Informants or provocateurs

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I am cool with the former and not cool at all with the latter. It was the former that was helpful in infiltrating the Klan in the 60s.

[Rex]

1. Aren't they kind of the opposite of each other?

And informant is helping law enforcement catch the boss bad guy by giving them credible evidence. Whereas a provocateurs sole intent is to cause harm or damage to a movement?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. Yes but sometimes they overlap, hence you have entrapment./NT

[leveymg]

3. An informant who takes a leadership or funding role is inherently a provocateur.

It's hard to be an effective informant unless that person has a substantial impact on what the targeted group does. That was often the case with FBI informants, as it is with CIA assets. They often reach a level of trust with both sides, and are allowed to do dangerous things - such as providing weapons or control over explosives and planning attacks, as was Ali Mohamed in the '93 WTC attack and later, in training elements of al-Qaeda that went on to carry out the 9/11 attack. That's the problem.

[countryjake]

4. Klan infiltrators? Helpful? To what end? Google the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.

Whitewash
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/11/whitewash?page=1

~snip~

At 11:23 on that sunny November morning, about 40 members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, mustered in a caravan of gun-laden vehicles, opened fire on black and white demonstrators at the Morningside Homes housing project, while four television news teams and one police officer recorded the action. People ran screaming for cover. When the shooting ceased, four were dead and 11 wounded, one mortally, their bodies strewn about the project as if on a battlefield. One of the dead, a local woman named Sandi Smith who'd been active in the black student movement and was at the time trying to unionize textile workers, was shot between the eyes when she peeked out of a hiding place. The demonstrators had been gathering for a permitted march and rally rhetorically declaring "Death to the Klan" and organized by the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), which was active in the poor neighborhoods and mills of a region then dominated by textiles. It advocated antiracism, unionism, and communist revolution, all abhorred by the Klan, with which it had previously clashed, yet a police lieutenant posted his men out of sight of the demonstration and then permitted them to take a break until 11:30.

Court proceedings later revealed that police had an informant in the Klan to whom they had given a copy of the march permit and route, and who two days later would lead the white supremacist caravan. He informed for the FBI as well. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which had been running surveillance on the WVO, also had an informant among the Nazis. At the time of the killings, the police special agent in charge of the Klan informant was at the back of the caravan, having trailed it to the site. He did not intervene, or radio for help, or trip a siren, or pursue the killers as nine of their vehicles got away. Arrests occurred only because two police officers broke ranks and apprehended a van. In two criminal trials all-white juries acquitted six defendants. In 1985 a civil jury found the city, the Klan, and the Nazis liable for violating the civil rights of one demonstrator; the city paid his widow $350,000 on behalf of all parties.