COINTELPRO:

• COINTELPRO (1956–1971) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists of the civil rights movement or Black Power movement (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), independence movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left. The program also targeted the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. According to Noam Chomsky, in another instance in San Diego, the FBI financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing group of former members of the Minutemen anti-communist para-military organization, transforming it into a group called the Secret Army Organization that targeted groups, activists, and leaders involved in the Anti-War Movement, using both intimidation and violent acts. The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception; however, covert operations under the official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. COINTELPRO tactics are still used to this day, and have been alleged to include discrediting targets through psychological warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; and illegal violence, including assassination. The FBI's stated motivation was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order." Beginning in 1969, leaders of the Black Panther Party were targeted by the COINTELPRO and "neutralized" by being assassinated, imprisoned, publicly humiliated or falsely charged with crimes. Some of the Black Panthers affected included Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Zayd Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Marshall Conway. Common tactics used by COINTELPRO were perjury, witness harassment, witness intimidation, and withholding of evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO (Here's a documentary)

• The Black Panther Coloring Book was an example of a psychological operation by the FBI to discredit the Black Panthers. They created and distributed a coloring book claiming to come from the Black panthers. "It was a (somewhat effective) effort to discredit the Panthers as any sort of valid political movement and reinforce the opinion already held by a lot of white people at the time, that Huey P. Newton and his organization were psychotic militants who killed white people and cops indiscriminately." https://www.vice.com/read/coloring-the-black-panthers (http://archive.is/XLvxS)

• Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy - "New documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves. The documents show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61). As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a "terrorist threat." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy (http://archive.is/uP1J2)

• Inside the secret world of the corporate spies who infiltrate protests - Major firms hiring people from corporate security firms to monitor and infiltrate political groups that object to their commercial activities. "The leaked documents suggest that corporate security firms frequently run espionage operations to gather information on protesters, including infiltrating private meetings and obtaining internal documents. However, they are subject to little or no regulation. This has attracted criticism from police, who have in the past called the deployment of corporate spies “completely uncontrolled and unrestrained”. Since 1968, the police have sent more than 140 undercover officers to spy on over 1,000 political groups. However, senior officers have claimed that there have been more corporate spies embedded in protest groups than police officers. Critics say the security firms are spying on law-abiding campaigners and impeding their democratic rights. The Guardian has spoken to a man who claimed that he had infiltrated political groups for a corporate espionage firm. He declined to give his name or say which groups he had spied on. He described how the spies surreptitiously fostered conflicts within a campaign to set activists against each other, in order to wear them down and make them lose their political motivation. “People get tired of it, that’s their weakness,” he said." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/12/inside-the-secret-world-of-the-corporate-spies-who-infiltrate-protests (http://archive.is/1qNKE)

• "Undercover police officers who adopted fake identities in deployments lasting several years spied on more than 1,000 political groups, a judge-led public inquiry has said. It is the first time that the number of political groups infiltrated by the undercover spies over more than four decades has been made public. The list of groups that were infiltrated has not been published by the inquiry. However, it is known to include environmental, anti-racist and animal rights groups, leftwing parties and the far right. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/27/undercover-police-spied-on-more-than-1000-political-groups-in-uk (http://archive.is/Pz3iH)

• A former Marine working for the private security firm TigerSwan infiltrated an array of anti-Dakota Access pipeline groups at Standing Rock and beyond. https://theintercept.com/2018/12/30/tigerswan-infiltrator-dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock/ (http://archive.is/6BCD6)

• "Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that three of their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que. Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock. In the video, protest organizers in suits order the men to put the rock down, call them police instigators and try unsuccessfully to unmask them. However, the police force denied allegations its undercover officers were there on Monday to provoke the crowd and instigate violence." https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-police-admit-they-went-undercover-at-montebello-protest-1.656171 (http://archive.is/Buxgz)