Comment by thinkingemote
10 hours ago
It's worth repeating a tactic from every state's intelligence playbook, but I note that this article gives an interesting angle to this.
Informants and spies are almost always those at the top of your group, they are the leaders, the ones with the money, the ones with the van, the people with the time to help out, to print your flyers, the people who can organise and transport. Spies are going to be the people above you that you trust. Spies will be your friends. In the UK, police informants even fathered children with members of their infiltrated groups! They are not going to be the new strange people who join and are look nervous but who make excellent and easy scape goats. States want the maximum value for their intelligence, the spies are going to be at the top of your group.
The article suggests one way around it, to have flat organisations: to not have leaders. It gives resilience if when a person is compromised the group can continue, or when there is no leader the amount of information or damage that leader can cause would be less. Another way potentially would be the cell format, used in some of the worst terrorist groups, only operate in cells of 5 or less and only one of those in each small group have contact with only 1 other cell.
Informants fathering children with their sources was also a thing in the DDR. Often the lines were blurred because informants were former activists that were turned by threats and blackmail. But I personally know a woman who had 2 children with a guy who turned out to be an informant that had been specifically set upon her and her group of friends. She found out only after 1989 when the files were opened.
I really think the incoherence of modern reform movements (Occupy, BLM, Defund Police, etc) is the result of modern political suppression groups having enough tools in their toolbox to eliminate leaders of these movements.
Without a strong voice, the movement devolves into contradictory platforms, which results in no action.