Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped upby the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware,  the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata).  American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around.  There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.

Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows.  The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time—look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t.  What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon.  (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.)

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high.  But as always, dots need connecting.  Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.

Read the full article here.