It surely didn't start in the last decade, and it won't stop this decade, either.
Just look at COINTELPRO in the 1960s:
COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations.
