Quote:"The history of the snitch is long and inglorious, dating to the common law. In old England, snitches were ubiquitous.Their motives, then as now, were unholy. In the 18th Century, Parliament prescribed monetary rewards—blood money—for snitches, who were turned back onto the streets where they were, in the words of one contemporary commentator,“the contempt and terror of society.”

"The system produced a cycle of betrayal in which each snitch knew he might find himself soon in the dock confronted by another snitch."


"If all cases ended so poetically, perhaps informant dependent prosecutions would be more humorous than objectionable. In real life, however, O. Henry endings are rare."


"The snitch system probably arrived in the New World with the Pilgrims.The first documented wrongful conviction case in the United States involved a snitch.The case arose in Manchester, Vermont, in 1819. Brothers Jesse and Stephen Boorn were suspected of killing their brother-in-law, Russell Colvin. Jesse was put into a cell with a forger, Silas Merrill, who would testify that Jesse confessed. Merrill was rewarded with freedom.
The Boorn brothers were convicted and sentenced to death but saved from the gallows when Colvin turned up alive in New Jersey."

Quote:BSC invented a game called “Vik“, described as “a fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy”. Printed booklets described up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathisers. Players of Vik were encouraged to ring up their targets at all hours of the night and hang up. Dead rats could be put in water tanks, air could be let out of the subject's car tyres, anonymous deliveries could be made to his house and so on. In the summer of 1941, BSC sent a sham Hungarian astrologer to the US called Louis de Wohl. At a press conference De Wohl said he had been studying Hitler's astrological chart and could see nothing but disaster ahead for the German dictator. De Wohl became a minor celebrity and went on tour through the US, issuing similar dire prognostications about Hitler and his allies. De Wohl's wholly bogus predictions were widely published.

Quote:BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But nobody on the American side of the fence knew what BSC's full agenda was nor, indeed, what would be the massive scale of its operations. What eventually occurred as 1940 became 1941 was that BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist (such as the notoriously anti-British America First Committee - it had more than a million paid-up members).
Stephenson called his methods “political warfare”, but the remarkable fact about BSC was that no one had ever tried to achieve such a level of “spin”, as we would call it today, on such a vast and pervasive scale in another country. The aim was to change the minds of an entire population: to make the people of America think that joining the war in Europe was a “good thing” and thereby free Roosevelt to act without fear of censure from Congress or at the polls in an election.

BSC's media reach was extensive: it included such eminent American columnists as Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, and influenced coverage in newspapers such as the Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Baltimore Sun. BSC effectively ran its own radio station, WRUL, and a press agency, the Overseas News Agency (ONA), feeding stories to the media as they required from foreign datelines to disguise their provenance. WRUL would broadcast a story from ONA and it thus became a US “source” suitable for further dissemination, even though it had arrived there via BSC agents. It would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, and relayed to listeners and readers as fact. The story would spread exponentially and nobody suspected this was all emanating from three floors of the Rockefeller Centre. BSC took enormous pains to ensure its propaganda was circulated and consumed as bona fide news reporting. To this degree its operations were 100% successful: they were never rumbled.

Quote:Emblem of NATO's “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations.After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited: i.e. mainly hardline anticommunists, including many ex-Nazis or former fascists, whether in Italy or in other European countries. In Germany, for example, Gladio had as a central focus the Gehlen Org — also involved in ODESSA “ratlines” — named after Reinhard Gehlen who would become West Germany's first head of intelligence, while the predominantly Italian P2 masonic lodge was composed of many members of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), including Licio Gelli. Its clandestine “cells” were to stay behind (hence the name) in enemy controlled territory and to act as resistance movements, conducting sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassinations.

However, Italian Gladio was more far reaching. “A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals Gladio was built around 'internal subversion'. It was to play 'a determining role… not only on the general policy level of warfare, but also in the politics of emergency'. In the 1970s, with communist electoral support growing and other leftists looking menacing, the establishment turned to the 'Strategy of Tension' … with Gladio eager to be involved.”[

Quote:“Coordinated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), {the secret armies} were run by the European military secret services in close cooperation with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British foreign secret service Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also MI6). Trained together with US Green Berets and British Special Air Service (SAS), these clandestine NATO soldiers, armed with underground arms-caches, prepared against a potential Soviet invasion and occupation of Western Europe, as well as the coming to power of communist parties. The clandestine international network covered the European NATO membership, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, as well as the neutral European countries of Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland.

