Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Terrorism

“Snitch” visa often promised but rarely given

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The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) produced this report “Shining a Light on the “S” Visa: A Long History of Unfulfilled Promises and Bureaucratic Red Tape.” An S-visa, sometimes referred to as a “snitch visa,” offers temporary residency status to immigrants who “are willing to supply…critical reliable information” to U.S. law enforcement. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(15)(S).

The NACDL report reveals how often the government uses the S-visa to entice immigrants into becoming informants, sometimes at great risk to themselves and their families, even though almost none ever actually receive the visa. The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the immigration relief “dangle.” See also this story from the Intercept: “Federal Informants are Often Promised Visas. They Rarely Materialize.”

Violent FBI informant infiltrates Denver’s racial justice movement

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From Trevor Aaronson at the Intercept, this profile of an informant used by the FBI to infiltrate, record, provide weapons to, and incite violence by Black activists in Denver: The Snitch in the Silver Hearse. Michael Windecker — who had prior convictions for sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl and weapons charges — was paid over $20,000 during the summer of 2020 at the height of Denver protests against the killings of George Floyd and Elijah McClain. Among other astounding things, Windecker drove an activist to the personal home of Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (who was overseeing the prosecution of the police and paramedics who killed McClain) where Windecker affirmatively encouraged the activist to kill Weiser. The activist refused.

The FBI has a long sordid history of using informants to infiltrate and disrupt progressive political groups. See previous posts here. For more history, see Elizabeth Hinton, The Unsettling Message of Judas and the Black Messiah in The Atlantic, and Gary Marx’s classic book, Undercover.

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.

FBI using informants to surveil Black Lives Matter activists

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This piece in the Intercept reviews official documents showing, among other things, how the FBI used informants to surveil Black Lives Matter activists after Ferguson and beyond: FBI Tracked an Activist Involved With Black Lives Matter as They Traveled Across the U.S., Documents Show. Michael German, former FBI agent and now a national security expert at the Brennan Center, described it as “clearly just tracking First Amendment activity.”

The FBI’s history of using informants to surveil political activity, especially Black activists, stretches back decades. Historian Elizabeth Hinton wrote about it today in the Atlantic. Professor Gary Marx wrote a seminal book about it years ago titled Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. More recently we have seen similar FBI tactics deployed against Muslim communities.