HEATED Lessons for protesters from Standing Rock The events following the 2016 protest are urgently relevant to our current political moment. Emily Atkin Jun 16, 2025 During the high-profile demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, the FBI sent several informants disguised as protesters to infiltrate activist communities. The FBI wasn’t alone. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, hired a private mercenary and security firm called TigerSwan to conduct a sweeping protester surveillance operation. Part of that operation included sending undercover operatives “to collect information on the protesters, explicitly targeting those who were down on their luck,“ according to a 2018 investigation published by the Intercept. The information collected by these surveillance operations was not only used to set up individual protesters during the demonstrations, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux. It was eventually used to justify a massive conspiracy lawsuit against the environmental group Greenpeace.
These operations sometimes target people who are experts, or people who might be important in some way, because they carry clout. And then they treat them as if they’re very important. And for people who’ve worked hard at something, to be something, and are yearning for recognition, this is a very powerful leverage for manipulation. If you’re being given the impression you’re being invited into some elite circle, some super special exalted organization… that’s not grassroots political organizing, that’s a cult at best, and maybe an astroturfed machine for deactivating would-be activist experts.
At a minimum, I would be wary of any organization that leans hard on only upper middle class people to bring some sort of policy change in US politics. Upper middle class people from fancy backgrounds are really good at getting attention and making money in politics, they don’t seem however to be very good on their own for actually making progress without the working class. Because the progress starts with the working class. The working class bears the brunt of bad policies. And this is why unions and labor organizing are always cited as integral to political action. We need more than unions, and unions sure aren’t perfect; but if labor interests are sidelined, or working class people aren’t involved, I don’t trust it.