History Main / StateSec

** In {{UsefulNotes/The New Russia}}, there is the FSB, the KGB's eventual successor after the dissolution of USSR, still maintains control over the "Alpha" and "Vympel" regiments, and took over the state border forces several years after inception. In a way, it is ''more'' powerful than its predecessor - after all, it is [[UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin their man]] that now rules all Russia.

** In {{UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia}}, there is the FSB, the KGB's eventual successor after the dissolution of USSR, still maintains control over the "Alpha" and "Vympel" regiments, and took over the state border forces several years after inception. In a way, it is ''more'' powerful than its predecessor - after all, it is [[UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin their man]] that now rules all Russia.

* The Special Police Force in ''Film/SleepingDogs'' that is established to counter guerrilla activity when civil war breaks out. They were blue uniforms and berets, working alongside ordinary army troops in a paramilitary capacity.

* ''VideoGame/HorizonForbiddenWest'': The Compliance and its officers are the eyes and ears of the Imperial House and the Boards, and they crack down hard on dissent. Everyone in Fleet's End is worried about upsetting them. To justify how truly black-hearted they are, even more so than the Ceo, Theoa tells an anecdote of how her brother reported their mother to Compliance and she was never seen again.

* The FBI was founded with the stated purpose of quashing communism in the US; that is, its goal is the suppression of political beliefs unpopular with the ruling class. COINTELPRO, the tactics used to foment discord among the FBI's targets and to abuse them into submission, officially only ran from the mid-50s to the mid-70s (when it was revealed to the press), but those same tactics were used by the Department of Justice against the victims of white mob violence during the Red Summer of 1919 (under the Radical Division, led by a young J. Edgar Hoover) and any muslim can tell you that they continued after 9/11. The tactics included entrapment, framing people, assaulting them, and even assassination. As they didn't have the manpower themselves, the FBI enlisted the assistance of local police and the KKK, and organized a paramilitary unit from the remnants of a far right wing militia in southern California (the Secret Army Organization). Victims of this state violence said that they felt they were at war with their own government. The targets were black civil rights groups like the NAACP and SNCC, environmentalists like Greenpeace, the American Indian Movement, student unions and war protesters, feminists, gay rights activists, and Jewish communities. In his private writings, president UsefulNotes/HarrySTruman expressed discontent with the FBI's methodology and motives, comparing the organization to the Gestapo.

* [[UsefulNotes/MoscowCentre The KGB]] had the Border Guards Chief Directorate, which consisted of 200,000 troops armed with its own tanks, aircraft, and ships. Although their chief task was sealing the border, not army action. ''Internal Troops'', the Interior Ministry gendarmerie corps, would be closer, but administratively they were glorified, heavy-armed cops (akin to [[UsefulNotes/LesCopsSportif French]] ''[[UsefulNotes/LesCopsSportif Gendarmerie Nationale]]'' or British [[UsefulNotes/TheTroubles Ulster Special Constabulary]]), and thus had much less authority. In addition, the KGB had their own [[ElitesAreMoreGlamorous Spetsnaz]] ("Alpha" and "Vympel" ("Banner") regiments) and [[PraetorianGuard the Kremlin Guard Force]].
** Stalinist era NKVD/NKGB/MGB was more in line with this trope, as it was more extensive, and its troops fought directly in the Great Patriotic War.\\
In fact, NKVD troops are the direct ancestors of the current Internal Troops, as when NKVD was split into KGB and MVD in the postwar restructuring and post-Stalin power struggle, they went to the cops. The security half of the organization managed to keep the border police, though.

** The FSB, the KGB's eventual successor after the dissolution of USSR, still maintains control over the "Alpha" and "Vympel" regiments, and took over the state border forces several years after inception. In a way, it is even ''more'' powerful than its predecessor - after all, it is [[UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin their man]] that now rules all Russia.
** All Soviet examples descend from the original Cheka, overseen by Felix Dzerzhinsky. They ultimately had by far the widest responsibilities of any incarnation of the internal security forces the Soviet Union. They were the part of the government responsible for almost all acts of state violence in the Civil War, from Grain requisitions to running Gulags, to rooting out opposition parties to the Bolsheviks. To what extent this was a deliberate tactic to pass responsibility for the worst parts of the Red Terror to a specific fall man, or just a consequence of giving so much power to a morally questionable individual, is a matter of debate to this day.
* Outside of the aforementioned FSB, [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Putinist Russia]] also has the business empire of Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of Vladimir Putin's close confidantes, which is a mix between this trope and MegaCorp. Closely tied to the government, Prigozhin controls much of Russia's mass media, has created the infamous Russian "internet troll factories", is involved in diamond mining in Central Africa, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking and owns a bunch of restaurants]]. More importantly, he owns the Wagner Group, an army of PrivateMilitaryContractors used by the Russian government to fight where it is not politically convenient to implicate the army.
* One of the scarier early examples of the trope was the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. It was a semi-monastic fraternal order that was created to terrorize and depower the Boyar nobles who schemed against the Tsar. Its operatives wore black robes, rode horses with symbolic brooms and dog heads attached to saddles, and were formed into paramilitary terror squads that wiped out both manor homes and peasant villages. Aside from these operatives, the Oprichnina also owned vast tracts of land, had merchants working to finance it, and generally was a state within a state. By the end of the Oprichnina, Ivan's enemies were gone, but so was a large chunk of Russia's population. Some people think that the Oprichniks were the source of inspiration for Stalin's NKVD (Ivan the Terrible was [[UsefulNotes/JosefStalin Uncle Joe's]] favorite historical character).