'The existence of these clandestine NATO armies remained a closely guarded secret throughout the Cold War until 1990, when the first branch of the international network was discovered in Italy. It was code-named Gladio, the Latin word for a short double-edged sword [gladius]. While the press said the NATO secret armies were 'the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II', the Italian government, amidst sharp public criticism, promised to close down the secret army. Italy insisted identical clandestine armies had also existed in all other countries of Western Europe. This allegation proved correct and subsequent research found that in Belgium, the secret NATO army was code-named SDRA8, in Denmark Absalon, in Germany TD BJD, in Greece LOK, in Luxemburg Stay-Behind, in the Netherlands I&O, in Norway ROC, in Portugal Aginter, in Switzerland P26, in Turkey Counter-Guerrilla, In Sweden AGAG (Aktions Gruppen Arla Gryning, and in Austria OWSGV. However, the code names of the secret armies in France, Finland and Spain remain unknown.

Quote: The cops love these free-wheeling, elite units. They were ostensibly created to combat terrorism, but have been used mostly to infiltrate and suppress liberal and radical political organizations and civil rights groups. They lift their members out of the routine of police work into something of a James Bond life. As Frank Donner points out in this excellently researched, thoughtful and well-detailed study of police spying, their excesses have been many. But Donner, who directed the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, concludes with the chilling thought that the Red squads will be around long after there are any Reds.

Quote:Worse yet, the information, and misinformation, gathered by these sleuths is fed into the growing number of intelligence networks maintained by federal, state and local law-enforcement organizations. In the computer age, if you attend a left-wing meeting in Echo Park, your name is likely to be spread as far as New York.
As Donner points out, the squads are not a recent invention. One of his most important contributions is tracing the history of the Red squads, showing how deeply rooted they are in American political, social and economic life….

…That set the pattern for the Red squads, a pattern that continues today. Whatever the city, said Donner, the goal and tactics are much the same: “police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo.”

Quote:In New York, former City Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy traced their origin there to an "Italian Squad" formed in 1904 to monitor a group of Italian immigrants under suspicion[1]. However, it is their association with fighting communism which provides the basis for the name "Red Squad." They became more commonplace in the 1930s, often conceived of as a countermeasure to Communist organizers who were charged with executing a policy of dual unionism - namely, building a revolutionary movement in parallel with membership in above-ground labor organizations. Similar units were established in Canada in this period, although only the Toronto police used the name.

In the late 1960s, as the protests against Vietnam and the general domestic upheaval intensified, the Red Squads augmented their focus, to include dissidents largely outside the labor movement, including therein not just war resisters, but protest movements of all political stripes, including Neonazis, Native American movements, the women's movement, environmentalists, the civil rights movement, and others. The methods employed ranged from simple surveillance to isolated incidents of assassination. Anti-activist police operations were expanded under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, particularly in concert with, and within the cadre of the FBI's COINTELPRO surveillance program, but also including domestic spying by the CIA.

Quote:The use of criminal informants in the U.S. justice system has become a flourishing socio-legal institution. Every year, tens of thousands of criminal suspects, many of them drug offenders concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods, informally negotiate away liability in exchange for promised cooperation, while law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels rely on ever greater numbers of criminal actors in making basic decisions about investigations and prosecutions. While this marriage of convenience is fraught with peril, it is nearly devoid of judicial or public scrutiny as to the propriety, fairness, or utility of the deals being struck. At the same time, it is a quintessential expression of some of the most contentious characteristics of the modern criminal system: law enforcement discretion, secrecy, and the increasing informality of the adjudication process.
The informant institution is also an under-appreciated social force in low-income, high-crime, urban communities in which a high percentage of residents - as many as fifty percent of African American males in some cities - are in contact with the criminal justice system and therefore potentially under pressure to snitch. By relying heavily on snitching, particularly in drug-related cases, law enforcement officials create large numbers of informants who remain at large in the community, engaging in criminal activities while under pressure to provide information about others. These snitches are a communal liability: they increase crime and threaten social organization, interpersonal relationships, and socio-legal norms in their home communities, even as they are tolerated or under-punished by law enforcement because they are useful.


