From the horse's mouth, there is the story of Mark Kennedy, UK policeman who spent 7 years infiltrating environmental groups in England. There was television show about him, including interviews with him, where he describes how he infiltrated the group:
From the sounds of it, he was more of an undercover intelligence gatherer than an agent provocateur, so he just went along with whatever the group did, and if he found illegal activity, he would secretly report it to his colleagues.
From a Guardian article:
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"My role was to gather intelligence so appropriate policing could take place," Kennedy says. "It wasn't to prevent people from demonstrating. I met loads of great people who would go out every weekend and show their concern and demonstrate. Then there were other people who would want to take things further and maybe want to break into somewhere or destroy things, and then you start infringing on the rights of other people to go about their lawful business."
The account in the tv show is interesting because he actually became friends with the activists, and the lover of some of the women, and it seems like he kind of regretted in the end spying on people who he sympathized with to a large degree:
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Kennedy experienced heavy-handed policing first-hand. In 2006 he was beaten up by officers on the perimeter fence of the Drax power station. He says he was trying to protect a woman being hit on the legs with a baton when he was jumped by five uniformed officers – they were there only because he had tipped off his handlers. "They kicked and beat me. They had batons and pummelled my head. One officer repeatedly stamped on my back. I had my finger broken, a big cut on my head and a prolapsed disc." There were plenty of other incidents, he says. "I experienced a lot of unjust policing. At times, I was appalled at being a police officer."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2...l-activist
There is also a pretty interesting interview with one of the women he had a relatioship with when he was undercover:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2...al-tactics
Obviously she felt betrayed, though what is interesting to me about her take is that she wasn't really convinced by his act, it was more just that they were an accepting group:
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She said: "He always had money. He obviously had an income that he never really explained. He told me once that him and his brother made beds out of scaffolding – to sell – and that is how he made so much money. At the time it seemed like a bit of a strange thing to me."
She added: "He was a bit different from all of us. He ate meat, he had a pick-up truck, and just not very hippy in a way. Nevertheless people trusted him, and I think people in this movement are generally accepting and open to people being different.
On a practical level, it seems like an infiltrator like this is really of no harm to a group that is staying within the bounds of the law.
An agent provocateur is another matter. I was involved in environmental activism in the early 90's, and although my group was small and local, we were always on the look out for agent provocateurs because of what happened to Earth First! activists in an FBI operation called Thermicon, in which an FBI agent infiltrated the group and actually convinced them to do something illegal that they wouldn't have planned on their own:
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Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy (EMETIC), sabotaged a ski lift in Arizona. The members were Mark Davis, Margaret Millet, and Marc Baker. The FBI mounted operation THERMICON and was able to recruit a friend of the three as an informant and infiltrate an agent, Michael Fain, as a member of the group. After two years of planning, the group decided to topple a transmission tower in the Arizona desert which carried power from the Palo Verde nuclear plant. There are claims that the idea was instigated by the FBI agent provocateur, and that the FBI even offered to obtain explosives for the purpose. There is no doubt that the FBI was keen [pdf, large] to implicate Earth First! founder Dave Foreman in the group’s activity, in spite of the fact that his involvement was limited to a passing acquaintance with the group’s members.
http://www.writingsonthewall.net/earth-f...nd-the-fbi
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In 1987 a Prescott, Arizona group calling itself EMETIC (Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy) sabotaged the ski lift at the Arizona Snow Bowl. The FBI infiltrated the group and through an agent provocateur convinced them to attempt to sabotage power lines in 1989, for which the four were arrested and prosecuted. During the infiltration the FBI desparately attempted to implicate Earth First! in EMETIC's actions, even arresting Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman and charging him with "conspiracy" for giving two copies of his book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching to the undercover FBI agent. The FBI agent, Michael Fain, was caught on tape saying that Dave Foreman "isn't really the guy we need to pop, I mean in terms of an actual perpetrator. This is the guy we need to pop to send a message. And that's all we're really doing. Uh-oh! We don't need that on tape. Hoo boy!"[6]
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Earth_First!
None of this is specific to online activities, and the Earth First! infiltration, for instance was years ago, and it was all hands on, in person activity.
Doubtless things have changed now, and everything is so much easier, still, the lessons from these two examples hold true.
- Don't plan anything that is against the law.
- Don't let anyone convince you to do anything that is against the law.
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