Informant

This article is about a person who provides privileged information. For other uses, see Informant (disambiguation).

"Informer", "Stool pigeon", and "Confidential Informant" redirect here. For other uses, see Informer (disambiguation) and Stool pigeon (disambiguation). 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

An informant 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".