Case Study 36-2: Standing Rock and the Surveillance of Indigenous Resistance

Background

In April 2016, members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe established a prayer camp near the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers in North Dakota, in protest of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The pipeline's route would pass under the Missouri River less than a mile upstream of the Standing Rock reservation's water intake, threatening the tribe's primary water source and crossing land the tribe considered sacred under treaty agreements.

Over the following months, the camp — known as Oceti Sakowin — grew into one of the largest gatherings of Indigenous peoples in modern American history. Thousands of people from hundreds of Indigenous nations, joined by environmental activists, veterans, and supporters from across the country, gathered at Standing Rock. At its peak in late 2016, the encampment had thousands of residents.

What happened at Standing Rock was, among many other things, a case study in the surveillance of Indigenous resistance. The monitoring of water protectors — the term protesters preferred — involved federal and state law enforcement, local sheriff's departments, private security firms, military contractors, and the pipeline company itself. The surveillance apparatus that descended on Standing Rock in 2016 was comprehensive, technologically sophisticated, and deliberately designed to suppress a political movement through the instruments of monitoring, documentation, and intimidation.

The Surveillance Infrastructure

Aerial Surveillance

Law enforcement agencies deployed aircraft to conduct aerial surveillance of the encampment and protest activities. National Guard aircraft flew over the camps. Helicopters operated by various law enforcement agencies conducted surveillance of marches, actions, and gatherings. High-resolution cameras captured imagery that was used to identify and track individual activists.

The aerial surveillance had a dual function. Practically, it provided law enforcement with situational awareness about the location and activity of thousands of people. Strategically, the visible presence of aircraft over the encampment communicated to water protectors that they were being watched — a demonstration of surveillance power designed to chill protected First Amendment activity.

TigerSwan and Private Intelligence

The most extensive documentation of Standing Rock surveillance operations came from internal documents of TigerSwan, a private intelligence and security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline. These documents — over one hundred internal situation reports and communications — were obtained and published by The Intercept beginning in 2017.

TigerSwan documents reveal the scope and character of the surveillance operation. Operatives monitored social media accounts, attended public events, and gathered intelligence on movement leaders and organizations. TigerSwan coordinated directly with law enforcement agencies, sharing intelligence and receiving information in return — a public-private surveillance partnership that blurred the line between corporate security and state law enforcement.

More significantly, TigerSwan's documents reveal how the company framed the surveillance operation. TigerSwan characterized the water protector movement using counterterrorism language, describing it as an "insurgency" with "jihadist" elements. Internal reports described standing Rock activists as employing "battlefield" tactics. This framing — which had no factual basis — served to justify the application of counterterrorism surveillance techniques to people engaged in protected political activity.

The counterterrorism framing is significant not merely as a rhetorical strategy. It reflects the absorption, by private corporate security, of surveillance techniques and frameworks developed in the post-9/11 national security context. TigerSwan was founded by James Reese, a former Delta Force commander. Its operatives brought military intelligence and counterterrorism methodologies to a pipeline protest in North Dakota, applying to Indigenous land defenders the surveillance logic developed for foreign battlefields.

Social Media Surveillance

Water protectors at Standing Rock quickly became aware that their social media communications were being monitored. Facebook posts, Twitter communications, and Instagram accounts were tracked to identify leaders, anticipate actions, and gather intelligence on plans. Some activists received direct messages from accounts later identified as infiltrator-connected; others noticed patterns in law enforcement deployment that suggested their communications had been compromised.

In a particularly significant incident, Facebook confirmed that it had received a search warrant from law enforcement seeking information about a Facebook event page associated with Standing Rock organizing. The company's compliance with the warrant — standard legal procedure — meant that the identities of everyone who had expressed interest in the event were potentially available to law enforcement. The infrastructure of social media, built for connection and organizing, became a surveillance tool against the movement that used it.

