Documents leaked to The Intercept in 2017 revealed that Energy Transfer Partners had hired TigerSwan — a private military contractor founded by Delta Force veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan — to run the corporate side of the Standing Rock response as a literal counterinsurgency. Internal situation reports described water protectors as "jihadist" insurgents, proposed exploiting divisions in the camps, ran infiltrators and aerial surveillance, and fed intelligence to law enforcement through fusion-center channels; North Dakota regulators later found the firm had operated in the state without a license.

The private war matched the public one: the water-cannon operation in sub-freezing temperatures in November 2016, less-lethal munitions that maimed protectors including Sophia Wilansky and Vanessa Dundon, and a seamless information loop between the company and prosecutors. Standing Rock thus became the reference case for the privatization of protest policing — a corporation's military contractor helping to generate the criminal cases against the corporation's opponents — and the template invoked when the same fusion of private security and public prosecution reappeared at Line 3 and Cop City.