Snitchuational Awareness
In which we notice and avoid informants.
Late last year I was asked to join a Discord. I find using Discord akin to chatting using a pinball machine, so I ignored this for a while. When I finally did join, I used my actual name, and I had one exchange with a regular. There was an immediate “vervets detect a lurking leopard” reaction. I ignored Discord for a week, and when I started it again, I found myself banned.
The whole idea behind this move was getting some seasoned hackers lurking in various places where people will face infiltration, manipulation, and informants. There was a discussion about restoring my access after getting the boot, but I despise Discord enough that I was uninterested. Hard knocks are a teacher, too.
But in the bigger scheme of things, there’s going to be a LOT of activity like this, which people mistakenly lump under the label “feds”. Understanding the nuances of how corporate security, domestic law enforcement, and foreign intel work will help you to avoid the various entrapment gambits.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you are joining a social movement, be it in an overt, clandestine, or covert fashion, these are some things you should know. If you’re just observing I think that goes double.
Definitions:
The first thing we need to do is squash that catch all term “fed” for being a useless buzzword. Here are some classes of actors that get lumped into it:
Federal informants in the business of framing targets.
Federal Cooperating Human Sources (CHS) who are mostly observers.
Actual DHS and FBI agents.
Publicly visible “handlers”, who in rare cases are former DHS/FBI.
Foreign spooks - foreign intel or skilled partisans aligned with a nation state.
Corporate spooks - not LE, but may engage in LE-like behavior.
LARPers - look and act like other categories, but in it for the lulz.
Those categories aren’t exhaustive but they do cover 90%+ of the various things I’ve encountered over the years. When you encounter someone who is being described as a “fed”, you should pay attention to the characteristics, in an effort to improve your assessments.
Historical Examples:
I’m going to name some actual individuals here, where I can, so those of you who are curious can dig deeper.
Federal informant: Hector Monsegur
Hector “Sabu” Monsegur was the front man for an Anonymous node named LulzSec. He got caught, disappeared for two days, was turned, and came back to stage manage a fifty day rampage in 2012. A variety of people have faced prison over his betrayal.
Federal CHS:
Charles “Rage Furby” Johnson was working at the direction of FBI whistleblower Johnathan Buma with he recruited Peter Thiel as a fellow CHS. He was in the middle of all sorts of interesting events and he’s been making them public over the last year and a half. He may have observed or participated in criminal activity, but he wasn’t visibly organizing it in the fashion Sabu did.
Actual Agents:
The odds of you encountering an actual sworn agent with a badge on social media are pretty much zero. They are busy people, they’ve got CHS and handlers to observe, or informants to do setups.
Handlers:
There are people who are visible on various social media platforms, but they’re participating with ulterior motives, and they often direct the activity of a string of associates. One of the longest running in connection with Anonymous is “MyWhiteNinja”, who has been appearing in my records since 2012.
Foreign Spooks:
This is a tough one in terms of examples. The first person who comes to mind when I hear “foreign agent” is Julian Assange, but that’s a terrible environment for a new person to enter. Keep in mind such people need not be hostile - there are plenty of pro-NATO partisans out there. Just understand that you are disposable in that world.
Corporate Spooks:
There are a variety of actors that play on social media on behalf of whomever is funding them. As a rule, they’re involved in disrupting social movements that might engage in campaigns against their masters.
Grifters & LARPers:
There are an endless variety of people playing various roles who are doing so purely for their own amusement, out of delusions of grandeur, or in support of a scam they run. When the January 6th people got prosecuted, former FBI section chief Thomas Caldwell got a LOT of attention for his seeming role as an organizer. Court filings later showed the rest of his associates viewed him as a harmless, grandiose goof.
Where do I fit? Corporate spook mostly - not that I’m working for “the man” in any sense, but the things I do, or at least used to do, are mostly in the realm of civil society NGOs and journalists. In other words, I see law enforcement as either a useful tool, or much more likely a hazard to be avoided, depending on the day.
Tactics, Techniques & Procedures:
This is where hands on experience really matters and in general there isn’t anywhere you can go to get schooling on defending against such attention. I guess I am some sort of expert in this, having done it long enough that I seldom encounter new patterns. Let me share a couple instructive anecdotes.
I’ve been wrapped up in a precedent setting 1st Amendment case in Texas for coming up on eleven years. One of my codefendants was in that last Grifters/LARPers category and he caused endless trouble. I used to email with him, but right at the start of 2018 I sent him a note to the effect of “Can you not see how this course of action will lead to a grand jury investigation?”, then I blocked him.
An individual from Texas approached me that March via LinkedIn. He claimed he had a dispute with a former employer and that he wanted to do something about it. I immediately suggested Jeff Dorrell, the attorney representing me. He insisted that he wanted “payback”, not monetary compensation, and quickly backpedaled when I just didn’t understand what he sought. I slept on it, then worked through his back trail, and called the head of security for his former employer, a Houston ambulance service. This person clearly 1) believed all the various rumors about my codefendant’s bad behavior and 2) assumed that because we were named in the same action we were close.
