COINTELPRO Tactics Still Active Today?

Overview

On March 8, 1971, while most of America was watching the first Ali-Frazier fight — the Fight of the Century — eight ordinary citizens broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania. They weren’t hardened criminals. They were a religion professor, a daycare worker, a social worker, a physicist, and their friends. They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, and they had a plan so simple it shouldn’t have worked: walk in, take everything, and mail it to the newspapers.

It worked. The documents they stole exposed COINTELPRO — the FBI’s covert program to surveill, infiltrate, disrupt, and neutralize domestic political organizations — to the American public for the first time. Within months, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover officially terminated the program. Within years, the Church Committee investigation had exposed the full scope of what the FBI had been doing: sending anonymous letters to try to break up Martin Luther King’s marriage, infiltrating the Black Panthers so thoroughly that some chapters had more FBI informants than actual members, forging documents, inciting violence between rival groups, and running what amounted to a domestic counterinsurgency program against American citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

COINTELPRO is one of the few genuine confirmed conspiracies in American history. The FBI secretly targeted American citizens for political surveillance and disruption, lied about it, and was only exposed through an illegal break-in that the perpetrators got away with for 43 years.

The question this article asks is different: did it actually stop?

The Original COINTELPRO (1956-1971)

What the FBI Did

COINTELPRO officially ran from 1956 to 1971, though evidence suggests related activities predated the formal program. Its targets included:

The Communist Party USA (1956): The original COINTELPRO target. By the late 1950s, the FBI had infiltrated the CPUSA so thoroughly that the joke was the party couldn’t hold a meeting without a majority of attendees being informants.

The Socialist Workers Party (1961): Despite the SWP posing essentially zero threat to national security, the FBI ran a sustained campaign against it, including burglaries of its offices and infiltration of its membership.

White hate groups (1964): The Ku Klux Klan was a COINTELPRO target, though the FBI’s efforts here were considerably less aggressive than its campaigns against left-wing groups. Informant Gary Thomas Rowe participated in the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo while working for the FBI — raising questions about whether the bureau was fighting the Klan or facilitating its violence.

Black nationalist groups (1967): This category included the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and most significantly, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Hoover called King “the most dangerous Negro in America” and directed a sustained campaign of surveillance, harassment, and psychological warfare against him, including an anonymous letter that appeared to urge King to commit suicide.

The New Left (1968): Anti-war groups, student organizations, and the counterculture movement. The FBI infiltrated Students for a Democratic Society, anti-Vietnam War organizations, and even feminist groups.

COINTELPRO Tactics

The program used specific, documented tactics that are worth understanding because they’re the template against which modern FBI activities are measured:

• Infiltration: Placing agents or paid informants inside target organizations, often in leadership positions
• Psychological warfare: Sending forged letters, planting false stories in the media, making anonymous phone calls designed to sow distrust
• Legal harassment: Using the legal system to tie up organizations in court battles, coordinating with local police for pretextual arrests
• Bad-jacketing: Spreading rumors that legitimate activists were themselves FBI informants, destroying trust within organizations
• Extralegal force: Coordinating with local police for violent raids (the 1969 murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton, killed in a raid planned with FBI intelligence, is the most notorious example)

The Exposure and “End”

After the Media break-in, the stolen documents were mailed to major newspapers. Most outlets initially refused to publish them. The Washington Post broke the story, and the floodgates opened. Congressional investigations followed, culminating in the 1975-1976 Church Committee, which documented COINTELPRO’s scope and illegality in devastating detail.

The result was a series of reforms: the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), guidelines restricting FBI domestic surveillance (the Levi Guidelines, later the Attorney General’s Guidelines), and a general public consensus that the FBI had overstepped its authority.

Hoover died in 1972. COINTELPRO was officially dead. The story should have ended there.

The Case for “COINTELPRO Never Ended”

Post-9/11: The PATRIOT Act Era

September 11, 2001, fundamentally reset the domestic surveillance landscape. The PATRIOT Act, passed six weeks after the attacks with almost no opposition, dramatically expanded the FBI’s surveillance authorities:

• National Security Letters: The FBI could now demand records from businesses without a judge’s approval, and recipients were legally barred from disclosing they’d received such a letter. The FBI issued over 300,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006 alone.

• Section 215: Allowed the FBI to obtain “any tangible things” relevant to a terrorism investigation — interpreted by the government to authorize bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, as Edward Snowden revealed in 2013.

• Expanded FISA authority: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, originally created as a check on domestic surveillance, became a near-rubber-stamp operation that approved virtually every government request.

The Muslim Community Informant Program

The FBI’s most extensive post-9/11 domestic program was its use of informants within Muslim American communities. The scale was remarkable:

• The NYPD (working with CIA assistance) ran a comprehensive surveillance program targeting Muslim communities in New York, mapping mosques, restaurants, and student organizations. The program was revealed by the AP in 2011 and shuttered after public outcry.

• FBI informants were embedded in mosques across the country. In several documented cases, informants appeared to create the very terrorist plots they then “disrupted.” A 2014 Human Rights Watch report examined 500 terrorism-related cases and found that nearly half involved informants, and that in many cases, the FBI “ichief participated in the plot as an agent provocateur.”

• The Newburgh Four: Four men from Newburgh, New York, were convicted of plotting to bomb synagogues and shoot down military aircraft. The entire plot was conceived, organized, and funded by an FBI informant who targeted impoverished men with no prior connections to terrorism. A federal judge called the case “a fantasy terror operation” created by the government. The men received 25-year sentences anyway.

