Mason and Ambrose targeted a campus office that held records on research related to moth-resistant potatoes for poor parts of...

REDFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - A business owner checking a Dumpster for scrap cardboard was alarmed by something else: gas masks, maps, an M-80 explosive, arson photos and anti-government writings. "It was kinda scary," Andy Wishaw recalled. "Some of my employees said it's nothing. I thought, 'What's it going to hurt to call the police?'" The discovery turned out to be a big break for the FBI. Agents on the trail of eco-terrorism used the contents to help solve more than a dozen acts of arson and tree spikings in Michigan and Indiana committed in the name of a radical...

FBI Warns of Potential Terror Attacks The FBI and Department of Homeland Security today issued an analytical "note" to U.S. law-enforcement officials cautioning that al-Qaida terrorists have in the past expressed interest in attacking public buildings using a dozen suicide bombers each carrying 20 kilograms of explosives. Authors with the U.S. Office of Intelligence and Analysis added that they have "no credible or specific information that terrorists are planning operations against public buildings in the United States." The FBI and DHS analysts said they were releasing the note because "it is important for local authorities and building owners and...

Petraeus: Al Qaida Trying to 'Come Back In' U.S. military officials said there will be no significant reduction in coalition troops in the Baghdad area as part of an effort to stop the Al Qaida offensive in northern Iraq. They said Al Qaida was trying to reenter Baghdad and reverse its losses in 2007. "Al Qaida is trying to come back in," U.S. military commander Gen. David Petraeus said. "We can feel it and see it, and what we're trying to do is rip out any roots before they can get deeply into the ground." Read More Militants Assert...

SACRAMENTO - A federal jury on Thursday found a 29-year-old environmental activist guilty of conspiring to burn down or blow up a northern California dam, a genetics lab, cell phone towers and other targets. Eric McDavid of Foresthill, Calif. faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for what FBI agents said was as an eco-terrorist plot in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy, loose-knit group of environmentalists that has claimed credit for arsons throughout the West. McDavid and two others were arrested in January 2006 after purchasing bottles of bleach, a car battery,...

A few hours after a $50 million condo project burned down, apparently in an eco-terror attack, Earth Liberation Front spokesman Rod Coronado stood in front of a San Diego audience and explained how to build a homemade Molotov cocktail. Now, Coronado is going to trial in federal court on a single count of distributing information on explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction with the intent that his listeners commit illegal acts of violence, a charge that could land him in prison for up to 20 years under post-Sept. 11 legislation. Prosecutors say Coronado, a longtime environmental activist renowned...

U.S. Seeks Closing of Visa Loophole for Britons -Full Story- Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the thwarted London bomb plot who was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, showed the potential for disaffected young men to be lured as terrorists, a threat that British officials said they would have to contend with for a generation.But the 25-year-old Mr. Khyam, a Briton of Pakistani descent, also personifies a larger and more immediate concern: as a British citizen, he could have entered the United States without a visa, like many of an estimated 800,000 other Britons of Pakistani origin.American officials, citing...

EUGENE, Ore. – Declaring fires set at a police station, an SUV dealer and a tree farm acts of terrorism, a federal judge Wednesday sentenced the first of 10 members of a radical environmental group to 13 years in prison. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken commended Stanislas Meyerhoff for having the courage to “do the right thing” by informing on his fellow arsonists after his arrest, but declared that his efforts to save the earth by setting fires were misguided and cowardly, and contributed to an unfair characterization of others working legally to protect the environment as radicals. “It was...

Who is a terrorist? After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, it was clean-cut Timothy McVeigh, a brooding loner — infused with hatred of the government — who was convicted and put to death for that crime.

Three environmental activists were cooking up plastic explosives and had planned to test a device the day they were arrested, federal prosecutors alleged Wednesday as they indicted them. The three face five to 20 years in federal prison if they are convicted of conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage property. The suspects planned assaults this spring in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, a 'loosey-goosey, sort of mist-of-the-fog kind of an organization' of environmental activists, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said. Eric McDavid, 28, Zachary Jensen, 20, and Lauren Weiner, 20, remain in jail. They could enter a...

(01-13) 17:55 PST Auburn, Calif. (AP) -- Three people were arrested Friday on suspicion that they plotted to blow up U.S. Forest Service property along with cell phone towers and power generators, the FBI said. Zachary O. Jenson, 20, of Monroe, Wash., Lauren Weiner, 20, of Philadelphia, and Eric Taylor McDavid, 28, of Foresthill, Calif., were arrested Friday morning, said Karen Ernst of the FBI. Federal authorities believe all three are members of the Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy collection of environmental activists that has claimed responsibility for dozens of acts of destruction in the past few years. Matt Mathes,...

Earth Liberation Front claims no leaders or spokespeople When three buildings and four chairlifts on Vail Mountain went up in flames in October, 1998, the Earth Liberation Front, an underground environmental movement, proudly took credit for the arson. The Earth Liberation Front claims to be an underground movement with no leadership, membership or spokespeople... Anyone who commits an act of ecoterrorism or sabotage in the name of the environment is welcome to do it under the front's name... Call yourself an "elf" and you're part of the elite, invisible group. Last month, Chelsea D. Gerlach of Portland Ore. and William...

An undercover informant helped investigators tape a conversation with one of the seven...radical environmentalists accused in a series of arson attacks and other crimes... Existence of the informant was disclosed last week by an investigator in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., during a bail hearing for Daniel McGowan, 31, who faces indictments that he and another man firebombed the office of a wood products mill in Glendale and the office and truck shop of a tree farm in Clatskanie in 2001. The Earth Liberation Front, an underground group that advocates economic sabotage to stop environmental destruction, took credit for...

Vandals targeted a timber company that has proposed a controversial development in Maine's North Woods, using paint, feces and even animal guts to deface the company's offices and the homes of two employees, police said Tuesday. Jim Lehner, Plum Creek Timber Co.'s regional general manager, was awakened at midnight to find that his Oakland home was under attack. Rocks and small containers filled with paint were thrown at the house, breaking four windows, said Police Chief Michael Tracy. In Greenville, meanwhile, project manager Luke Muzzy's home was defaced with animal feces, police said. Muzzy's two children were home at the...

  MSNBC.comCalif. student gets 8 years for SUV vandalism Sentenced for 2003 spree that torched Hummers, other gas guzzlersReuters Updated: 9:45 p.m. ET April 18, 2005 LOS ANGELES - An aspiring physicist was sentenced to more than eight years in prison on Monday and ordered to pay $3.5 million for his role in a spree of arson and vandalism that targeted gas-guzzling Hummers and other sports utility vehicles.Rejecting pleas for clemency from William Cottrell, a 24-year-old doctoral candidate in physics at the California Institute of Technology, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner added more time to the sentence after finding that Cottrell...

SUTTER CREEK, Calif. - An early morning fire at brand new apartment complex may be the work of radical environmentalists who also claimed responsibility for several recent Northern California arsons, officials said Monday. The fire at the 128-unit Pinewoods apartment complex broke out around 3 a.m., Sutter Creek Chief of Police Robert Duke said Monday. Only two of the apartments were occupied, and a fire suppression system helped keep the damage confined, he said. Sutter Creek is in Amador County, about 45 miles east of Sacramento. "There were seven individual fires and some kind of incendiary device with very, very...