Secret service

Type of government agency

This article is about the form of government policing. For other uses, see Secret Service (disambiguation).

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources.
Find sources: "Secret service" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2023)

|

A secret service is a government agency, intelligence agency, or the activities of a government agency, concerned with the gathering of intelligence data. The tasks and powers of a secret service can vary greatly from one country to another. For instance, a country may establish a secret service which has some policing powers (such as surveillance) but not others. The powers and duties of a government organization may be partly secret and partly not. The person may be said to operate openly at home and secretly abroad, or vice versa. Secret police and the FBI can usually be considered secret services.[1]

Various states and regimes, at different times and places, established bodies that could be described as a secret service or secret police – for example, the agentes in rebus of the late Roman Empire were sometimes defined as such. In modern times, the French police officer Joseph Fouché is sometimes regarded as the primary pioneer within secret intelligence. Among other things, he is alleged to have prevented several murder attempts on Napoleon during his time as First Consul (1799–1804) through a large and tight net of various informants.

## See also

[edit]

* Espionage

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "F. Dvornik, Origins of Intelligence Services - 1". macedonia.kroraina.com. Retrieved 2023-01-30.

## External links

[edit]

Media related to Secret service at Wikimedia Commons

This government-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

|

* v
* t
* e

Authority control databases

National|

* Germany
* United States
* France
* BnF data
* Latvia
* Israel

Other|

* NARA

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template