Police pay protestor informants...

news.bbc.co.uk...


"Police are using hundreds of paid informants inside protest groups to "feed them intelligence", according to evidence handed to the Guardian.

The paper says it has obtained tapes of discussions between men claiming to be undercover officers from Strathclyde Police and a Plane Stupid activist.

The recordings appear to show money being offered for information.

Strathclyde Police said officers had spoken to the group and the force had a responsibility to gather evidence.

The Guardian says the recordings were made during meetings between Strathclyde Police and Matilda Gifford, an activist with environmental protest group Plane Stupid, which campaigns against airport expansion.

The taped evidence appears to show her being offered money to reveal information about the organisation's members and tactics. "

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So what in the name of hell is going on? Those protestors who must be ashamed, although i truly don't believe they stand for their cause. Just another step forward to a paranoid Orwellian nightmare?

Or are we already in it.... and this is just mind games??

Spooky.

this all sounds like the movie "A scanner darkly" where all of your friends can be a possible agent for Big Brother.

Scary that so much is becoming a reality

This isn't news. It is routine for police to use paid informants, "snitches", and other informal, secretive sources for information. Paying for information is only a part of it, and a small part at that. Often policemen pay from their own pockets, because their departments won't fund the informers.

More often, the police will offer a deal to a small-time criminal, letting them walk or have a minor penalty for some crime. The price is to give the police information. These are routine in any large police department (and possibly in smaller ones as well).

Often the police or other agencies will infiltrate a group, in order to learn of potential crimes being planned. In many cases the information is misused in order to thwart perfectly legal activities. Sometimes, at least in Chicago, the authorities have planted "agents provacateur" to incite violence or other illegal behavior in a group, thus justifing the police using force against the group.

So yes, that kindred spirit, sympathetic to "The Cause" may, in fact, be a police plant, or someone from an opposing group, or even a reporter. The bigger the group, and the more the police dislike it, the more likely it is that someone's a plant.