Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Terrorism

Coercion of Intelligence Informants

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Diala Shamas, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, has just published this informative article in the Brooklyn Law Review: A Nation of Informants: Reigning In Post-9/11 Coercion of Intelligence Informants.  Here is the abstract:

“This article challenges the adequacy of the existing legal and regulatory framework governing informant recruitment and coercion practices to protect fundamental rights, informed by the Muslim-American experience. It looks at the growing law enforcement practice of recruiting informants among Muslim-American communities for intelligence gathering purposes. Although the coercion of law-abiding individuals to provide information to federal law enforcement agencies for intelligence gathering purposes implicates significant rights, it is left unregulated. Existing, albeit limited, restraints on the government agents’ ability to coerce individuals to provide information either assume a criminal context, or are driven by historical concerns over FBI corruption. As the U.S. government engages in widespread surveillance of Muslim-American communities, it relies heavily on recruiting members of those communities as informants. These individuals are targeted for their community ties, or their religious or linguistic knowledge—and not because of any nexus they might have to criminal activity. This has led FBI agents to search for coercive levers outside of the criminal process and that have far fewer procedural protections—namely, immigration and watch-listing authorities. Thus, existing protections that have evolved to prevent civil rights violations in the criminal informant context—limited as those protections may be—do not apply. In light of these expanding authorities and the significant rights at stake, this article makes several proposals that would regulate the recruitment of intelligence informants.”

Recordings of FBI informant recruiting tactics

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The Intercept has published a story of a man who documented and recorded nearly two years of efforts by the FBI to pressure him into becoming an informant. Story and recordings here: Recordings Capture Brutal FBI Tactics to Recruit a Potential Informant.  The story is by Trevor Aaronson, author of “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism.”

The FBI’s “immigration relief dangle”

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The FBI has long used immigration as both a carrot and stick to induce people to become informants.  See this story from BuzzFeed last year: Welcome to America, Now Spy on Your Friends.  Now the Intercept has published this article: When Informants Are No Longer Useful, the FBI Can Help Deport Them. It includes new information from  the FBI’s “Confidential Human Source Police Guide”–its manual for handling informants–which uses the phrase “immigration relief dangle” to describe the dynamic.  FBI agents coordinate with immigration officials to identify and pressure potential informants, and then help ICE locate them for deportation when they are no longer useful.  From the article:

“It’s been clear for a decade that the FBI works with ICE to keep informants in the country. What we didn’t know was that the assistance is often contingent and temporary, and that the FBI actively assists ICE in locating informants who are no longer useful so that they may be deported.”

“’This creates a perverse incentive structure, because informants are incentivized to keep themselves valuable,’ said [immigration expert and Stanford lecturer Diala] Shamas. ‘It will further incentivize them to create investigations when there wouldn’t be one otherwise. In the traditional criminal context, the law enforcement community is conscious of the risk that coercing informants increases the likelihood of getting bad intelligence. But in the counterterrorism and intelligence context, this caution has been thrown out the window.'”

The article is by Trevor Aaronson, author of the Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism.

Following a terrorism informant in real time

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In this Sundance award-winning documentary, (T)error, filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe follow a local professional informant as he collects information about his target for his FBI handlers.  The New York Times Magazine, which published “The Informant and the Filmmakers” today, describes the film as follows:

   “By some counts, nearly half of the 500-plus terrorism-related convictions in federal court since the Sept. 11 attacks have involved informants. Before ‘‘(T)error,’’ most of what was known of their work came from indictments and snippets of wiretapped dialogue, served up by prosecutors and neatly presented for the courtroom. Filmed without the F.B.I.’s cooperation and apparently without its knowledge, ‘‘(T)error’’ shows how an informant puts a case together from its raw ingredients.”

The article relies on Trevor Aaronson’s book “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” which criticizes the phenomenon of terrorism informants more broadly.   Interested readers should also take a look at Wadie Said’s recent book “Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions,” which argues that the federal legal system has become distorted in response to terrorism prosecutions in general, and the use of informants in particular.  Click here for links to both books.

FBI pressures Muslim immigrants to become informants

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This Buzzfeed article– Welcome to America–Now Spy on Your Friends — describes how the FBI routinely interferes with the immigration process in order to exert pressure on immigrants from Muslim countries to provide information.  As the article puts it, “[w]hen Muslim immigrants apply to become citizens, they often find the process delayed for years without explanation. Then, when they are at wit’s end, they get a visit from the FBI, with an offer they don’t dare refuse.”

See also this 2013 ACLU report, Muslims Need Not Apply.