How Far Does It Go? The Wider History of Nonprofits Paying Informants Inside Extremist Groups

The April 21, 2026 federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has prompted a broader question that reaches well beyond a single organization: how widespread is the practice of advocacy nonprofits paying confidential informants inside the groups they publicly oppose, and what other organizations may be operating under similar arrangements?

The historical record indicates the practice is neither new nor confined to the SPLC. American Jewish defense organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee built sophisticated paid-informant networks beginning in the 1930s. The Council on American-Islamic Relations was infiltrated by paid informants working for ideological opponents in 2021. And federal law enforcement itself has used paid informants inside extremist groups as a routine investigative tool for more than half a century.

Whether the SPLC indictment represents a unique legal theory targeted at a single organization, or a precedent that could reshape how every nonprofit watchdog group in the United States operates, depends on which of those questions a federal court ultimately answers.

Background: A Century of Civilian Counter-Extremism

According to historian Steven J. Ross, whose book “The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy” was published in April 2026 — coincidentally the same week as the SPLC indictment — paid informant networks operated by private American nonprofits date to at least the 1930s. Ross documents how the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League ran undercover investigators into meetings of the German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts, the Columbians, the National Renaissance Party, the American Nazi Party, and the National States’ Rights Party.

The Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, founded in 1934 and led by attorney Leon Lewis (who had previously served as the first national secretary of the Anti-Defamation League), conducted seven years of continuous undercover surveillance of pro-Nazi organizations in California from 1934 to 1941. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, these operations frequently provided information that was shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation at a time when then-Director J. Edgar Hoover was reluctant to investigate domestic Nazi sympathizers.

Political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University documented in 2023 that the ADL operated a parallel covert surveillance program targeting the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Dallek, the ADL deployed “undercover agents with code names” who infiltrated Birch Society headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, gathered financial and employment data on individual members, and provided information to journalists for use in published exposés.

In simple terms: paying people to infiltrate hate groups and report back is a practice older than the SPLC itself.

The 1993 ADL Surveillance Case

The most significant prior legal action against a major American nonprofit for informant-related conduct involved the ADL itself.

In April 1993, San Francisco police executed search warrants on two ADL offices in connection with an investigation into the organization’s relationship with private investigator Roy Bullock. According to court documents and contemporary reporting in Middle East Report (MERIP) and The Guardian, Bullock had worked as a paid ADL informant for more than three decades, accumulating files on approximately 12,000 individuals and 950 organizations.

Court documents alleged that the ADL had obtained confidential police records through Thomas Gerard, a San Francisco Police Department intelligence inspector, and that the ADL had paid Bullock through an attorney in arrangements that California state officials characterized as a violation of state tax laws. Plaintiffs in subsequent civil litigation alleged that the ADL had sold information about anti-apartheid activists to the South African government during apartheid.

In 1996, the ADL settled the federal civil lawsuit brought by groups representing African Americans and Arab Americans. The organization did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to a restraining injunction prohibiting it from obtaining information from state employees who could not legally disclose it. The ADL paid $25,000 to a community relations fund and $175,000 in plaintiffs’ legal costs. In 2002, the organization settled with three additional plaintiffs for $178,000.

The ADL did not face federal criminal charges. The 1996 settlement closed the matter without admission of liability.

Federal Law Enforcement Use of Informants

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has used paid confidential informants inside extremist organizations since at least the 1960s. The practice was formalized in the FBI’s 1976 confidential informant guidelines, which remain the operative framework for federal law enforcement informant operations today.

According to a Christian Science Monitor analysis published April 25, 2026, the SPLC began using paid informants in the 1970s in part because the FBI under Hoover had been reluctant to investigate Klan activity, leaving private organizations to fill the intelligence gap. Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who served during the Obama administration, told NPR that paid-informant operations are a standard intelligence practice and characterized the SPLC’s program as “exposing” extremist groups rather than “stoking” their work.

The SPLC and the FBI maintained an active intelligence-sharing relationship from the 1980s until 2014, when the FBI scaled back the partnership during the Obama administration following criticism of the SPLC’s objectivity. The relationship was formally severed in October 2025 when FBI Director Kash Patel publicly characterized the SPLC as “unfit for any FBI partnership.”

In simple terms: the federal government itself ran the same kind of operation it is now prosecuting the SPLC for running.

CAIR and Right-Wing Infiltration

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest American Muslim civil rights organization, was the target of paid-informant infiltration that became public in 2021.

According to reporting by The New Arab and CAIR’s own internal investigation, CAIR identified two undercover operatives who had served in long-term staff and leadership positions while feeding confidential information to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, an organization founded by journalist Steven Emerson. One of the informants, Romin Iqbal, worked for CAIR for thirteen years before being identified as an outside operative.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism — which the SPLC has designated as an anti-Muslim hate group — reportedly received recordings of internal CAIR meetings, strategic planning documents, internal emails, and benefits from purchases Iqbal made using CAIR funds. CAIR identified a second operative, in the organization’s Ohio chapter, days after the first was disclosed.

The CAIR case differs from the SPLC and ADL cases in a crucial respect. CAIR was the target of paid informants, not the operator of them. The relevant point for purposes of this analysis is that paid-informant operations by ideological organizations against their opponents extend across the American political spectrum, with no demographic or political constituency being uniquely subject to or uniquely insulated from the practice.

Other Watchdog Organizations

Several other nonprofit organizations engaged in extremism monitoring have not been alleged to operate paid-informant programs comparable to the SPLC’s, but their existence and methodologies are relevant to understanding the broader landscape.

