Информатор: роль, риски и применение.

Person who provides information
a person who provides privileged information

An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a "snitch", "rat", "canary", "stool pigeon", "stoolie" or "grass", among other terms) 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. The term is commonly used in politics, industry, entertainment, and academia. 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".

Informants are extremely common in every day police work, including homicide and narcotics investigations. Any citizen who provides crime related information to law enforcement by definition is an informant. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies may face criticism regarding their conduct towards informants. Informants may be shown leniency for their own crimes in exchange for information, or simply turn out to be dishonest in their information, resulting in the time and money spent acquiring them being wasted. Informants are often regarded as traitors by their former criminal associates. Whatever the nature of a group, it is likely to feel strong hostility toward any known informers, regard them as threats and inflict punishments ranging from social ostracism through physical abuse and/or death. Informers are therefore generally protected, either by being segregated while in prison or, if they are not incarcerated, relocated under a new identity.

Corporations and the detective agencies that sometimes represent them have historically hired labor spies to monitor or control labor organizations and their activities. Such individuals may be professionals or recruits from the workforce. They may be willing accomplices, or may be tricked into informing on their co workers' unionization efforts. Paid informants have often been used by authorities within politically and socially oriented movements to weaken, destabilize and ultimately break them.

Informers alert authorities regarding government officials that are corrupt. Officials may be taking bribes or be participants in a money loop also called a kickback. Informers in some countries receive a percentage of all money recovered by their government. The ancient Roman historian Lactantius described a judiciary case which involved the prosecution of a woman suspected to have advised another woman not to marry Maximinus II: "Neither indeed was there any accuser, until a certain Jew, one charged with other offences, was induced, through hope of pardon, to give false evidence against the innocent. The equitable and vigilant magistrate conducted him out of the city under a guard, lest the populace should have stoned him The Jew was ordered to the torture till he should speak as he had been instructed The innocent were condemned to die Nor was the promise of pardon made good to the feigned adulterer, for he was fixed to a gibbet, and then he disclosed the whole secret contrivance; and with his last breath he protested to all the beholders that the women died innocent." Criminal informant schemes have been used as cover for politically motivated intelligence offensives.

Jailhouse informants, who report hearsay (admissions against penal interest) which they claim to have heard while the accused is in pretrial detention, usually in exchange for sentence reductions or other inducements, have been the focus of particular controversy. Some examples of their use are in connection with Stanley Williams, Cameron Todd Willingham, Thomas Silverstein, Marshall "Eddie" Conway, and a suspect in the disappearance of Etan Patz. The Innocence Project has stated that 15% of all wrongful convictions later exonerated because of DNA results were accompanied by false testimony by jailhouse informants. 50% of murder convictions exonerated by DNA were accompanied by false testimony by jailhouse informants.

A system of informants existed in the Russian Empire and was later adopted by the Soviet Union. In Russia, such people were known as osvedomitel or donoschik, and secretly cooperated with law enforcement agencies, such as the secret police force Okhrana and later the Soviet militsiya or KGB. Officially, those informants were referred to as "secret coworker" (секретный сотрудник, sekretny sotrudnik) and often were referred by the Russian derived portmanteau seksot. In some KGB documents has also been used the designation "source of operational information" (источник оперативной информации, istochnik operativnoi informatsii).