Are you hunching an FBI informant?
The person you’re hunching could be an FBI informant. How the FBI uses sex, romance, and social media to disrupt people’s movements and how NSPM-7 is going to make things a whole lot worse.
The person you’re hunching could be an FBI informant. How the FBI uses sex, romance, and social media to disrupt people’s movements and how NSPM-7 is going to make things a whole lot worse. Let’s get into it.
The U.S. government has a proven, decades-long playbook for dismantling social movements from the inside, and at its core is the exploitation of people’s most intimate human connections: love, trust, and community. And newly enacted NSPM-7 shows that this playbook is not only back but expanding in ways that should terrify anyone who believes in the right to rebel.
Part 1: Romantic Relationships and Infiltration: A License to Manipulate
The tactic of using sexual and romantic relationships to infiltrate and destroy activist groups is not a conspiracy theory, it is well documented federal policy. The case files are damning. In the prosecution of environmental activist Eric McDavid, an FBI informant known as “Anna” spent 18 months monitoring him, sexually manipulating him, wearing a wire in private, and adopting an “asexual persona” to fuel his infatuation. McDavid described her as his “soul twin,” but his lawyer called her a provocateur whose task was to make young people on the left fall in love with her. When Anna told her FBI handlers about McDavid’s growing feelings, they did not pull her out. Instead, they gave her a psychological manual and told her to hold out as long as she could. She was paid over $65,000.
A photo of Eric McDavid and “Anna” Source: Earth First Journal
The pattern is identical with Khalil Abu Rayyan, a 21-year-old Michigan man who was suicidal over a breakup with one FBI honeypot, only for the FBI to send another woman to entrap him. In a recorded call where Rayyan said he had bought a rope to kill himself, the FBI informant asked Which thought is greater to you right now hurting yourself or somebody else?” His lawyers say the government blatantly steered him toward terrorism as an acceptable form of suicide.
Photo of Khalil Abu Rayyan, Source: Twitter
At Standing Rock, FBI informant Heath Harmon entered a romantic relationship with water protector Red Fawn Fallis. Heath Harmon had close familial ties with community leaders and even participated in important ceremonies. Red Fawn Fallis was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after a gun that belonged to the FBI informant Heath Harmon went off when the police tackled her.
Photos of FBI Informant Heath Harmon and Red Fawn Fallis
To this day, the weaponization of intimacy is enabled by the lack of policies by the FBI and the local police forces that coordinate with them. In Jacksonville, the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office coordinates regularly with the FBI on different field operations using paid informants and undercover officers. Their own policy gives carte blanche to engage in sexual relationships with people that are subject to investigations. The policy, verbatim says, “ Unless in the performance of official duties, members shall not participate or engage in any sexual activity while on duty, including the exchange of messages or media of a sexual nature.”
JSO Code of Conduct, Source: Screenshot from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Website
This “human intelligence” machine is fueled by a massive and often secretive budget. The data we do have shows that Federal agencies paid out at least $548 million to informants in recent years. A few informants became millionaires, with audits showing the FBI alone paid $294 million between 2012 and 2018. And these informants are not just gathering information. In just a four-year period, federal handlers authorized informants to commit over 22,800 crimes.
The campaign to disrupt and disturb movements has gone digital too. In Chicago, a “Social Media Exploitation” (SOMEX) team, overseen by the FBI, created fake online identities in violation of platform policies, friended targets, and were even permitted to take full control of informants’ real social media accounts so they could pose as them online. The FBI recently signed a $27.6 million contract for social media surveillance software, aiming to create “low-footprint” and “anonymous” accounts to monitor and map networks in real time.
Part 2: COINTELPRO : The Original Blueprint for Disruption
This is not a new frontier of policing or disrupting either. These tactics are a direct descendant of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, which was formally active from 1956 to 1971. The stated objective of COINTELPRO was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” groups and individuals deemed threats to the status quo of capitalism and white supremacy in America. Targets included the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party, Martin Luther King Jr., the American Indian Movement, and later, the “New Left” anti-war movement. The tactics that they utilized included psychological destruction.
Declassified documents reveal the FBI’s toolkit:
· Destroying marriages: Anonymous letters were sent to the spouses of targets to ruin their relationships.
· Economic warfare: Agents would anonymously attack targets to get them fired from their jobs.
· Inciting violence: The FBI deliberately aggravated conflicts between groups like the Black Panthers and rival organizations.
· Moral assassination: Agents were instructed to gather information on the “immorality” and “scurrilous and depraved… habits and living conditions” of “New Left” leaders to embarrass and discredit them.
All of the information they gathered was false, but they didn’t care. The disruptions served their purpose: to discredit, disrupt and derail.
Part 3: NSPM-7: COINTELPRO on Steroids
COINTELPRO was the blueprint for how the Federal government would disrupt movements. And it has been officially reworked into the federal government’s architecture through a new directive under the Trump administration: The National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). NSPM-7, which was signed by Donald Trump on September 25, 2025, officially codifies the attacks on the people’s movements. NSPM-7 pushes a narrative that acts of political violence are not isolated but the result of “sophisticated, organized campaigns” designed to “silence opposing speech” and “prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”
So, who does NSPM-7 target? NSPM-7 uses the umbrella term “anti-fascism” to label a wide array of political views as indicators of domestic terrorism. The memorandum lists the signature “motivations” to be investigated as: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality. A follow up memo from fired, former, Attorney General Pam Bondi came out on December 4th, 2025, discussed how NSPM-7 should be implemented at the local level. The Feds directed federal prosecutors to vigorously pursue these cases and leverage RICO statutes, typically used against the mafia, against various organizing networks. Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller declared it “the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism.”
