History Main / SecretPolice

* While there is no real consensus on what body did what, UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany and the Manchu Qing Dynasty of ImperialChina all had some form of this.
* The Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) of UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany, established by UsefulNotes/OttoVonBismarck in 1866.

* Many communist regimes had notorious units: the Czechoslovak ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StB StB]]'', the Romanian ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate Securitate]]'', the Hungarian ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Protection_Authority ÁVH]]''... (although none of them took [[BigBrotherIsWatching mass surveillance]] to quite the same extremes as the Stasi).
* While there is no real consensus on what body did what, UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany and the Manchu Qing Dynasty of ImperialChina all had some form of this.

** The Okhrana was (understandably) abolished after the [[UsefulNotes/RomanovsAndRevolutions February Revolution]] of 1917. However, the [[UsefulNotes/RedOctober Bolsheviks]] established a new security agency, the Cheka, less than a month after taking over. The Cheka was even bigger and more efficent than the Okhrana, and its exploits--particularly those of its leader, Felix Dzerzhinski--were legendary (and legendarily frightening). Due to ongoing shakeups in the structure of the Russian and then Soviet government, the Cheka was reorganized and renamed several times between the Revolution and the death of UsefulNotes/JosephStalin. Its most famous incarnation during this period is probably as the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (''Narodniy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del'', NKVD), which existed 1936-41. It was during this period that the secret police agencies first got involved in foreign intelligence, as well.

* Until it became defunct, UsefulNotes/TheSpanishInquisition was basically this for the Spanish crown. Quite possibly the UrExample... Which explains why [[Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus no one expected it.]] Unlike the Inquisition in most other countries, the Spanish Inquisition was unique in that the Spanish crown had usurped the Church's authority in Spanish territory to collect tithes, appoint bishops, and prosecute Church-related crimes (at its height, the Spanish Empire was ''that'' powerful). The Inquisition in Spain became the political police as much as (if not more than) ecclesiastical police. By contrast, the Inquisition in most other Catholic countries was separate from (and usually more fair and consistent than) the secular legal authorities of the time.
* Some scholars have suggested that the Spartan Crypteia played this role: they were ordered to spy on the helot (slave) population, and were given permission to kill anyone who were suspected of conspiring to overthrow the government.
* It is said that the UsefulNotes/{{Singapore}}an intelligence services (the Internal Security Department and the Security and Intelligence Division) work much like this.
* [[UsefulNotes/ToGetRichIsGlorious Modern-day China]] has several secret police units, as one would expect from a country that has managed to keep over 1 billion people in line, even more than 25 years after the [[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp fall of the Iron Curtain.]] Most of them are organs within the dreaded Ministry of State Security (国家安全部) and the Chinese Communist Party, but the Ministry of Public Security (公安部), responsible for day-to-day law enforcement in China, also contains secret police units. These include the Enemy Investigations Bureau (敵偵局), and Office 610 (610弁公室). The latter is tasked with [[UnPerson disappearing Falun Gong activists]] and [[OrganTheft harvesting their organs.]]

