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.