Everyone knew these cops were cops. They fooled only the foolish, the careless, and the talkative. The real point of soft infiltration isn't to gather information by deceit. The real harm of soft infiltration, from the citizen's point of view, and the real value, from the cop's point of view, is to wear us down . Dealing with soft infiltrators for two or three weeks requires mental resources that are best applied elsewhere, as the cops understand.
Hard infiltration is different.
Agents provacateurs are hard infiltrators. So too are cops who, posing as protesters, commit federal offenses by tagging anarchist symbols on abandoned federal property. Hard infiltration is the attempt to disrupt, subvert, provoke, prevent or otherwise interfere with a citizen's right to protest, including nonviolent civil disobedience. These cops attempt to pass themselves off as serious protesters, perhaps as protest leaders. One difference between hard and soft infiltration is that when challenged hard infiltrators typically do not retreat as readily as soft infiltrators are willing to do.