** Due to the brutality of prewar Japan's secret police, modern-day Japanese intelligence and security services[[note]]Mostly carried out the Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSIA, 公安調査庁) which is under the Ministry of Justice, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Public Security Bureau (警視庁公安部)[[/note]] have far more limited powers of surveillance compared to even their modern western counterparts.
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Bureau_of_State_Security Bureau Of State Security]] [[FunWithAcronyms (BOSS)]] in South Africa during UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra. This was replaced in 1980 by the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Service_%28South_Africa%29 National Intelligence Service (NIS)]], which was itself in turn replaced by the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Agency National Intelligence Agency (NIA)]] after the transition to democracy.
* The Ming Dynasty's ''Jinyi Wei'' ("Brocade-Clad Guard") and the ''Dongchang'' ("The Eastern Commission of Investigations"). This is the first incarnation for the modern concept of "secret police". The Ming Dynasty Jinyi Wei originally begin as bodyguards to the emperor, but later evolved to a full-blown intelligence agency. They blended into the public and were responsible for thought-policing, domestic-espionage, political assassination, and during times of war, acted as political commissars. The Jinyi Wei were often judge, jury and executioners without any concerns for due-process.
* Taiwan boasted two oddly-named versions, which operated at the same time: the General Department of Political Warfare, which maintained both political officers and general high-ranking commanders in every military unit, down to the company or battery level, as well as in many police units-and the Taiwan Garrison Command, commanded by a three-star general, which acted to suppress political activism and ensure political orthodoxy, and was tied to various unsavory political murders or assassinations, and kept a hand in influencing society, economics, culture and education. These were the descendants of secret police organizations in pre-1949 China, in which the present Taiwan has institutional continuity with-the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, and the Military Bureau of Investigation and Statistics. It also showed some influence from the Russian system of political commissars.
* The Joseon Dynasty's Amhaeng-eosa (Secret Censors), specially appointed by the King to keep tabs on his own administration and yangban nobility, but never as fully institutionalized as some others on this list. Oddly, or perhaps not when one considers their preferred targets, they also tend to be viewed positively today as agents opposed to government corruption.
* The Austrian Empire and then Austria-Hungary had one that (fascinatingly) went from hypercompetent and scary to incompetent and woefully underfunded. They went from being able to intercept and copy almost all correspondence into and out of Vienna during the Congress of Vienna (1814) to a service so badly overstretched that a staff of 20 people was expected to monitor all postal traffic in the nation post-Metternich, including clerical assistants and servants. Despite this, it was still treated as some monolithic instrument of repression and censorship, generally by people not actually within the nation. Its history is interesting, in that Metternich was insistent on keeping it funded and capable, while his rival, the Finance Minister Kolowrat, argued that the organization (1) was too expensive for the Empire's limited budget and (2) wasn't even particularly effective at preventing the spread of subversive ideas. The later ineffectiveness of the Austrian/Austro-Hungarian secret police was basically because Kolowrat was right--Metternich's secret police was unable to prevent the UsefulNotes/RevolutionsOf1848 from breaking out across the Empire, and even though the Habsburgs were able to reassert central control, they decided that investing in police-state repression wasn't worth the expense (especially with other tools at their disposal).

* Great Britain:
** A secret cell within London's Metropolitan Police Special Branch - the Special Demonstration Squad. From 1968 to 2008, these elite policemen would go on deep-cover 'tours' in political activist groups; mainly to provide information to the regular police ahead of any protest or illegal activity, but also to smear and discredit them. A tactic they found useful was to get into a relationship with a high-ranking member of a group - the end of a tour saw the operative vanish from the group and the person's life, which had a side-effect akin to the Stasi's 'Zersetzung', especially when one officer left his partner in the group with a baby.
** The British Army's 14 Intelligence Company a.k.a 'the Det', a secretive special forces unit tasked with covert surveillance in Northern Ireland with gadget-strewn 'Q cars'. Along with their parent regiment, the Special Air Service, they faced accusations of torture and brutality up to and including murder levelled by Irish republican groups. Bear in mind that the IRA are not necessarily the most impartial source when it comes to the British Army. It isn't impossible, however.
* Historically, the FBI were very close to becoming a straight example under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, focusing on the suppression of political dissent at the expense of a worsening organised crime problem and amassing large files of potential blackmail material on radicals... and elected officials, according to some sources.
* From 1950-1983 the Canadian government operated a secret program called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROFUNC PROFUNC]] which spied on suspected Communists and Communist-sympathizers. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police developed dossiers on 16,000 Communist party members/supporters and over 50,000 suspected sympathizers including details on their families, exact movements, and including pre-filled arrest documents. In the event of war with the Soviet Union (the so-called Mobilization Day), the RCMP would immediately round up everyone on the PROFUNC list and send them to [[POWCamp internment camps]].
* UsefulNotes/{{Egypt}}'s State Security Investigations Service proved to be remarkably like the Stasi after revolution revealed its piles and piles of documents, indicating (according to some sources) that as much as 1 or 2 percent of the country's population of 80 million was on its payroll (mostly as informants). It also proved to have had a taste for ElectricTorture, although that was well-known beforehand (1975's ''The Karnak Cafe'', one of the greatest Egyptian films ever, depicts torture under the 1953-1970 regime of UsefulNotes/GamalAbdelNasser in graphic detail).
* UsefulNotes/TheRomanEmpire had the ''Frumentarii'' (lit. 'foragers') who were spies tasked with infiltration of foreign groups and collecting information about the situation in various regions. Together with ''Speculatores'' (the military scouts) they were also conducting arrests, interrogation and elimination of the most dangerous traitors, dissenters and troublemakers.
* UsefulNotes/NorthKorea's version of the [=KGB=] was called the State Security Department, widely considered to be one of the most repressive police forces in the world, as it's been noted to have been involved in countless human rights abuses, including forced disappearances and public executions. And unsurprisingly, North Korea is a totalitarian PoliceState, where the government controls ''every'' aspect of its citizens' private lives, including the clothing they can wear and the TV shows they can watch, making it the perfect example of an [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Orwellian]] {{Dystopia}}. Dissenters and their immediate family members are sent to concentration camps, where they are subject to harsh and brutal Gulag-type conditions, including slavery and torture.
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabahith Mabahith]] in UsefulNotes/SaudiArabia.

