Brandon Darby is anomalous in the world of informants, not because what he did is so unusual ( :( ) but because he owned it so thoroughly, and has gone on to be so successful (if you can call it that) and public on the other side (as a commentator for Breitbart). His apparent lack of shame about what he did, evident in the interviews he did afterwards, provides some perspective that we don't usually get on why informants do what they do, and how they rationalize it to themselves. There is a lot of public information about Darby (the movie Informant, most notably, but also multiple interviews), but this pamphlet compiles information from various sources, most of whom knew Darby and worked with him, sometimes for a long time.

In the interest of exposing and exploring what the various faces of infiltration are, how different people and scenes have dealt with them, how they were outed, and more, we introduce our Informant Series. This series is not about name-calling or grandstanding; it is definitely about having a realistic sense of what infiltrators have looked like, sounded like, and how they have acted, and sometimes, about what not to do in the future. The series will emphasize first-person accounts of the events.

Even in the best case scenario, infiltration is never an easy thing to recover from, scenes have been betrayed, and even if folks made no mistakes in their security, we're left feeling disoriented and destabilized. More stories about how infiltration actually happens can only help us to prepare and recover from the future instances we all know will happen.