*** This also explains why by the time ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamUnicorn'' takes place, the Feddies are revealed to have established another Titans replacement called the ECOAS "Manhunter" unit. But while its job more or less is to do the sort of wetworks that Londo Bell would never do, a sense of duty, professionalism and a grounded awareness of being NecessarilyEvil keep it from becoming ''just like'' the Titans.

* The FBI was founded with the stated purpose of quashing communism in the US; that is, its goal is the suppression of political beliefs unpopular with the ruling class. COINTELPRO, the tactics used to foment discord among the FBI's targets and to abuse them into submission, officially only ran from the mid-50s to the mid-70s (when it was revealed to the press), but those same tactics were used by the Department of Justice against the victims of white mob violence during the Red Summer of 1919 (under the Radical Division, led by a young J. Edgar Hoover) and any muslim can tell you that they continued after 9/11. The tactics included entrapment, framing people, assaulting them, and even assassination. As they didn't have the manpower themselves, the FBI enlisted the assistance of local police and the KKK, and organized a paramilitary unit from the remnants of a far right wing militia in southern California (the Secret Army Organization). Victims of this state violence said that they felt they were at war with their own government. The targets were black civil rights groups like the NAACP and SNCC, environmentalists like Greenpeace, the American Indian Movement, student unions and war protesters, feminists, gay rights activists, and jewish communities.

** The series has the [[ANaziByAnyOtherName Thalmor]], who are, on a basic level, essentially a militarized, radical [[OurElvesAreDifferent Altmeri (High Elf)]] political party with [[ChurchPolice extremist religious]] and SecretPolice elements. Following the devastating events of the [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion Crisis]], the Thalmor (then only a marginal group) [[StealingTheCredit took the credit]] for resolving the Crisis, winning them massive populist support in their homeland. They quickly rose to the highest ranks of the Altmeri government and, [[ManipulativeBastard through their machinations]], started a domino effect which severely weakened the already [[VestigialEmpire crumbling Cyrodiilic Empire]]. The Thalmor seceded, annexed neighboring Valenwood (home of the Bosmer (Wood Elves), and reformed the [[AntiHumanAlliance Aldmeri]] [[TheEmpire Dominion]] of old. The Thalmor have their own military branch, complete with ProfessionalKiller hit squads and wandering MagicKnight "Justicars" given free reign to arrest/murder "undesirables". Following the [[GreatOffscreenWar Great War]] between the Dominion and the remnants of the Empire, the White-Gold Concordat was struck with terms ''heavily'' favorable to the Dominion. Included is the ban on [[DeityOfHumanOrigin Talos]] worship throughout the Empire, the official dissolution of the [[AncientOrderOfProtectors Blades]], and the right for the Thalmor to patrol the Empire enforcing these terms (and others). The Thalmor can be found throughout ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'' and are mostly responsible for the ScrewYouElves [[FantasticRacism sentiment]] present in the population of Skyrim.

** Before the Atomic War, the Department of Justice had become a State Sec in its own right to the US government, fielding tanks and other military hardware on par with the US military. If not for this militarization, they certainly would not have been able to topple Booth's administration after they charged him with tyranny.

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'': Justice Department is so big that it has several Black Ops agencies with their own forces. After they were all consolidated following the Day of Chaos, they even tried to overthrow the Chief Judge in a coup during the "Trifecta" arc.

** The Inquisition - the original and most iconic of the Imperium's State Sec. They're divided into three main groups: the Ordo Xenos deals with aliens (mostly Genestealers and Tau, since they are the only alien races that actively corrupt or recruit humans), the Ordo Hereticus roots out heresy that hasn't yet erupted into conflict, and the Ordo Malleus handles the killing of witches and daemons.

** Belarus still maintains its own branch of the KGB even to this day. Most of the other former Soviet republics also do, actually, but the Belarusians were the only ones not to bother with renaming theirs after the fall of USSR and the ascension of the ostensibly pro-Soviet president, Alexander Lukashenko.

* ''Series/TheWheelOfTime'': In the series False Dragons, and indeed the Dragon Reborn, can also be female. Thus the Red Ajah deals not only with male but also with female channelers who violate the White Tower rules. This implies both wilders (channelers without Tower education) and their fellow Aes Sedai. As a consequence, other Ajahs dislike Reds and are wary of them as the Tower's enforcers. This is actually close to their original purpose from the books, where the Red Ajah was formed to deal with misuses of the One Power in general before increasingly focusing on gentling men who could channel.

