Eco-Activists Taking On Company Workers At 3 a.m. one recent morning, animal rights activists enraged by a company that tests products on animals gathered outside the home of an executive. ... "We'll be back," the group, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, later warned the executive on its Web site. "We know where you live, we know where you work, and we'll make your life hell until you pull out of HLS." What made the noisy protest unusual was that its target wasn't an executive with Huntingdon Life Sciences: It was a manager of a Los Angeles company that just sells software to Huntingdon. ... On Sunday, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty announced it would begin a week of similar demonstrations nationwide outside homes of people with often tenuous ties to animal research. The group says such tactics have "broken new ground in the struggle for animal liberation."

I think of this tactic -- pressuring a target by proxy -- as the "Mr. Jordan strategy." Mr. Jordan was my 6th grade math teacher. When someone in the class didn't do his homework, Mr. Jordan would assign extra homework to the entire class. This was no punishment for the offender, because he would just skip the new assignment as well. Mr. Jordan's explanation was that if the good kids in the class didn't want to get extra homework, we'd go after the offender and make him start doing his work. The assumption was that his peers would have more influence than his teacher.