The Ghetto Informant Program (GIP) was an intelligence-gathering operation run by the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

(FBI) from 1967 to 1973. Its official purpose was to collect information pertaining to riots and civil unrest. Through GIP, the FBI used more than 7000 people to infiltrate poor black communities in the United States.

Background

After the Watts Riots of 1965, and further unrest in Newark and Detroit in the summer of 1967, the US government mobilized to prepare for urban conflict. Its actions ranged from commissioning a report by the civilian

Kerner Commission The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member Presidential Commission established in July 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in to in ...

to mobilizing the army to prepare for martial law in American cities. The order for GIP program came in a letter from Attorney General

Ramsey Clark William Ramsey Clark (December 18, 1927 – April 9, 2021) was an American lawyer, activist, and federal government official. A progressive, New Frontier liberal, he occupied senior positions in the United States Department of Justice under Presi ...

to FBI Director

J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation ...

. Clark wrote:Church Committee (1976), p. 253.

We have not heretofore had to deal with the possibility of an organized pattern of violence, constituting a violation of federal law, by a group of persons who make the urban ghetto their base of operation and whose activities may not have been regularly monitored by existing intelligence sources.

And:

As a part of the broad investigation which must necessarily be conducted ... sources or informants in black nationalist organizations, SNCC and other less publicized groups should be developed and expanded to determine the size and purpose of these groups and their relationship to other groups, and also to determine the whereabouts of persons who might be involved in instigating riot activity in violation of federal law.

The GIP coincided with

COINTELPRO COINTELPRO ( syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program; 1956–1971) was a series of covert and illegal projects actively conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrati ...

–BLACK HATE.

Scope

The program was targeted at those likely to have information about ghetto happenings. Thus (according to an internal memo) it included people such as "the proprietor of a candy store or barber shop" in a ghetto area. These informants were "listening posts"—tools for blanket surveillance of a community or area. GIP operated with no oversight from courts or Congress.Julia A. Shearson,
Tracked by Spies and Informers
, ''Z Magazine'' 22(5), May 2009. Informants monitored "Key Black Extremists" such as

Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...

Malcolm X Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement. A spokesman for the Nation of Is ...

Elijah Muhammad Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole; October 7, 1897 – February 25, 1975) was an African American religious leader, black separatist, and self-proclaimed Messenger of Allah, who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until his de ...

Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture (; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941November 15, 1998) was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the Unite ...

H. Rap Brown Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (born Hubert Gerold Brown; October 4, 1943), formerly known as H. Rap Brown, is a civil rights activist, black separatist, and convicted murderer who was the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ...

Floyd McKissick Floyd Bixler McKissick (March 9, 1922 – April 28, 1991) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist. He became the first African-American student at the University of North Carolina School of Law. In 1966 he became leader of CORE, the Congr ...

Huey Newton Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American revolutionary, notable as founder of the Black Panther Party. Newton crafted the Party's ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966. Under Newton's leadership ...

, and more. One of the first major projects involving the GIP was Operation POCAM, the FBI's effort to monitor and disrupt the 1968

Poor People's Campaign The Poor People's Campaign, or Poor People's March on Washington, was a 1968 effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States. It was organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCL ...

. Informants were later asked to report on Afro-American bookstores and investigate the existence of subversive literature.Church Committee (1976), p. 254. At least 67 informants were members of the Black Panther Party (BPP), tasked with spreading disinformation as well as sending reports to the FBI. Recent disclosures have suggested that photographer Ernest Withers was a paid FBI informant under the GIP.

Termination

In 1972, the FBI's Inspection Division began to express concern about using African-American informants specifically to investigate civil unrest. A memo dated November 24, 1972, notes that the GIP has produced abundant 'byproduct' information related to activities other than rioting. It suggests that these informants be reclassified as Security, Extremist, Revolutionary Activities, or Criminal, and that civil unrest information continue to be collected as a byproduct from these same informants. The GIP was terminated in July 1973, and informants were either reclassified or discontinued. Concerns about FBI surveillance in the style of the Ghetto Informant Program has continued through the present day. Senator

Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph Leahy (; born March 31, 1940) is an American politician and attorney who is the senior United States senator from Vermont and serves as the president pro tempore of the United States Senate. A member of the Democratic Party, ...

compared

Operation TIPS Operation TIPS, where the last part is an acronym for the ''Terrorism Information and Prevention System'', was a domestic intelligence-gathering program designed by President George W. Bush to have United States citizens report suspicious activity. ...

to the GIP in 2002.Anita Ramasastry,
We Don't Need Citizen Spies: The Problem With The Bush Administration's Proposed 'Operations TIPS'
, FindLaw's ''Writ'', 5 August 2002.

References

Bibliography

Church Committee The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence ...

.
The Use of Informants in FBI Domestic Intelligence Investigations
. 23 April 1976
PDF
* McKnight, Gerald. ''The last crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People's Campaign.'' Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. . * Risen, Clay. ''A Nation on Fire''. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. {{ISBN, 978-0-470-17710-5. * Weiner, Tim. ''Enemies: A history of the FBI''. New York: Random House, 2012. Surveillance scandals American secret government programs Federal Bureau of Investigation operations