The Article also hypothesizes the harms imposed by the informant institution on socially disadvantaged, high-crime communities in which snitching is common. These harms may include increased crime, the erosion of trust in interpersonal, familial and community relationships and other psychological damage created by pervasive informing, the communal loss of faith in the state, and the undermining of law-abiding norms flowing from law enforcement's rewarding of and complicity in snitch wrongdoing.

Quote:http://www.november.org/razorwire/2005-0...-V8N3a.pdf

"As summer travel ebbed, I dove into the study of
the informant system, as pertains to those whom the police arrest, then pressure to go back into their
places of home and work and set others up for arrest."


How many informants do we have in communities? We can’t measure it because of this secret system, but experts have some guesses.

"Because researchers know what is behind the search warrants granted, they know that almost 98% of the time the police don’t have any goods on anyone, just a confidential informant. A lot of informing is going on, and it’s escalating."

"So they squeeze these people into rolling on their mother. Our family involved my brother’s girlfriend; it was her brother who turned her in, and so we went through this ourselves. And it is hard to try to explain to people this part — people do 20, 30 years and they get through it. Somehow, I don’t know how.
I’ve never been to prison, but they get through
it, and what dogs them all of the time is this —
how could my sister do that to me? How could my friend do this to me? That stays with them.
That psychological damage never goes away.

And it spreads to everyone in the family, just like anything traumatic does, and you get a bunch of sick people."

When I grew up, the Russians were doing it a lot, the informant system throughout all the communities. A person could be hauled off and interrogated and taken off to the ice fields. It terrified me, those Russian people. We studied these communities in
Russia after that period because there was a lot of
mental illness. Our country went over there to help them with all their crazy people. And do you know what our country found out? Our scientists and
doctors went over there and came back and said, “It was all those informants. It made them crazy to live
among people, and nobody knew who was going to rip them off, or who needed to ‘get in good,’ or some favor. And so turn someone in, and that person gets hauled off to Siberia. It made people crazy. <b>Well, that’s what is happening in our communities now."</b>

Quote:Immediately after Tallahassee police raided her apartment April 17, Hoffman went to her boyfriend's house and told him about the deal she'd cut. Over the next three weeks, she would tell him and Liza all about her work as a confidential informant.

"They wanted her to turn in her friends, and she wouldn't do that," said Liza, a 24-year-old FSU graduate student. "She said she wanted to get some grimy people off the street. She wanted to get bad guys."

At first she agreed to give up a guy she knew who dealt drugs and sometimes bought pot from her, her friends said. But after one controlled call from the police station, she confessed to him she was working for the police and asked him to help her find someone else to turn in.

Quote:If you attended a Canadian university in the past eighty years, it's possible that, unbeknownst to you, Canadian security agents were surveying you, your fellow students, and your professors for 'subversive' tendencies and behaviour. Since the end of the First World War, members of the RCMP have infiltrated the campuses of Canada's universities and colleges to spy, meet informants, gather information, and on occasion, to attend classes.

Quote:RCMP spies kept secret files on hundreds of Canadian Politicians and bureaucrats at all three levels of government as part of a project known as the “VIP program,”

Quote:The book, a thorough examination of RCMP surveillance of the academic world, also discusses the Mounties' efforts to keep tabs on other
elements of society, including government, the media and women's groups.

The RCMP created security files on 800,000 Canadians, and it has long been known the force took an active interest in politicians and public
servantswith links to Communist organizations or other pursuits deemed subversive.

Quote:More East Germans were spying on their neighbors, colleagues, family and friends when the Berlin Wall fell than had previously been thought. According to a report published Monday, 189,000 people were informers for the Stasi -- the former Communist secret police -- when East Germany collapsed in 1989 -- 15,000 more than previous studies had suggested.