* The National Intelligence and Security Authority was the Philippine's most notorious intelligence agency responsible for cracking down on anti-Marcos opposition in the 1970s and 80s under the command of General Fabian Ver. Formerly replacing the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, the [=NISA=] was rebranded to its current name after the [=EDSA=] Revolution.
* The Council of Ten in UsefulNotes/{{Venice}} during the days when Venice was a sovereign state. It had a fearsome reputation, (which it probably didn't mind) but according to at least one writer it focused mostly on those who were actually powerful enough to pose a threat. Thus it was a more downplayed version.
* UsefulNotes/TheShinsengumi, pro-Shogunate and their pro-Meiji rivals/counterparts, the Ishin-Shishi. Most of the Ishin-shishi later became advisers to the emperor.
* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVRA O.V.R.A.]] of UsefulNotes/FascistItaly, who are the subject of ''Literature/TheConformist'' and who harass the title character in ''Anime/PorcoRosso''. Secret enough nobody's sure what O.V.R.A. meant (there are various possible meanings) or even if it actually existed (there are rumours that Mussolini invented it to scare political enemies and distract everyone from who actually did the job, namely the MVSN (the original {{Black Shirt}}s) and the Public Safety Agents Corps (the normal police).
* The Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) of UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany, established by UsefulNotes/OttoVonBismarck in 1866.
* The hideously inappropriately named "State Research Bureau" of UsefulNotes/IdiAmin's Uganda.
* All over the place in Napoleonic France, one of the most ruthlessly efficient police states of the period (especially towards the end). In addition to the "regular" force under the Minister of Police (Fouché, later replaced by Savary, although Fouché retained a vast and powerful network of informants and assorted thugs), there was the ''gendarmerie'' (a section of the army), Davout's military police (''another'' section of the army), the Palace's police under General Duroc[[note]]That one was especially scary because it effectively applied martial law to anyone who fell under its jurisdiction... even though most of these people were civilians[[/note]]... mutual suspicion was rampant and even encouraged between all of these.
* In UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra, The South African Bureau for State Security [[note]]incorrectly given the abbreviation B.O.S.S. by journalists; the official Afrikaans was ''die Buro vir Staatsveiligheid''[[/note]] fulfilled this function for the white government. BOSS was notorious for its general paranoia, for enthusiastically interrogating black suspects and facilitating their "suicides" from very high windows, and invented the euphemism "care package" for letter bombs - on the grounds that receiving one of these ''really'' takes care of people. After the end of apartheid, a revised and re-educated version persists as the National Intelligence Service.
* During the [[UsefulNotes/CivilRightsMovement Civil Rights Era]], after the ''Brown v. Board'' ruling banning school segregation, several DeepSouth states set up agencies to fight "racial agitators;" Mississippi, with its Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, is the most known example. Its mission was to "protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states" from "encroachment thereon by the Federal Government" (read: prevent integration and the demise of Jim Crow) and, to do this, they had an extensive network of spies and informants. Both White and Black, in fact. Although murder was discussed by some agents but never actualized, methods such as assaults, blacklisting and intimidation were used against "racial agitators" and their allies; for example, Clyde Kennard was railroaded to Parchman after attempting to integrate the White-only Ole Miss. They also broadcasted pro-segregation propaganda. Founded on 1957, they lasted until 1973, by which time they had shifted their focus to target anti-UsefulNotes/VietnamWar [[RedScare "subversives"]].
* The Department of Homeland Security as a whole is often accused of this ever since it's founding in 2002 following 9/11. Issues included data mining, using fusion centers to infringe on civil liberties, wrongful deportations and arrests, sexual abuse of women and separation of families at the border, and kidnapping citizens in Portland during the George Floyd protests. As a result, critics describe them as this and acting as the [[StateSec National Police]].