• The Liberty City Seven: Seven men in Miami were arrested for allegedly plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. The plot was initiated and directed by an FBI informant. The men had no weapons, no explosives, no operational capability, and no connection to al-Qaeda. The first two trials resulted in mistrials; the government eventually secured convictions on its third attempt.

Black Lives Matter Surveillance

In 2017, Foreign Policy obtained a leaked FBI assessment that identified “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE) as a domestic terrorism threat. The document, dated August 2017, argued that perceptions of police brutality against Black Americans could inspire violence against law enforcement.

Civil liberties organizations immediately drew the COINTELPRO parallel: the FBI was again categorizing Black political movements as security threats. Subsequent FOIA requests revealed:

• FBI agents had monitored BLM social media accounts and activist communications
• The bureau tracked BLM protesters at specific demonstrations
• FBI reports referenced BLM alongside actual domestic terrorist organizations
• The “BIE” designation was used to justify surveillance of individuals with no connection to violence

Under pressure, the FBI retired the “BIE” label in 2019 — but replaced it with a broader “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism” (REMVE) category that critics argued still captured peaceful protest movements.

Environmental and Pipeline Activism

The FBI and DHS have monitored environmental activists and anti-pipeline protesters with particular intensity:

• Standing Rock: During the 2016-2017 Dakota Access Pipeline protests, leaked documents revealed that TigerSwan, a private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners, operated a surveillance operation that included social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, and infiltration. TigerSwan’s reports were shared with law enforcement and described protesters using military terminology (“insurgents,” “jihadist tactics”).

• Earth First! and environmental groups: FBI infiltration of environmental groups has been documented since the 1980s. Informants have been placed inside groups including Earth First!, the Animal Liberation Front, and various anti-logging and anti-pipeline organizations. Environmental activism was classified under the FBI’s “Eco-terrorism” framework, a designation that critics argued criminalized First Amendment activity.

Occupy Wall Street

Released FBI documents show that the FBI began monitoring Occupy Wall Street before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park in September 2011. The documents reveal:

• FBI offices in multiple cities tracked Occupy activities
• The bureau communicated about the movement with the Department of Homeland Security and local police
• Documents discussed the movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat, despite its largely peaceful nature
• One FBI memo from Houston referenced a plot to assassinate Occupy leaders — but the memo was heavily redacted, and it remains unclear who was plotting the assassinations

The Counterarguments

Legal Framework vs. Illegal Program

Defenders of post-9/11 FBI activities argue there’s a fundamental distinction between COINTELPRO and modern surveillance:

COINTELPRO was illegal. The FBI deliberately violated Americans’ constitutional rights without any legal authority, judicial oversight, or statutory basis. It targeted groups for political reasons, not criminal ones.

Modern surveillance, they argue, operates within legal frameworks — the PATRIOT Act, FISA, the Attorney General’s Guidelines — and is subject to judicial oversight through the FISC. The fact that you disagree with the laws doesn’t make the activities illegal.

This argument has merit and limitations. The legal frameworks exist, and the FBI does operate within them (mostly). But critics respond that:

1. The FISC approved 99.97% of government requests between 1979 and 2012 — that’s not meaningful oversight
2. Laws written in the panic after 9/11 were specifically designed to authorize COINTELPRO-like activities
3. Legality and morality are different things — the original COINTELPRO was technically authorized by internal FBI policy too

Entrapment vs. Prevention

The informant cases raise genuine questions about where investigation ends and entrapment begins. The FBI argues that informant-driven sting operations prevent terrorism by identifying and neutralizing individuals who express willingness to commit violence. Critics argue that the FBI is manufacturing terrorists by targeting vulnerable people, providing them with means and motivation, and then arresting them for plots that would never have existed without FBI involvement.

The courts have generally sided with the government, holding that providing an “opportunity” for someone to commit a crime they were predisposed to commit is not entrapment. But the pattern — particularly in cases where defendants were impoverished, mentally unstable, or had no prior criminal history — is troubling.

Where Things Stand

The question “Is COINTELPRO still happening?” doesn’t have a clean yes or no answer, because it depends on what you mean by “COINTELPRO.”

If you mean: is the FBI running an identical program with the same name, targeting the same groups, using the same illegal methods? No.

If you mean: does the FBI still infiltrate domestic political organizations, use informants who sometimes act as provocateurs, surveil protest movements, and treat certain categories of political dissent as security threats? The documented evidence says yes.

The distance between those two answers is where the debate lives. Civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Lawyers Guild argue that the distinction is cosmetic — that COINTELPRO’s tactics have been legalized rather than eliminated. Government defenders argue that the legal frameworks, however imperfect, represent a genuine difference from the lawless Hoover era.

What’s not in dispute is that the original COINTELPRO was real, it was devastating, and the institutional culture that produced it has not been fully dismantled.

Timeline

Sources & Further Reading

• Medsger, Betty. The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. Knopf, 2014.
• Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers. South End Press, 1990.
• Church Committee. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. U.S. Senate, 1976.
• Human Rights Watch. Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions. 2014.
• Brennan Center for Justice. “Are They Allowed to Do That? A Breakdown of Selected Government Surveillance Programs.” 2020.
• Aaronson, Trevor. The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. Ig Publishing, 2013.
• Goldman, Adam, and Matt Apuzzo. “NYPD Monitored Muslim Students All Over the Northeast.” AP, February 2012.

Related Theories

• COINTELPRO — The original confirmed FBI program
• Deep State — The broader theory of entrenched government power
• NSA Mass Surveillance — The Snowden revelations
• FBI Secret Society — Claims about FBI internal politics