“What if she's from the FBI?” The effects of covert forms of social control on social movements

What Makes Protest Dangerous? Ideology, Contentious Tactics, and Covert Surveillance

“…It should be emphasized, however, that even a strict adherence to covert intelligence gathering can have a considerable chilling effect on freedoms of association and assembly. Intelligence gathering is often used for the purpose of extra-legal intimidation of movement actors (Marx, 1974) and can also have a significant emotional toll on individual activists (Cunningham & Noakes, 2008).…”

Undercover Research: Corporate and police spying on activists. An introduction to activist intelligence as a new field of surveillance.

“…Recent work has highlighted how state agencies identify targets by constructing them as such (Manning 2012;Brodeur et al 2003;Brodeur 1983Brodeur , 2007, and has shown that such constructions are shaped not only by, for example, ethnicity, class, religion or other characteristics of potential candidates, but also by the organisational structure of policing agencies (Monaghan and Walby 2012;Monahan and Palmer 2009;Cunningham 2004). The Church Committee Report (1976) illustrates this in great detail, documenting the FBI Counter Intelligence Programme (COINTELPRO) to undermine and 'neutralise' groups considered an 'enemy of the state' and the dangers of questionable activities justified by such intelligence morality (Churchill and Vander Wall 1988;Churchill 2002;Glick 1999;Donner 1990;Gelbspan 1991;Leonard and Gallagher 2015;Cunningham and Noakes 2008;Boykoff 2007). The field of activist intelligence will map the extent to which the secretive character of police undercover operations and the lack of accountability and transparency add to an apparent culture of complacency and also how links with corporate parties affected the identification of targets.…”

Surveillance and student dissent: the case of the Franco dictatorship.

“…But it also strongly favored it because such dirty play did not go unnoticed among students, and therefore it confirmed the most far-left views about the political situation. The obsession to stay underground, which consumed so much energy inside revolutionary, "new left" groups-Trotskyist, Maoists, Luxembourgists, Guevarists, anarchists and others-in Spain and abroad (Marx 1974;Cunningham and Noakes 2008), was obviously related to the fear that inconvenient observers-maybe infiltrators-could ruin their projects. Police reports contained plenty of references from non-identified "sources" and, although they were sometimes pure inventions, anti-Franco fighters could not know this for sure.…”