Interesting pdf here on the rise of informants, with the relevant parts quoted below:
Another area of law governs how informants can be used to investigate others. The Supreme Court has given the government nearly unfettered authority to use informants in investigations by exempting informant use from many of the constraints of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
The seminal case in this area is Hoffa v. United States, 385 U.S. 293 (1966). In that case, the Supreme Court held that the government could use a criminal informant recruited from a Louisiana jail cell in order to get incriminating information from Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa. Because Hoffa let the informant into his hotel room and spoke freely in front of him, the Court decided that Hoffa had no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information, and therefore the government could use it without violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court has also authorized the use of wired informants to record information electronically.
Usually, the Fourth Amendment requires the government to have probable cause and a warrant before it can enter private hotel rooms or surreptitiously tape people’s statements. Before a warrant can issue, a court has to decide whether the government has enough evidence to justify the intrusion into the target’s privacy. Informants are therefore an extremely powerful tool: they permit the government to seek out and even record private information without concrete evidence of wrongdoing or a warrant, and without asking a judge. Interestingly, several states, including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, have rejected this broad grant of investigative authority and held that under their state constitutions, warrantless informant recordings in private places like the home violate the right to privacy.
The Fifth Amendment is the basis for the famous Miranda warnings, under which the government cannot interrogate suspects in custody without warning them that they have the right to remain silent and the right to counsel. The Supreme Court has held that these rules do not apply to undercover informants. For example, a jailhouse snitch working for the government can question a suspect without triggering Miranda, even though if police asked those questions directly the suspect would have to be Mirandized. This rule applies only if the suspect has not yet been charged with a crime. Once formally charged, a suspect has the right to counsel and the government cannot use an informant to deliberately elicit in-formation from him about that crime.
These rules also have implications for the making of informants in the first place. Miranda warnings are required only when a suspect is in custody, so a police officer talking to a suspect on the street corner can ask questions and try to make a deal as long as the suspect is not yet arrested or otherwise prevented from leaving. In other words, the government has many opportunities to communicate with potential informants, and to use informants to get information, without constitutional restrictions.
You see how powerful informants are as a tool. You don’t even have to have committed a crime, and they can record your private conversations, perform surreptitious entries and searches, acquire confidential financial and health information, and do all the other things the Constitution won’t even let them do to criminals.
This is why Operation TIPS, which would have recruited one informant for every 24 people, was so potentially useful, and potentially dangerous. It is basically an end run around the citizenry’s Constitutional protections, and even worse, it is an end run around your Constitutional protections performed not by sworn Law Enforcement who volunteered to protect the innocent, but by criminals who make a living victimizing innocents.
Perhaps the most fundamental compromise of informant use is that it requires the government to tolerate crime, thereby jeopardizing the integrity of the entire system. By their very nature, informant deals require law enforcement to ignore the severity of crimes committed by informants—the heart of the snitching deal. Active informants typically continue to commit new crimes in order to generate information for their handlers and to remain connected to criminal networks, from drug dealing to fraud schemes to violence. And finally, law enforcement officials routinely acknowledge that informants tend to continue to offend on their own. The government may turn a blind eye to this new criminal activity, or even assist its informants in escaping punishment for these new crimes once detected.
All this informant crime—whether authorized by the government or not—has a real effect on individuals and communities. Such crimes erode the quality of life in neighborhoods and undermine businesses; they strike fear and insecurity into the hearts of family, friends and neighbors. Informant crime also sends a pernicious message to victims—that the government has decided to tolerate their suffering in exchange for the value of the informant’s cooperation. When the government gets into the business of permitting and even promoting crime for investigative purposes, it flips the entire law enforcement endeavor on its head.
Even worse is the use of informants who aren’t criminals. Modern LE Intelligence will find and exploit any weakness they can find in the people around a target. If a friend is having an affair he can be blackmailed, and now your friend reports to them. If a sister has a thing for badboys, she may enjoy a miraculous evening, running into a guy who is exactly the type of guy she dreamed about, and now the guy who is sleeping with your sister is reporting back to them. Your boss, your neighbor, your cousin, once LE Intel moves in on you, they will try to corrupt everyone. There are even cases of targets who woke up one day married to informants who approached them initially as part of an investigation.
The next thing you know, your cable guy has installed a backdoor on your router and is passing everything you do online back to them, your maid service is giving them an inventory of your house, your accountant has turned over all your financial data, your priest is telling them what you tell him in confession (purely off the record), your postman is CC’ing them on all your mail, your pool guy is pumping you for intel during cleanings, and you can’t get a service call from anyone at your house without wondering what they will get out of it.
I’m all for destroying criminals, but I also have a soft spot for Constitutional protections, and the concept of a government limited in its power and authority. I also hate criminals, and dislike giving them governmental authority to commit crimes. From there it is a short trip to Whitey Bulger’s story of victimizing the innocent under the full protection of the FBI.
The number of informants is not shrinking, nor has TIPS gone away (no matter what they tell you), and that will get much worse as the apocalypse approaches. Remain vigilant.
Apocalypse cometh™
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]