** Most of the above allegations is very specific to Homeland security's branch, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The fact Ex-president Trump gave them a bit too much leeway in how they pursued their jobs during his single term has much to do with this.

* ''Webcomic/{{Drive}}'', despite it's overall Spanish/{{Spanglish}} culture, has the Jinyiwei (see the Real Life section for the group that inspired the name). Many of them are pretty unpleasant people, though in most cases it's more "ruthless" than actually "evil".

** The secret police a modern Russian citizen is the most likely to run afoul of is the MVD E-Department, or the Center for Counteracting Extremism. This political police handles most of the low-profile dissidents and Internet badmouthers, while the FSB only works with high profile cases.

** And most shadowy of all is the Officio Assassinorum. Their forte is stealth and secrecy, and as well as external threats, the Officio Assassinorum often deals with rogue planetary governors. So capable is the Officio Assassinorum that one Grand Master of Assassins, Drakan Vangorich, used the temples to slay the other High Lords of Terra and take over the Imperium himself. It took 400 Space Marines to take his army of 100 Eversor Assassins down and the battle left one lone Space Marine of the Imperial Fists standing to claim the Grand Master's head. Since this event, deployment of even a single Assassin requires the authorisation of at least two thirds of the High Lords of Terra, and the lasting distrust means the Space Marines have '''conspiracy theories''' about them, suspecting the Officio Assassinorum of responsibility for unexplained misfortunes such as the Crimson Fists' fortress monastery being destroyed by its own defence missile.

* Inspired by the above, ''VideoGame/{{Beholder}}'' has you taking on the role of secret policeman yourself. Although player-character Carl Stein is just a landlord and not a member of any such organisation, he is tasked by the state to spy and report on his tenants by such means as searching apartments and installing cameras in them without the tenants knowing.

** And most shadowy of all is the Officio Assassinorum. Their forte is stealth and secrecy, and as well as external threats, the Officio Assassinorum often deals with rogue planetary governors. So capable is the Officio Assassinorum that one Grand Master of Assassins, Drakan Vangorich, used the temples to slay the other High Lords of Terra and take over the Imperium himself. It took three chapters of Space Marines to take his army of assassins down and the battle left one lone Space Marine of the Imperial Fists standing to claim the Grand Master's head. Since this event, deployment of even a single Assassin requires the authorisation of at least two thirds of the High Lords of Terra, and the lasting distrust means the Space Marines have '''conspiracy theories''' about them, suspecting the Officio Assassinorum of responsibility for unexplained misfortunes such as the Crimson Fists' fortress monastery being destroyed by its own defence missile.