The Racial and Colonial Dimension

The surveillance of Standing Rock water protectors cannot be understood apart from the centuries-long history of settler colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples. The U.S. government has monitored, infiltrated, and suppressed Indigenous political movements throughout the post-colonial period. The FBI's COINTELPRO program conducted surveillance of the American Indian Movement (AIM) throughout the 1970s, including surveillance of the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff. FBI informants infiltrated AIM chapters; movement leaders were prosecuted on federal charges that many legal scholars characterized as political persecution; Leonard Peltier remains incarcerated today on charges that have been broadly challenged as the product of a politically motivated prosecution.

Standing Rock did not occur in a historical vacuum. It occurred in a country with a two-hundred-year history of using the instruments of surveillance and law enforcement to suppress Indigenous resistance to land dispossession. The specific technologies changed — from informants and letter-opening to aerial surveillance and social media monitoring — but the structural function remained constant: to make Indigenous political organizing legible to state power, to identify leaders, and to create conditions that suppressed effective resistance.

The TigerSwan documents explicitly make this connection when they draw on counterterrorism frameworks. The "Indian problem" of nineteenth-century federal policy — the logic that Indigenous people were obstacles to settler progress who required management, containment, and when necessary, elimination — finds a contemporary expression in the "insurgency" framing of TigerSwan's intelligence reports. The language changes; the logic of treating Indigenous political action as a security threat remains.

Outcomes and Accountability

Ultimately, the Dakota Access Pipeline was completed and began operating. Courts rejected the tribe's legal challenges; the Trump administration accelerated federal approvals; and the encampment was forcibly cleared in February 2017.

Several water protectors faced criminal charges for their activities during the protests. The surveillance data gathered by TigerSwan and law enforcement — social media posts, photographs from aerial surveillance, intelligence on movement leadership — was used to support these prosecutions. Surveillance served not merely as a tool of deterrence but as a tool of prosecution.

TigerSwan faced limited accountability for its operations. North Dakota regulators attempted to sanction the company for operating as an unlicensed private investigator in the state; TigerSwan challenged this jurisdiction. The blurring of public and private surveillance — the coordination between TigerSwan and law enforcement, the sharing of intelligence between a corporate security firm and government agencies — raised profound accountability questions that no legal proceeding fully resolved.

The Standing Rock case was not an aberration. In the years following, environmental advocates documented similar surveillance operations against pipeline opponents in other states, against activists opposing other fossil fuel infrastructure, and against Indigenous-led land defense movements. The infrastructure of surveillance built at Standing Rock — aerial monitoring, private intelligence, social media tracking, counterterrorism framing — became a template.

Discussion Questions

1. TigerSwan characterized the Standing Rock water protector movement using counterterrorism language. What functions does this framing serve? How does it justify the use of specific surveillance techniques that would not otherwise be applicable?

2. The case involves surveillance by both private actors (TigerSwan) and government agencies (law enforcement). What accountability mechanisms exist for each? How does the public-private coordination blur these accountability lines?

3. Social media was simultaneously an organizing tool for water protectors and a surveillance tool against them. What does this dual function reveal about the relationship between infrastructure and power?

4. The chapter argues that the surveillance of Indigenous land defenders must be understood as continuous with the historical surveillance of Indigenous resistance. Is this historical continuity argument persuasive in the Standing Rock case? What evidence supports or complicates it?

5. What obligations, if any, do social media companies like Facebook have when they receive law enforcement requests for data about political organizing? How should they balance legal compliance, user privacy, and the protection of political speech?

Extension Research

• Read the full TigerSwan document cache published by The Intercept
• Research the history of FBI surveillance of the American Indian Movement, including the Wounded Knee standoff (1973)
• Examine the legal status of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and its provisions on free, prior, and informed consent for projects affecting Indigenous lands
• Review research on the "Green Scare" — FBI surveillance of environmental activists in the 2000s — and compare the surveillance frameworks with those documented at Standing Rock