COINTELPRO Never Ended — It Just Got an Upgrade

On December 4, 1969, at 4:45 in the morning, fourteen Chicago police officers armed with shotguns and a submachine gun kicked down the door of a West Side apartment. Inside, several members of the Black Panther Party were asleep.

The officers fired over 90 rounds into the apartment. The occupants fired once — a single shot from Mark Clark’s gun, likely discharged reflexively as he was hit. Clark was killed at the door. Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, never left his bed. He’d been drugged earlier that evening by William O’Neal — an FBI informant who had become Hampton’s bodyguard. O’Neal had drawn the floor plan of the apartment for the agents who planned the raid. According to witnesses, an officer stood over Hampton’s unconscious body, asked if he was still alive, and two shots were fired into his head. “He’s good and dead now,” one officer said.

Hampton’s fiancée, eight months pregnant, had been lying next to him.

O’Neal received a $300 bonus from the FBI for his work.

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COINTELPRO — the Counter Intelligence Program — ran from 1956 to 1971. It was not a conspiracy theory. It was a documented FBI operation exposed by the Church Committee, a Senate investigation whose findings are part of the congressional record. The committee’s own words: COINTELPRO was “a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”

The tactics were systematic. I’m going to name them specifically, because each one has a modern equivalent.

Infiltration. The FBI planted informants and undercover agents inside organizations. O’Neal inside the Black Panthers is the most famous case, but there were hundreds. The purpose wasn’t intelligence-gathering — it was disruption. Informants were tasked with creating internal conflicts, encouraging illegal activity that could be used for prosecution, and identifying leaders for targeting.

Disinformation. The FBI fabricated letters between organizations to provoke distrust and violence. They sent forged communications designed to look like they came from rival groups, planted false stories in newspapers, and created fake leaflets attributed to organizations they wanted to discredit. The goal was to make groups turn on each other.

Bad-jacketing. This is the tactic I think is most likely to resurface at scale. Bad-jacketing means falsely labeling loyal members of an organization as informants. The FBI would circulate rumors, fabricate evidence, and create documents suggesting that trusted members were actually government agents. The resulting paranoia destroyed organizations from within more effectively than any external pressure could.

Direct targeting of leaders. In 1964, the FBI sent Martin Luther King Jr. an anonymous letter accompanied by surveillance recordings, urging him to commit suicide before his “filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” The letter implied he had 34 days to act. This was not a rogue agent. It was approved by senior FBI leadership under a program that J. Edgar Hoover described as targeting the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” — his characterization of the Black Panther Party. King was assassinated 4 years later.

The program didn’t target one group. COINTELPRO operations were conducted against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the New Left, antiwar organizations, feminist groups, and environmental activists. The common thread wasn’t ideology. It was dissent.

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In 1975, the Church Committee exposed all of this. Senator Frank Church warned, on national television, that the NSA’s surveillance capabilities could “at any time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left.” He was talking about the technology of the 1970s.

The committee’s findings led to reforms: Executive Order 12333 restricting domestic intelligence activities, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act creating a court to oversee surveillance warrants, congressional intelligence committees established. For a period, the infrastructure of domestic surveillance was constrained by law.

Then those constraints were systematically dismantled. The PATRIOT Act, passed six weeks after September 11, 2001, expanded the government’s surveillance authorities in ways the Church Committee reforms had specifically tried to prevent. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed the scope of what had been built: PRISM collected data directly from servers of nine major internet companies. Upstream collection tapped the fiber optic cables carrying internet traffic. The system Senator Church had warned about, built exactly as he predicted, operated in secret for years.

The pattern is the same every time. Capability is built for one purpose. Mission creep expands its use. Abuse follows. This isn’t cynicism — it’s the documented historical record, exposed by the government’s own investigations.

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If you’ve seen The Hunger Games, you know President Snow’s playbook. Surveillance. Infiltration. Turning districts against each other. Keeping the population afraid, divided, and convinced that resistance is futile. Snow didn’t need to control every citizen — he needed to control the infrastructure that made control possible. The Peacekeepers, the Capitol’s surveillance network, the televised spectacle designed to make rebellion look hopeless — these weren’t improvisations. They were part of the architecture.

In 2025, DOGE accessed Social Security Administration data covering hundreds of millions of Americans. Court filings later revealed that DOGE employees improperly shared sensitive personal data on outside servers and circumvented IT security rules — and that the government had misrepresented the extent of access in its own testimony. IRS data was shared with ICE before courts intervened. Palantir contracted to build a system called “ImmigrationOS” that compiles government databases into a unified targeting and enforcement platform. A privacy law professor called this “the demolition of the Watergate-era safeguards that were intended to keep databases separated.”

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed challenging DOGE’s data access across multiple federal agencies — Treasury, OPM, SSA, IRS, the Department of Labor, and others. The Supreme Court, in a case that reached it on the emergency docket, ultimately allowed DOGE access to Social Security records to continue while litigation proceeds. The legal battles are ongoing, the outcomes uncertain.

I’m going to say something carefully here. Whether you support the current administration’s goals or oppose them, the infrastructure being built will be inherited by every administration that follows. That’s the lesson COINTELPRO teaches. The program survived the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon — four presidents across both parties, none of whom shut it down. The capability outlived the people who built it and was used by every successor for their own purposes.

The surveillance infrastructure I mapped in the last chapter — the license plate readers, the facial recognition, the social media monitoring, the commercial data pipeline — is the modern equivalent of what COINTELPRO had in the 1960s, except orders of magnitude more powerful, more pervasive, and more automated. Snow’s playbook, with better tools.

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This isn’t uniquely American.

In the UK, the Undercover Policing Inquiry has documented that over 139 undercover officers infiltrated more than 1,000 political groups across four decades. Officers formed intimate relationships with activists, fathered children with them, then disappeared. Of the hundreds of groups infiltrated, only three were later found to be justified on public safety grounds. Three out of a thousand.

This matters because the reflex when hearing about COINTELPRO is to categorize it as a dark chapter that ended. It didn’t end. The tactics adapted. The technology improved. And the targets — people exercising their rights to organize, protest, and dissent — remain the same.

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The Church Committee is proof that exposure and reform are possible. The congressional record exists. The findings were published. Laws were passed. The system responded to democratic pressure, even if those reforms were later eroded.

That’s the pattern you need to recognize: capability leads to abuse, but exposure leads to accountability — if people know what to look for and insist on transparency.

Two things.

First: read the ACLU Know Your Rights overview. It’s at aclu.org/know-your-rights. It covers interactions with law enforcement, immigration agents, and protests. Read it the way you’d read a manual for lifesaving equipment you hope you never need to use.

Second: memorize four phrases. Write them in your field journal.

“Am I free to go?”

“I do not consent to this search.”

“I am exercising my right to remain silent.”

“I want to speak to a lawyer.”

These are not magic words. They don’t prevent anything. What they do is establish a legal record. If your rights are violated after you’ve clearly stated them, that matters in court. If you haven’t stated them, it becomes much harder to demonstrate that a violation occurred. The phrases are a tool — a simple one, free, requiring nothing but the willingness to say them out loud when it matters.

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History provides examples. Your threat model focuses on what’s worth protecting. But there’s a gap between what you think is private and what anyone with a search engine can find out about you.

Come back this evening. We’re going on a spy mission.

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