Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

International

FBI Agent reveals illegal informant tactics in the domestic war on terror

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Informants are central to and embedded in numerous larger law enforcement programs. The New York Times Magazine published this profile of FBI agent Terry Albury who, among other things, pushed back against the FBI’s coercive development of informants in pursuit of baseless counterterrorism investigations, as well as racial and religious profiling. Albury was convicted in 2018 of leaking classified documents to journalists; he was sentenced to four years in prison. From the article, “I Helped Destroy People“:

“Assessments were the opening salvo to the informant-recruitment process. It was a delicate art of manipulation, persuading a person to work for the federal government against his or her own community, but with access to the person’s criminal history, or immigration status, it was much easier. There were different techniques agents were allowed to use. They could assist a person who lacked legal status to be given it, a tactic known as the “immigration-relief dangle.” Conversely, agents could also work with immigration officials to deport those people if and when they’d exhausted their usefulness as confidential sources. Fear was a prominent driver. . . . Another approach was to threaten uncooperative sources with spreading disinformation unless they agreed to cooperate. “The script was, ‘Everyone in your community already thinks you’re a source, so you might as well work with us.'” “

Assessing terrorism informants 20 years after 9/11

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NYTimes story covering the prosecution of an alleged terrorist who was set up by a paid government informant: The ‘Herald Square Bomber’ Who Wasn’t. Nearly 50 percent of international terrorism cases have involved informants, in a process that has drawn criticism for decades. From the article:

“In [terrorism] trials, the government presented evidence gathered by paid civilian informants who latched onto low-income, vulnerable and mentally challenged individuals, urged them toward a plot and, in several cases, even offered money and supplies to carry out bombings.”

See here for previous posts on terror-related informant policies.

Japan considers snitching

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Japan is introducing American-style plea bargaining in which defendants can trade information about others in exchange for leniency.  Some are concerned about the risks of snitching in general, and of wrongful convictions in particular.  The law is more limited than the U.S. version, and only permits certain kinds of deals and only for certain kinds of crimes.  From the Japan Times:

“Unlike the U.S. plea bargaining system, admitting to a crime does not warrant a deal with prosecutors in Japan. The new system, introduced in a revision to the criminal procedure law, allows suspects in such crimes as bribery, embezzlement, tax fraud and drug smuggling to negotiate with prosecutors. The bargaining only applies to crimes listed in the law, with murder and assault off-limits.”

Multimillion-dollar drug bounties for informants

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Bloomberg recently explored the State Department’s Narcotics Reward Program which offers bounties for information on high-ranking drug traffickers: America’s Multimillion-Dollar Bounty Program Just for Drug Lords.   As always, the program accepts the risk of rewarding and protecting serious, violent criminals in exchange for information about other potentially more serious, violent criminals.  As the article notes, “[c]ritics of the government’s rewards programs warn that huge cash bounties increase cartel violence and encourage corruption among U.S. law enforcement personnel. But the program’s success is hard to dismiss, its proponents contend.”  Other agencies, including the IRS and the SEC, offer large bounties to informants as well.

The pressure to become an ICE informant

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The Intercept published this extensive story on the ICE informant program, how individual migrants can be coerced into becoming informants, and how the practice intersects with various aspects of the immigration apparatus: Play to Stay: Undocumented Immigrant Faces a Choice: Become an Informant for ICE or Be Deported.  The piece documents both the relatively robust regulatory structure that ICE uses to manage informants, and how it can go wrong.  From the article:

   “Working with confidential informants is a controlled process with oversight from [Homeland Security Investigations] HSI management, [Agent] Robinette said. Informants are registered and receive identification numbers. Background checks are conducted. Supervisors must approve the agreements. Indeed, ICE dedicates an entire handbook solely to informants, though its contents have not been made public. A separate HSI handbook on asset forfeiture, leaked to The Intercept and also published by the independent media organization Unicorn Riot, says that ICE should “identify, cultivate, and retain assistance” from so-called confidential informants “who are intimately involved with targeted criminal organizations.” According to the handbook, employing an informant should be a last resort, and the decision to do so should be made only after weighing the informant’s reliability against other factors. Every dollar paid to informants should be carefully considered and documented.

At the same time, ICE informant practices suffer from many of the ills that characterize informant use more generally and in less regulated environments. As the article notes, “several news stories have highlighted the pitfalls of ICE-informant relationships. Agents have fostered improper liaisons with informants. In one case, ICE knew an informant participated in killings yet continued working with him anyway (the agent was later fired). ICE, along with the FBI, uses informants and then works to deport them. ICE defenders like Robinette paint these as isolated incidents, and, of course, most ICE informants don’t make the news.”

For similar stories and additional resources see these prior posts.