This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of two controversies around the disclosure of informants’ names. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the FBI’s counterintelligence program used informants to observe and disrupt black power, feminist, and antiwar movements. Underground publications decried FBI methods and attempts to export them to Saigon. When Media thieves for the first time disseminated the term “COINTELPRO,” along with several informants’ identities, they conveyed their disdain for “the snitch” to the larger public, and helped journalists, legislators, lawyers, and juries—some culled from conservative districts—make FBI accountable for its undercover operations.
This Vietnam-era information war recalls contemporary clash between the US government and the global transparency movement. In 2010, in response to valid criticism, transparency organization Wikileaks attempted to redact from leaked Afghan and Iraq War Logs the names of informants—often, but not always, ordinary people caught in between the interests of US military, contractors, allied indigenous forces, and insurgent groups. Yet contemporary “human intelligence” methods can damage informers and their targets far more than those that inspired public disdain in the 1970s. Using evidence from Wikileaks files, this paper argues that by focusing solely on Wikileaks’ failure to protect individuals, its critics lent support to informing as an institution: the related, coercive and subtle ways the United States governs through its informant networks on home soil and occupied territories.
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