How to Resist a Politicized FBI: Surviving and Countering the New Hoover Era (Part I)

I. The Return of Hoover-Era Political Repression

Every government crackdown follows a pattern. The faster we recognize it, the faster we can stop it.

The FBI was never designed to protect democracy—it was built to police dissent. From its inception, it has operated as the enforcement arm of the ruling class, targeting anyone who threatened the status quo. Under Hoover, it functioned as an unaccountable secret police, infiltrating, disrupting, and destroying political movements through surveillance, provocation, and state violence.

That era never truly ended. It is happening again.

The Trump administration has placed a conspiracy theorist at the helm of the FBI—an open loyalist who has pledged to target Trump’s political opposition. He does not need a direct order to act. The agency already has a blueprint: COINTELPRO, the program that illegally surveilled, infiltrated, and sabotaged the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, labor unions, and anti-war organizers—under the explicit goal of “neutralizing” their leadership and preventing mass mobilization.

COINTELPRO’s tactics included blackmail, illegal wiretaps, and assassinations coordinated with local police. It infiltrated Black liberation groups, spreading false rumors to instigate violence between factions. It deployed informants to escalate tensions inside anti-war movements, feeding disinformation to provoke crackdowns. It tapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s phones for years and sent him a letter urging him to commit suicide.

The FBI considered the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to internal security” and assisted in extrajudicial killings, including the 1969 execution of Fred Hampton in his sleep. The agency framed anti-war activists as violent extremists, leading to mass arrests and government blacklists. It attempted to dismantle labor and socialist movements by inserting informants who encouraged reckless or illegal activity, giving the state pretext for repression.

Now, with Trump’s return, the mask is off. Hoover at least pretended to act in the name of national security. Trump’s FBI will act in the open, with the full force of a judicial system already primed to criminalize opposition.

What happens next is predictable.

• Mass surveillance of opposition groups. The FBI already tracks activists under the label of “Black Identity Extremism,” a designation created with no evidentiary basis, used to justify surveillance. The ACLU has documented how federal agencies misused intelligence powers to spy on Black Lives Matter organizers, treating them as a terrorist threat.

• Infiltration and provocation.COINTELPRO never ended—it was rebranded. Recent movements, from Occupy to Stop Cop City, have seen coordinated infiltration, with police provocateurs encouraging illegal acts to justify charges of “domestic terrorism.”

• Preemptive arrests of movement leaders. This has already begun in environmental movements, where activists are facing fabricated domestic terrorism charges simply for protesting police militarization.

• Legal harassment to drain resources.The state does not need convictions—endless indictments and legal battles are enough to exhaust movements before they can escalate.

This is not speculation. This is what the FBI does. And unless resistance is prepared, it will succeed.

█ Surveillance. Infiltration. Arrest. Repression. The pattern is always the same. The question is: will we be ready?

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II. How to Protect Yourself & Your Movement

The state is not omnipotent. Its success depends on secrecy, compliance, and division. Resistance survives by denying it all three.

1. Digital Security Against FBI Surveillance

If you don’t take digital security seriously, you are handing them everything.

The modern surveillance state is larger, faster, and harder to detect than Hoover’s FBI ever was. Predictive policing algorithms scan social media for activist activity. Geofence warrants pull location data from every phone near a protest. Federal agencies openly use Clearview AI facial recognition to identify demonstrators in real-time. During the George Floyd protests, at least six federal agencies deployed facial recognition on activists.

To protect yourself:

• Get off compromised platforms. Stop using Facebook, Google, or X for organizing. Switch to Element, Briar, or Session—decentralized platforms that cannot be shut down remotely.

• Turn off cloud backups. If your phone is confiscated, your entire message history is vulnerable.

• Use burner devices for protest planning. Never mix personal and political communication on the same device.

Geofence warrants allow the FBI to demand records of every phone present at a protest. In Kenosha, federal agents pulled location data on every person within a third of a public park for a two-hour period—vacuuming up information on innocent bystanders and protesters alike. The EFF has warned that geofence searches violate the Fourth Amendment and make participation in protests inherently risky.

█ Your phone is a tracking device. Treat it as such.

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2. Avoiding Government Informants & Infiltrators

The FBI will try to destroy movements from the inside. Don’t let them.

Informants will enter your circles. They will volunteer for leadership roles, push for unnecessary violence, and create internal disputes. This is not theoretical—it has happened in every movement from the 1960s to today.

During the Occupy movement, the FBI and DHS ran daily “Peaceful Activist Demonstration Reports,” treating protests as terrorist threats and deploying infiltrators to disrupt them.

Signs of an infiltrator:

• They push for escalation before the group is ready.

• They ask for personal details.

• They create conflict within the movement.

█ If they push for reckless action, they are not your comrade. They are your enemy.

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3. Know Your Legal Rights Before It’s Too Late

If the FBI knocks on your door, you already lost if you don’t know what to do.

• Do NOT answer questions. Say: “I am invoking my right to remain silent. I want a lawyer.”

• Do NOT let them search anything.Say: “I do not consent to a search.”

• Never snitch. Ever.

█ Repression depends on fear. The antidote is solidarity.

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IV. This Fight is Just Beginning

Every authoritarian crackdown in history has failed when met with organized resistance.

We do not wait for repression to escalate. We prepare. We train. We build networks that cannot be dismantled.

█ No more waiting. The time to prepare is now.