60 Minutes did a special on the increasing use of Confidential Informants by Law Enforcement:
It’s called Metro Narcotics, and one of its confidential informants was an Ole Miss student we’ll call Greg, who agreed to speak with us in disguise. His life as a C.I. began one day coming home from class.
Greg: I was met halfway there by men in bulletproof vests, guns and badges around their necks. My initial reaction was just “Keep goin’. This is no way involved with me.” And then — until they held up a piece of paper with my name on it, saying I had sold LSD, and I thought, “What on earth? I had nothing to do with this.”
Greg, who had no criminal record, insists his only encounter with LSD was when a friend asked to leave some at his apartment. Then, he says, another acquaintance stopped by — wearing a wire, it turns out — and picked the LSD up.
Greg: I was just on the couch watching TV. And he was like, “Oh, thanks.” And I just said, “I have nothing to do with this. Don’t thank me.”
But at the metro office, Greg says two agents threatened him with more than 20 years in prison and a felony on his record for life, unless he agreed to become an informant and make drug buys wearing a wire, from 10 people — who he had to find himself.
Greg: It felt like I had a gun to my head.
Confidential Informant is just a fancy word for spy, and this is just a small part of the increasing problem of small (and sometimes not so small) cliques in Law Enforcement “Intelligence” agencies which view themselves as spooks beyond the law, tending to the cattle-citizenry which they are meant to control.
The story featured small local LE departments which have begun Confidential Informant “mills” at universities in town, where they bust one kid for buying pot, turn him into a CI, and then make him entrap three to ten other kids in monitored buys, who themselves will be turned into CI’s, repeating the process. The officers running them then just sit back, jumping from kid to kid, and building their networks faster than they can run all their assets. You could see how in no time they would have a window into almost every single student on the campus through someone who knew them.
The story detailed a couple of kids who turned up dead, and whose parents were suing since their untrained kids (in one case a girl) were basically being blackmailed into going out to do dangerous undercover police work with dangerous criminals when they ended up shot to death.
These kids they were recruiting are totally unimportant, and LE is drawing them in as CI’s by the thousands, for really no reason at all. Now imagine if you were Heartiste, or Roger Stone, or Andrew Breitbart, or eve just the local anchor of some podunk network news show, and someone in the political hierarchy took notice. Have no illusions. LE Intel will roll surveillance, identify all of their contacts, surveil them, cull through their social circles for the weak links, and then roll out this script on those weak links, to turn them into CI’s. If you run the risk of having an audience someday, some politician in the upper echelons of the machine will move to get on top of you long before you are actually important because these agencies, at the top, are run by politicos who understand the power of control, and the ease with which it can be gained early, before someone is important or well known. This is not traditional LE, nor is it necessarily bound by what you think it would be bound by.
This system does have a vulnerability. LE Intel began with the FBI, which used it in mob, counterterror, and counterintelligence operations. FBI spooks were watching (and taping illegally) everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Hoover’s political enemies. As they enjoyed success in their LE operations, and as the drug war took off, the techniques began to be picked up by smaller agencies.
I suspect after 9/11 some sort of grant programs were initiated to increase the recruitment of informants by all LE, culminating in the ostensibly aborted TIPS program, which proposed recruiting millions of informants among small businesses that have access to what surveillance refers to as “denied areas,” usually private areas inside houses. The plan was to recruit so many cable installers, plumbers, electricians, appliance repairmen, and other workers, that if a target requested any service inside their home, from heating repair, to phone service, to a cabinet installation, there would be a high likelihood that the service tech called would already be a quasi-federal agent who could spy on the customer for the feds within that denied area. Even better, the installer wouldn’t be restricted in the way federal agents would be, so if they wandered into a room downstairs and took photos and video, swiped a wife’s diary, or took a quick clone of a hard drive while unattended, it wouldn’t reflect on the agency.
I would assume if they wired a microphone into an outlet, and it broadcast sound out on an FM wavelength, and the surveillance “accidentally” discovered the broadcast, it wouldn’t technically even be eavesdropping, since the installer never listened to the output, and the surveillance just discovered the broadcast by chance while signal sweeping in the neighborhood, and never installed the source.
This is why I think domestic surveillance will eventually become a much bigger mess politically. It is one thing when the professionals at the FBI use borderline illegal, or even illegal means to combat mobsters, spies, and drug dealers. It is quite another when you have thousands of small podunk mall cops in college towns rolling out spook techniques against teenage kids at college, whose greatest sin is smoking a joint, or giving one to a friend. As more bodies begin piling up, (and they will be as you read this), the entire thing is careening toward a wider audience.
My suspicion is eventually one of two things will happen. One option will be that the FBI will realize that these smaller operations against civilians of borderline illegality, or even no illegality at all, pose an unimaginable threat to their ability to operate against real crime, especially as they get people killed. At that point, either the FBI will act to get sole control over the use of espionage techniques in law enforcement, or they will endure what I suspect will be Church-committee like reduction in the deployment of intelligence techniques among all law enforcement agencies. I’d bet on the former before the latter.
As with everything, Apocalypse will grease the skids.
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