When someone approaches you and solicits criminal activity, they might be an idiot, but it’s more likely they’re an informant.
The plaintiff in my Texas case, James “Pissboy” McGibney, set up a guy named Deric Lostutter, who had worked with him. He received a couple of years for an intrusion related to the Steubenville rape case in 2012. I talk to all sorts of people and when he came back to Twitter we had a private conversation in July of 2022. He said he was studying for a support job in a civil rights NGO, which sounded like a good direction after his rough start. Then he wanted me to get on some Twitter Space with Pissboy and revenge pornographer Hunter Moore.
When you get a clumsy pretext approach involving people who engage in all sorts of public histrionics, and they want you to join some group activity, the correct response is “let me get back to you on that”.
When Charles Johnson made it known he’d been working with Johnathan Buma and he started dumping details on things, I accepted a LinkedIn request from him that I’d ignored for the prior fifteen months. My thinking was that he might have things useful to one of the journalists I know. He asked for a face to face meet quite quickly, which I initiate only rarely, and almost never accept on someone else’s urging.
A bit later he tried to create a situation where I would interact with Individual None, a clownish persona from the post-Occupy years, which seems to have changed hands since it was doxed in 2018. I let things run on a bit more, because it was a busy, high profile situation and I thought maybe something useful would fall out of it. I finally ended up doing a mock & block on both Buma and Johnson the spring of 2024.
When someone proffers a highly public crackpot whose stock in trade is broadcasting delusions of reference, busy yourself elsewhere.
It should be stated that ANY introduction someone makes MUST be treated as an attempt to insert an informant into your environment. I can think of three or four times I’ve seen this over the years. Basically a Handler type will find or witness enough to convince the agent directing an informant to make an approach. Such people show up, they’ve got lots of obviously stupid ideas, they’re controlling, they’re disruptive, the ask questions out of scope for the nominal task at hand, and they will always try to get you on an escalation ladder that will end with a crime they can pin on you.
That pinning is VERY important, if you are at all effective you WILL face this. A big part of why I keep such detailed records are the several times when, growing frustrated with the lack of anything that could be cognized as a crime, someone else did a poor job of mimicking me, and then did something that was a violation. This has happened with the Dallas FBI field office, and with people associated with Special Agent Jayson Chambers, the guy who orchestrated the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping sting. There are an equal number of events like that I’ve never shared in public, I just keep waiting for an alert to trigger, or someone approaching me with knowledge of those happenings.
You must recognize things in your daily flow of activities that are exculpatory in nature, and preserve them in an admissible fashion
Prior Articles:
These originally appeared in Informantspotting in May of last year. If you can only take the time to read ONE thing, let it be the Informantspotting post itself.
Join The Resistance:
There are a bunch of the usual suspects blabbering about ZOMG TEH RESISTANCE!!! I have completely ignored all of them, despite having participated in pretty much every social movement since the Coffee Party clear back in 2009. Some of my motivations for this include:
Buncha n00bs who’ve never done anything like that previously.
N00bs can’t vet people, so infiltrators swarm.
Psychopaths rise, due to their nature, and malign forces boosting them.
N00bs can be made to stampede, psychopaths enjoy this.
DOJ/FBI are a couple weeks away from being led by absolute ninnies.
Foreign actors will find a newly permissive environment here.
The whole point of this Substack was transferring knowledge and skills to a new generation, rather than me going out in person AGAIN. That’s something I would not have done had Harris won, and that goes quadruple for the oncoming circus.
Your 4th Amendment protections are something the courts formerly ensured that law enforcement respected. That’s pretty much out the windows in my view. If you lack the ability to move around without leaving a trail, if you’ve absorbed at least some of what I’ve been trying to convey here, you already understand that the best place to observe a stampede is from the rear.
It’s not that I disagree with the reasons put forth for doing this, I’ve just seen way too much of the fallout up close and personal over the years. Even if I were a largely invisible actor, I’d be reticent about joining, and being a professional trouble magnet also makes one a designated lightning rod. The players I recall from Occupy days are trying to reinvent themselves, and they’ll have to accomplish that without being able to credible claim they’ve got some angle that involves me.
So there’s your cautionary lecture … it’s going to be a long four years, please try to remain standing until the end, eh?
Conclusion:
If this sounds personal and I come across as bitter … well … congrats for being perceptive. Never the less, a bunch of people are about to learn these things the hard way, and unlike what in retrospect were relatively benign troubles during Occupy, this time it’s going to get really ugly.
We have no direction yet for Q1 2025 … and this is certainly an area that could use attention … so maybe there should be a biweekly or monthly Snitchuational Awareness article? I absolutely could write such a series, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. I had a long paragraph enumerating the hazards from my perspective, but I thought better of including it.
Perhaps I should leave this to a younger person who remains close to the action …