In 1968 New York City police, FBI agents and CIA agents were masquerading as students and faculty at Columbia University during and after the student protests. Today psychiatrists masquerade as librarians, artists, and political activists. Attending almost any city council meeting are FBI informants, police employees, and psychiatrists masquerading as activists. Performing psychiatric evaluations without consent is a violation of state and U.S. privacy laws. When will the New York Times reveal the undercover psychiatric abuses?
[From article]
Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents.
[. . .]
It has also resulted in hidden problems, with money gone missing, investigations compromised and agents sometimes left largely on their own for months.
[. . .]
At convenience stores, for example, undercover agents, sometimes using actual minors as decoys, look for illegal alcohol and cigarette sales, records show.
[especially popular in college towns like Cambridge MA]
[. . .]
director of the F.B.I., [James B.] Comey wrote in a letter to The New York Times that “every undercover operation involves ‘deception,’ which has long been a critical tool in fighting crime.”
[. . .]
In one investigation, the bureau paid an undercover informant from the tobacco industry nearly $5 million in “business expenses” for his help in the case.
[The FBI used me to fight organized crime for 15 years after government psychiatrists drugged me for 80 days using hallucinogens. The FBI paid me nothing. They went on to coordinate 22 years of retaliation by up to nine crime families. Charming agency.]
[. . .]
Across the federal government, undercover work has become common enough that undercover agents sometimes find themselves investigating a supposed criminal who turns out to be someone from a different agency, law enforcement officials said. In a few situations, agents have even drawn their weapons on each other before realizing that both worked for the federal government.
[. . .]
The numbers are considered confidential and are not listed in public budget documents, and even Justice Department officials say they are uncertain how many agents work undercover.
But current and former law enforcement officials said the number of federal agents doing such work appeared to total well into the thousands,
[. . .]
An intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the agency alone spent $100 million annually on its undercover operations.
[. . .]
“There is a danger to democracy,” he said, “in having police infiltrate protests when there isn’t a reasonable basis to suspect criminality.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/
More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and WILLIAM M. ARKINNOV. 15, 2014
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