Insane Provocateur Attacks WeAreCHANGE

Agent provocateur

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Traditionally, an agent provocateur (plural: agents provocateurs, French for “inciting agent”) is a person employed by the police or other law enforcement body to act undercover and entice or provoke another person to commit an illegal act. More generally, the term may refer to a person or group who provokes another to perform a wrong or rash action, the deliberate purpose being to incite wider conflict or harm.

An agent provocateur is often a police officer who encourages suspects to carry out a crime under conditions where evidence can be obtained; or who suggests the commission of a crime to another, in hopes he will go along with the suggestion, so he may be convicted of the crime. These are sometimes called sting operations.

One common use of Agents provocateurs is to investigate consensual or “victimless” crimes; since each participant in such crimes are willing participants, it is often difficult for the authorities to discover such crimes without the use of undercover agents.

Agents provocateurs are also used against political opponents. Here, it has been documented that provocateurs deliberately carry out or seek to incite counter-productive or ineffective acts, in order to foster public disdain for the group and provide a pretext for aggression against the group; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for (see Red-baiting).

Historically, Agents provocateurs activities have been one operational tactic of labor spies who may also be hired to infiltrate, monitor, disrupt, or subvert union activities.

During WW2, the Germans were notorious for putting an Agent provocateur (a “brick”) into the cell of a suspected resistance member, Communist or such. The agent pretended that he isn’t associated with the occupiers in any way, thus encouraging the captive into divulging sensitive information (like a warning message for their superiors or contacts in the resistance cell) in order to obtain a lead.

Terrorists act as agents provocateurs when they seek to provoke government repression or an aggressive response, hoping thereby to reduce the credibility of the government, gain it enemies, alienate, divide, and demoralize its constituency, and increase support for themselves. In this sense, provocation may be combined with endorsement terrorism. In many cases terrorist provocation is an example of what is colloquially called “let’s you and him fight”.

Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of radical political groups in the U.S., such as the Black Panthers, Ku Klux Klan, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The activities of agents provocateurs against dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Yevno Azef is an example of agent provocateur.

New York Police officers have been accused of acting as agents provocateurs during protests against the Republican National Convention in New York City.^[1]

The activities of agents provocateurs pose a number of ethical and legal issues. Within common law jurisdictions, the law of entrapment seeks to discern whether the provocateur’s target intended to commit the crime he participated in with the provocateur, or whether the suggestion to commit the crime began with the provocateur. It is also debatable whether the institutionalized deception that the use of agents provocateurs implies is in fact more harmful to the social order than the various consensual offenses typically investigated by provocateurs.