* The Inquisition of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'', with three major branches, each specializing in fighting either heretics, aliens, or the forces of chaos. Also overlaps with StateSec. How ''secret'' their policing is can vary, considering some Inquisitors have become famous and well-known, but also depending on circumstances or an individual Inquisitor's preferred methods. While Inquisitor Lord Torquemada Coteaz maintains an extensive informant network throughout the Formosa Sector (said to be [[BigBrotherIsWatching at least 2 in every 3 citizens]]), others such as Inquisitor Lord Fyodor Karamazov are more likely to descend on a planet with their own personal fleet and chamber militants.

** And most shadowy of all is the Officio Assassinorum. Their forte is stealth and secrecy, and as well as external threats, the Officio Assassinorum often deals with rogue planetary governors. So capable is the Officio Assassinorum that one Grand Master of the Officio, Drakan Vangorich, used the temples to slay the other High Lords of Terra and take over the Imperium himself. It took three chapters of Space Marines to take his army of assassins down and the battle left one lone Space Marine of the Imperial Fists standing to claim the Grand Master's head. Since this event, deployment of even a single Assassin requires the authorisation of at least two thirds of the High Lords of Terra, and the lasting distrust means the Space Marines have '''conspiracy theories''' about them, suspecting the Officio Assassinorum of responsibility for unexplained misfortunes such as the Crimson Fists' fortress monastery being destroyed by its own defence missile.

* The Inquisition of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'', with three major branches, each specializing in fighting either heretics, aliens, or the forces of chaos. Also overlaps with StateSec. How ''secret'' their policing is can vary, considering some Inquisitors have become famous and well-known, but also depending on circumstances or an individual Inquisitor's preferred methods. While Inquisitor Lord Torquemada Coteaz maintains an extensive informant network throughout the Formosa Sector (said to be [[BigBrotherIsWatching at least ''2 in every 3 citizens'']]), others such as Inquisitor Lord Fyodor Karamazov are more likely to descend on a planet with their own personal fleet and chamber militants.

* The Inquisition of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'', with three major branches, each specializing in fighting either heretics, aliens, or the forces of chaos. Also overlaps with StateSec. How ''secret'' their policing is can vary, considering some Inquisitors have become famous and well-known, but also depending on circumstances or an individual Inquisitor's preferred methods. While Inquisitor Lord Torquemada Coteaz maintains an extensive informant network throughout the Formosa Sector (said to be [[BigBrotherIsWatching/at least ''2 in every 3 citizens'']]), others such as Inquisitor Lord Fyodor Karamazov are more likely to descend on a planet with their own personal fleet and chamber militants.

* The Inquisition of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'', with three major branches, each specializing in fighting either heretics, aliens, or the forces of chaos. Also overlaps with StateSec.
** For more mundane dangers, there's the Adeptus Arbites. The Arbites deal with organised crime, sedition, rebellion, and everything else outside the jurisdiction or ability of the local police forces. Essentially, they are the MVD to the Inquisition's KGB.
** And most shadowy of all is the Officio Assassinorum. While Inquisitors have ultimate authority and their job is to investigate internal threats to the Imperium, the 'secret' aspect of their policing is up for debate, given how the Inquisition have quite a public face and some Inquisitors even become famous to a degree. The Arbites also have a public presence. But the Officio Assassinorum deals with internal threats such as rogue planetary governors and the forte of most of their temples is stealth and secrecy. It is due to this that '''Space Marines''' have conspiracy theories against them.
** Of course, that last part might have something to do with the fact that the Officio's leader, the Master of Assassins, can, and in one case did assassinate every other member of the Senatorum Imperialis after he fell to Chaos, and was only defeated by the combined efforts of an ''army'' of space marines, only one of which survived to put a bolt in the Master of Assassin's head.

* Inspired by the above, ''VideoGame/{{Beholder}}'' has you taking on the role of secret policeman yourself. Although player-character Carl Stein is just a landlord and not a member of any such organisation, he is tasked by the state to spy and report on his tennants by such means as searching apartments and installing cameras in them without the tennants knowing.

* Inspired by the above, ''VideoGame/Beholder'' has you taking on the role of secret policeman yourself. Although player-character Carl Stein is just a landlord and not a member of any such organisation, he is tasked by the state to spy and report on his tennants by such means as searching apartments and installing cameras in them without the tennants knowing.

* ''Film/TheLivesOfOthers'' is about a secret policeman in East Germany who spies on a high-profile composer and is moved to spare him by the man's beautiful music.

** The Okhrana was (understandably) abolished after the [[UsefulNotes/RomanovsAndRevolutions February Revolution]] of 1917. However, the [[UsefulNotes/RedOctober Bolsheviks]] established a new security agency, the Cheka, less than a month after taking over. The Cheka was even bigger and more efficent than the Okhrana, and its exploits were legendary (and legendarily frightening). Due to ongoing shakeups in the structure of the Russian and then Soviet government, the Cheka was reorganized and renamed several times between the Revolution and the death of UsefulNotes/JosephStalin. Its most famous incarnation during this period is probably as the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (''Narodniy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del'', NKVD), which existed 1936-41. It was during this period that the secret police agencies first got involved in foreign intelligence, as well.
** After Stalin's death, there was a power struggle over who would control the secret police and how it would be managed. In 1954, Khruschchev's faction won out and established the ''Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti'' (Committee for State Security), more commonly known as the KGB. The KGB was by this point the premier Soviet foreign intelligence agency in addition to being the secret police domestically, which led to some weirdness.

** The SAVAMA is another secret police under the Islamic Republic. After the Shah was overthrown in 1979, the Islamic government inherited the intelligence apparatus of the old SAVAK, the secret police during the previous regime.

* It is said that the Singaporean intelligence services (the Internal Security Department and the Security and Intelligence Division) work much like this.

** The Oprichnina was dissolved before the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign, but the [[UsefulNotes/TsaristRussia Russian Crown]] always had informal networks of domestic spies to keep an eye and a lid on dissent. In 1826, Emperor Nicholas I systematized and expanded these networks under the "Third Section of His Majesty's Own Chancellery." The Third Section was a great boogeyman in Russia for the middle part of the 19th century, as for all the spying of earlier regimes, the Third Section's ability to catch you talking politics one day and send you to Siberia the next was spooky and new. However, by the 1870s it was undone by its own shortcomings--mostly that it was an OddlySmallOrganization (it never had more than 1-2 dozen fulltime agents and a few hundred gendarmes at its disposal) and developed some bad habits (in particular, it never realized that it needed to spy on anyone other than nobles and bureaucrats). This led it to be replaced in 1881 by...

* Some scholars have suggested that the Spartan Crypteia played this role: they were ordered to spy on the helot (slave) population, and were given permission to kill anyone who were suspicious of conspiring to overthrow the government.

* For sheer notoriety, nothing tops the ''Geheime Staatspolizei'' (Secret State Police Service), much better known as UsefulNotes/TheGestapo, from UsefulNotes/NaziGermany. Prior to them was the TropeNamer in the Prussian Secret Police. Most other similar organizations did not use the word "secret" in their names or descriptions. There was even a junior Gestapo, called the ''Hitlerjugend Streifendienst'', middle-school kids who spied on and reported other kids for setting up unlawful youth organizations... or their parents for opposing the regime.

* ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'': The dreaded Thought Police watch the population of Oceania for any sign of {{thoughtcrime}}. Citizens don't even need to have done anything contrary to Big Brother. They just need to be ''thinking'' about it. The famous slogan "Big Brother Is Watching You" threatens that the Thought Police could being inspecting your behavior at any moment, so you never get a moment's safety to be yourself. The Thought Police will even recruit your own family members to inform against you.

* The Da Li of Ba Sing Se from ''Franchise/AvatarTheLastAirbender''. They have an official charge: to preserve the city's cultural heritage. They have an unofficial charge: to keep order within the city walls. Their three modes of operation are through establishing a Panopticon effect where you are always being watched and know it, deploying terrifyingly consistent brainwashed PR operatives, and physically assaulting any remaining problems with intensely trained earthbenders, who apparently also are the main intelligence officers, since they're only supposed to fight when the system has sprung a leak. While they officially answer to the Earth Kingdom royalty, in practice [[FairWeatherFriend they are loyal only to whoever keeps them in power]]; at the start of the story this is [[TheSpymaster Long Feng]], by Book 3 its [[spoiler:Azula]], and in [[WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfKorra the sequel show]] they've somehow warped back around to the Earth Queen, who unlike her father is a power-hungry despot. Perhaps the scariest thing about them is that they were founded ''[[NiceJobBreakingItHero by an Avatar]]''; they were one of Avatar Kyoshi's pet projects.

* Austria-Hungary had a fascinatingly incompetent/woefully underfunded version of this. They went from being able to intercept and copy almost all correspondence into and out of Vienna during the Congress of Vienna (1814) to a service so badly overstretched that a staff of 20 people was expected to monitor all postal traffic in the nation post-Metternich, including clerical assistants and servants. Despite this, it was still treated as some monolithic instrument of repression and censorship, generally by people not actually within the nation.

** The Oprichnina was dissolved before the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign, but the [[UsefulNotes/TsaristRussia Russian Crown]] always had informal networks of domestic spies to keep an eye and a lid on dissent. In 1826, Emperor Nicholas I systematized and expanded these networks under the "Third Section of His Majesty's Own Chancellery." The Third Section was a great boogeyman in Russia for the middle part of the 19th century, as for all the spying of earlier regimes, the Third Section's ability to catch you talking politics one day and send you to Siberia the next was spooky and new. However, by the 1870s it was undone by its own shortcomings--mostly that it was an OddlySmallOrganization (it never had more than 1-2 dozen fulltime agents and a few hundred gendarmes at its disposal) and developed some bad habits. This led it to be replaced in 1881 by...

* The ''Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti'' (Committee for State Security), more commonly known as the KGB. They were also a spy agency. They have had a number of other names over the years (Cheka, NKVD etc.) and continue today (sort of) in the form of the ''Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti'' (Federal Security Service, FSB). Unlike the KGB, the FSB deals exclusively with domestic spying, making them closer to the classic trope.

* Before the KGB, UsefulNotes/IvanTheTerrible created the Oprichnina. They were almost like a monastic order, where the Oprichniki were the "monks" and Ivan was their "abbot". The Oprichniks had free rein to terrorize the Russian population, and not even the nobility were spared. One of the scariest things about them was the banners they flew during their raids--severed dog heads mounted on spears.
* The Tsarist equivalent to the KGB was the ''Okhrannoye otdeleniye'' (Security Section), better known in the West as the ''Okhrana'' (technically, it was usually called Okhran'''k'''a, at least in Russia. Okhranka is a diminutive, a "cute" name.). And that was preceded by the "Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Chancellery".

* The port city of Limsa Lominsa in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has its own heroic version of SecretPolice known as the Rogue's Guild. Formerly the Upright Thieves, the Rouge's Guild works directly under Admiral Merlwyb to uphold the Lominsan Code from the shadows while the Maelstrom (military) and Yellow Jackets (police) focus on other tasks.

* The Department of Homeland Security as a whole is often accused of this ever since it's founding in 2002 following 9/11. Issues included bungling Hurricane Katrina, data mining, misuse of fusion centers, wrongful deportations and arrests, sexual abuse of women and separation of families at the border, and kidnapping citizens in Portland during the George Floyd protests. As a result, critics describe them as this and acting as the [[StateSec National Police]].