The parallels to COINTELPRO are not an accident either. The NSPM-7/Bondi framework is a formalized resurrection of the “New Left” COINTELPRO of 1968. It establishes a national priority to “disrupt networks” before a “crime” is committed, just as COINTELPRO sought to neutralize a “messiah” before they could unify a movement. Often times, when people hear the word Messiah, they think this always means an important figure like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr or Fred Hampton but it also includes Liberation or Communist groups that seek to unify the movement around a common goal- the overthrow of the current order. For example, in declassified documents the aim of COINTELPRO was to also to “prevent groups and leaders from gaining “respectability” by discrediting them to the “responsible” Negro community, the “responsible” white community, “liberals.”
Now, NSPM-7 orders federal law enforcement to map “the full network of culpable actors,” which mirrors the COINTELPRO tactic of using informants to identify the “local structure and relationships” of a group, right down to “who they’re sleeping with.” It directs the IRS to investigate tax-exempt status and the Treasury to hunt what they call “illicit funding streams,” which is the modern version of leaking IRS tax returns to cripple a leader’s finances. Straight out the COINTELPRO playbook. For NSPM-7, the central coordinating force is a now-rebranded Threat Screening Center. This is a secretive FBI hub in Virginia with a classified budget and a rapidly expanding watchlist. Under NSPM-7, this center is making up criteria to organize a “new category of threats.”
Threat Screening Center in VA, Source: Ken Klippenstein
The outcome is predictable and we’ve seen this before. The program’s architects understand that a centralized, public-facing movement with a clear leader can be beheaded and disrupted. By unleashing this surveillance apparatus, NSPM-7 encourages a chaotic, paranoid environment where the very act of organizing is criminalized, and the social bonds that make movements strong like trust, love, and shared beliefs are systematically turned into vulnerabilities.
Part 4: How to Spot a Rat
The goal of these programs is to stop us from organizing- plain and simple. And we must defend our movements. Based on the patterns these programs leave, here’s what you should watch for and what to do.
There are multiple types of informants. For these purposes we will discuss the characteristics of 5 types of informants.
- The Provocateur Push: Someone who consistently pushes for more militant, illegal, or over the top actions that the rest of the group is not comfortable with. They may have a rehearsed “militant revolutionary” persona but scatter like roaches when the light comes on during a real moment. Often suddenly disappearing right as the action is taking place.
- The Divide and Conquer Artist: They initiate personal conflicts, create factions, spread malicious gossip, and frame personal vendettas as principled political disagreements.
- The Boundary Violator: They use their charisma and power to form romantic or sexual relationships with weak links in the group. Sometimes these relationships last months, sometimes like in cases in the UK, relationships last for years. At the end of it, these Feds destabilize movements and leave trauma in their wake. Often, the boundary violator is one of two different types: 1. The Caper: The person who “saves” the weak link from trauma and operates as the person who guides them through their emotional turmoil. But instead of guiding them through emotional turmoil, they guide them into erratic and dangerous behaviors with the goal of destabilizing and isolating them. 2. The Person that Always has an Issue: The person who is an “emotional wreck” whose neediness consumes group energy and disarms valid critique.
- The Unexplained Expert and Helper: They show up with resources like money, experience, equipment and a place to stay. Many times, they show up at just the right time to offer help that lacks a logical source. Their past and background are often a fog. They typically move from a random city, have parents that conveniently live overseas with no digital footprints, have little to no digital footprint themselves besides the few months prior to infiltration. These rats will go on social media to add or friend everyone related to the group they aim to infiltrate. When questioned about these things they will likely tell you a sob story to play on your emotions to prevent you from asking logical questions.
- The Process Wrecker: They constantly derail meetings, break group agreements, avoid accountability, and act autonomously while demanding collective action.
Part 5: The Choice Before Us
When Trump’s homeland security advisor says the quiet part out loud—that this is a program to dismantle so called left-wing terrorism—we must take him at his word. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. The renamed Threat Screening Center, the FBI’s fake Facebook profiles, and the paid infiltrators seducing their way into people’s lives are not separate things. They are all tentacles of a single apparatus designed to disrupt and dismantle movements that go against the status quo of capitalism and white supremacy. They’ve shown us their hand and how we respond will determine the future of our movements.
Take care of yourselves and each other too.
Works Cited:
Anonymous Tips
Michael Loadenthal (2014) When cops “go native”: policing revolution through sexual infiltration and panopticonism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 7:1, 24-42, DOI: 10.1080/17539153.2013.877670
NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence
Bondi Memo On Countering Domestic Terrorism And Organized Political Violence
Ken Klippenstein: Secretive Watchlisting Center Executing NSPM-7
The Intercept: After one woman broke his heart, Khalil Abu Rayyan, a 21-year-old Michigan man, contemplated suicide. Then, when he confided his dark thoughts to another woman, she suggested he steer his violence toward other people.
Grist: Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016.
PBS: Rick Smith, now a private security expert in San Francisco, ended up being the perfect source.
Forbes: Federal agencies paid out at least $548 million to informants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), in recent years, according to government audits.
Real Change News: FBI and SPD infiltrated Seattle 2020 protests, used informants and surveillance
UC Berkeley: ‘Discredit, disrupt, and destroy’: FBI records acquired by the Library reveal violent surveillance of Black leaders, civil rights organizations
The Intercept: FBI Provides Chicago Police With Fake Online Identities for “Social Media Exploitation” Team
End of Capitalism: Sexism, Egos and Lies: The Story of FBI Informant Brandon Darby
Workers Herald Volume 1: Drive Spies and Provocateurs Out of the Communist Movement
Intelligence.gov: Cointel Pro Documents