Cointelpro Quotes

“A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times

“In the decade since 9/11, the FBI has built the largest network of spies ever to exist in the United States—with ten times as many informants on the streets today as there were during the infamous Cointelpro operations under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—with the majority of these spies focused on ferreting out terrorism in Muslim communities.”
― Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism