High policing
High policing is a form of intelligence-led policing in most parts of the Western World that serves to protect the national government, or a conglomerate of national governments, from internal threats; that is, any policing operations integrated into domestic intelligence gathering, national security or international security for the purpose of protecting government. The term high policing refers to the fact that such policing benefits the "higher" interests of the government rather than individual citizens or the mass population. There is no conventional designation for this category of policing in countries of the Western World, however, and it should not be confused with secret police, although secret police organizations are known to use high policing methods to some extent. Calling it "secret" or "political" policing would be too vague, as all police work is to a certain extent both secret (police generally do not reveal their methods until a case is completed) and political (police enforce laws determined by the political system in power). Furthermore, the term secret police is usually used to refer to clandestine and extralegal organizations like the Gestapo and the Mukhabarat, whose main functions are to eliminate opponents of the regime and to make the population passive through intimidation and terror.
The primary tool of high policing is intelligence, which is derived from both human and technological sources. The former includes the use of vast numbers of secret informants for information on the activities of citizens, while the latter includes electronic surveillance and eavesdropping, such as closed-circuit camera monitoring, telephone tapping and Internet tapping. Humint and technological intelligence are undoubtedly the most powerful tools in the high policing profession.
High policing in western democratic countries is performed by both national police forces and specialized intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and the Secret Service in the United States, MI5 in the United Kingdom, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. These organizations usually confront domestic or internal threats to national security, whereas the military or military intelligence agencies generally handle foreign or external threats. However, this distinction can become blurred, especially in cases involving terrorism.
High policing has an extremely high potential for abuse. There is a tendency, even in democratic countries, for high policing organizations to abuse their powers, or even to operate outside the law, because many organizations involved in high policing are granted extensive legal powers, including immunity from prosecution for acts that are criminal under normal circumstances. In some countries, for example, high-policing organizations regularly engage in actions of dubious legality, such as arbitrarily arresting and detaining people without charge, without legal representation, and without means of communication; some high-policing forces also engage in torture. In the worst cases, high policing becomes a substitute for the whole criminal justice system: suspects are arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced entirely by a national security agency, usually very expeditiously and in complete secrecy, as is the case in police states.