Informant

This article is about a person who provides privileged information. For other uses, see Informant (disambiguation).
"Informer" and "Stool pigeon" redirect here. For other uses, see Informer (disambiguation) and Stool pigeon (disambiguation).
"Confidential Informant" redirects here. For the film, see Confidential Informant (film).
A representative from the U.S. State Department congratulates and offers a partial payment to a fully disguised informant whose information led to the neutralization of a terrorist in the Philippines
Two-page totally confidential, direct and immediate letter from the Iranian Minister of Finance to the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Hossein Fatemi) about creating a foreign information network for controlling smuggling, 15 December 1952
Look up informant  or stool pigeon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a "snitch", "rat", "canary", "stool pigeon", "stoolie" or "grass", among other terms)[1] is a person who provides privileged information, or (usually damaging) information intended to be intimate, concealed, or secret, about a person or organization to an agency, often a government or law enforcement agency. The term is usually used within the law-enforcement world, where informants are officially known as confidential human sources (CHS), or criminal informants (CI). It can also refer pejoratively to someone who supplies information without the consent of the involved parties.[2] The term is commonly used in politics, industry, entertainment, and academia.[3][4]

In the United States, a confidential informant or "CI" is "any individual who provides useful and credible information to a law enforcement agency regarding felonious criminal activities and from whom the agency expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future".[5]

  1. ^ "informer". Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 6 June 2016. 2: one that informs against another; specifically : one who makes a practice especially for a financial reward of informing against others for violations of penal laws
  2. ^ "The Weakest Link: The Dire Consequences of a Weak Link in the Informant Handling and Covert Operations Chain-of-Command" by M Levine. Law Enforcement Executive Forum, 2009
  3. ^ "Pursuing strategic advantage through political means: A multivariate approach" by DA Schuler, K Rehbein, RD Cramer – Academy of Management Journal, 2002
  4. ^ "Reading English for specialized purposes: Discourse analysis and the use of student informants" by A Cohen, H Glasman, PR Rosenbaum-Cohen, TESOL Quarterly, 197
  5. ^ "Special Report". oig.justice.gov. Retrieved 2021-01-28. According to the Confidential Informant Guidelines, a confidential informant or "CI" is "any individual who provides useful and credible information to a Justice Law Enforcement Agency (JLEA) regarding felonious criminal activities and from whom the JLEA expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future."