The ADL’s Center on Extremism continues to track extremist movements across the ideological spectrum. The organization reported total revenue of approximately $38.3 million in 2023. According to Wikipedia and The Guardian reporting, the ADL has continued to conduct what it terms “threat assessments” on activists and organizations, including a 2020 internal threat assessment on a Black activist working with the Deadly Exchange campaign that opposed exchange programs between American and Israeli police agencies. The ADL has not publicly disclosed the methodology by which such assessments are produced.

The Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit founded in 2014 by former Bush administration officials, monitors jihadist and white-nationalist movements. The Global Network on Extremism and Technology, the Tech Transparency Project, and Hope Not Hate (a UK-based organization with American partnerships) all conduct related monitoring work.

None of these organizations has been publicly accused of operating a paid-informant program of the scale alleged in the SPLC indictment. Whether any of them maintains comparable arrangements is, at present, not publicly documented.

Analysis: A Question of Disclosure, Not Practice

The legal theory of the SPLC indictment is narrower than the public discussion suggests. The Department of Justice is not arguing that paying informants is itself unlawful. Federal law enforcement does it routinely. The SPLC itself did it for more than four decades with substantial overlap with FBI operations.

The DOJ’s theory is that the SPLC failed to disclose to donors that some donor funds were being used to pay members of extremist groups, and that the use of fictitious entity names — Fox Photography, Rare Books Warehouse, Center Investigative Agency — to disguise those payments constituted intent to deceive.

Phil Hackney, a University of Pittsburgh law professor specializing in nonprofit law, told Associated Press reporters that the prosecution represents “a new way of going after a charity.” Todd Spodek, a federal criminal defense attorney, noted to AP that “the law has never required nonprofit groups to hand donors a line-item receipt for every sensitive operation.”

If the legal theory succeeds, it could establish a precedent that any nonprofit running confidential intelligence operations — including the ADL, the AJC, the Counter Extremism Project, and analogous organizations on the political right — could be exposed to similar charges if their public fundraising language did not specifically disclose informant payments.

If the legal theory fails, the practice will likely continue largely unchanged across the broader nonprofit watchdog landscape, with the SPLC indictment functioning as a politically charged but legally unsuccessful prosecution.

The Symmetry Question

A complete examination of the practice should also acknowledge the question of symmetry. The watchdog nonprofits most prominently associated with paid-informant operations have historically been left-of-center civil rights organizations targeting right-wing extremists. The available record shows fewer documented examples of right-of-center watchdog organizations running comparable programs targeting left-wing extremists.

This asymmetry may reflect several factors. The largest historical extremist movements requiring sustained civilian monitoring — the KKK, the German-American Bund, the American Nazi Party, the John Birch Society — were predominantly right-coded. Civilian counter-extremism work emerged from communities (American Jewish organizations, civil rights groups) that were the targets of those movements. Federal law enforcement during much of the 20th century was reluctant to investigate right-coded extremism and often willing to investigate left-coded movements, creating different incentive structures for civilian intelligence-gathering on each side.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism case described above represents one documented example of a right-coded organization running an analogous operation. The Capital Research Center, the National Legal and Policy Center, and other conservative research organizations have been accused by their critics of conducting analogous opposition research, though the public record does not indicate paid-informant operations comparable in scale or duration to those documented at the ADL or alleged at the SPLC.

The question of whether the federal prosecution targets only the most visible operators of a widely shared practice, or whether it reflects a genuine attempt to reshape the practice across the nonprofit sector, is one of the central uncertainties about the case.

Conclusion

The Southern Poverty Law Center is not the first American nonprofit to pay confidential informants inside extremist organizations. It is not the only one currently doing so, and it will not be the last. The practice has roots that extend nearly a century into American civil society history, has been conducted by both private and federal actors, has produced both documented public benefits and documented abuses, and has historically operated with limited public disclosure as an essential condition of its effectiveness.

Whether the federal indictment results in conviction, dismissal, or settlement, the question it raises — whether donors to nonprofit watchdog organizations are entitled to know that some portion of their contributions may be funding payments to members of the very groups those organizations publicly oppose — is one that other organizations across the American political spectrum will have to answer, regardless of how the SPLC’s specific case resolves.

Key Takeaways

Paid-informant operations by private American nonprofits date to the 1930s, with the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee documenting some of the earliest such programs.
The ADL settled a federal civil lawsuit in 1996 over a 30-year paid-informant operation that accumulated files on 12,000 individuals and allegedly sold information to South African intelligence during apartheid; the organization did not admit wrongdoing.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations was the target of paid right-wing informants who fed information to the Investigative Project on Terrorism for more than a decade, demonstrating the practice operates across the political spectrum.
The federal government’s own confidential informant guidelines, established in 1976, govern FBI use of paid informants inside extremist organizations and represent the legal framework cited by SPLC defenders.
The DOJ’s prosecution turns on disclosure to donors, not on the legality of paying informants — a theory that, if successful, could affect numerous other nonprofit watchdog organizations operating similar programs.

Sources

Steven J. Ross, “The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy” (Liveright/Norton, April 2026).
Matthew Dallek, “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” (Basic Books, 2023).
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “DOJ’s indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center recalls Jewish groups’ use of informants to fight extremism,” April 24, 2026.
Christian Science Monitor, “What’s ethical for undercover operatives? Anti-hate group entered gray zones,” April 25, 2026.
Middle East Report (MERIP), “ADL’s Spy Ring,” July 1993.
Khaled A. Beydoun, “The Islamophobic Informant Industrial Complex in the US,” The New Arab, December 2021.
The Guardian, internal ADL email reporting on threat assessments, 2024.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Confidential Informant Guidelines, 1976 (and subsequent revisions).
Joyce Vance interview, NPR All Things Considered, April 22, 2026.
Phil Hackney and Todd Spodek interviews, Associated Press, April 21-22, 2026.