** Many historians have gone so far as to call the SS a "state within a state", because at their height they not only had their own police, army, intelligence service, administration of the death camps and the ''Einsatzgruppen'' death squads (who shot, and forced Hiwi militiamen to shoot, over 1.5 million Soviet Communists and Jews). They had their own schools, clubs, a medical corps (which included the MadDoctor Josef Mengele, if you can even call the guy a doctor), a science corps, a women's corp (which were auxiliary, or assistant personnel, as women were not allowed to be members), a Cavalry Corps (which were really just riding clubs), their own ''courts'', and of course, their own '''religion''' (they were expected to renounce Christianity in favour of [[{{Ghostapo}} a Nazified version of Germanic paganism/occultism]], something which even [[EvenEvilHasStandards Hitler]] didn't like). They were intentionally geared towards being an elite society within but apart-from the rest of Nazi Germany, one that would need as little contact as possible with outsiders. If a member of your family was in the SS, then you basically moved into a completely different social circle. Himmler's inspiration for this were UsefulNotes/TheTeutonicKnights (an independent monastic order of elite Crusaders in the same manner as the Knights Templar, and which later evolved into own nationstate, {{UsefulNotes/Prussia}}) and his goals was to turn Schleswig-Holstein -- or according to some other sources, a recreated "Burgundy" between Germany and France -- into an SS nationstate.

* The ''Schutzstaffel'' of UsefulNotes/NaziGermany, better known to Westerners by the abbreviation "SS". Particularly notable is that the SS included or at least controlled the Orpo (''[=ORdnungsPOlizei=]'' = Order Police, a.k.a. ordinary uniformed beat cops), Kripo (''[=KRIminalPOlizei=]'' = Criminal Police, i.e. plainclothes detectives working on ordinary crimes), [[UsefulNotes/TheGestapo Gestapo]] (''[=GEheime STAatsPOlizei=]'' = Secret State Police, which was the SecretPolice and fully incorporated into the SS) and Sipo (''[=SIcherheitsPOlizei=]'' = Security Police, a sort of junior Gestapo-Kripo combination, mostly made up of SS members), several of which (at various times) became users of this trope in their own right. It should be noted that the SS were originally only a group of bodyguards and were subordinate to the SA, the brown-shirted stormtroopers. It was only by a series of successful power plays that the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was able to expand his power base to practically controlling or at least threatening every aspect of German society. The ''Waffen-SS'' (literally, weapons SS) were the military wing of the SS, with a separate command structure from the Wehrmacht. However, they were subject to the Army High Command while in the field.

** The Organization of the Zodiac in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamWing'' is an interesting case, zig-zagging as the series went on. While officially part of the Alliance military as a [[EliteArmy elite force]], it was secretly the [[NGOSuperpower Romefeller Foundation's]] military wing. After eliminating the Alliance, [=OZ=] becomes the regular army for the Romefeller government.

* The A-Laws (Autonomous Peace-Keeping Force) from ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam00'', who are obvious [[{{Expy}} expies]] of the Titans. They're autonomous from the regular military, with access to secret police, and under the direct command of [[BigBad Ribbons Allmark]]. Interestingly enough, the organization had different levels of trust: Those who have no idea what the A-Laws are really doing, the ruthless top brass who knew what the A-Laws were doing but remained mere pawns, and the [[ArtificialHuman Innovades]] who really knew really what was going on.

** The A-Laws (Autonomous Peace-Keeping Force) from ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam00'', who are obvious [[{{Expy}} expies]] of the Titans. They're autonomous from the regular military, with access to secret police, and under the direct command of Ribbons. Interestingly enough, the organization had different levels of trust: Those who have no idea what the A-Laws are really doing, the ruthless top brass who knew what the A-laws were doing but remained mere pawns, and the Innovades who really knew really what was going on.

** Phantom Pain in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamSeedDestiny'' is a downplayed version -- it's a special forces group used to support the radical [[NGOSuperpower Blue Cosmos]] faction. They get to use advanced (but illegal) technology, has skilled personnel, and are autonomous from the regular chain of command. But despite being used to expand Blue Cosmos's [[spoiler:and LOGOS's]] agendas, the group mostly uses standard Alliance uniforms and don't seem to be ideologically charged as other examples.

* ''Series/AFrenchVillage'': The SS appear more than once, mostly in the form of their intelligence, the SD. Later the Milice, who served as this for Vichy France, also appear. Both groups have an infamous (deserve) notoriety as brutal, vicious enforcers of their regimes.

[[caption-width-right:300: [[GodwinsLaw The most infamous example]] from RealLife.]]

* ''Series/{{Andor}}'': The Imperial Security Bureau is the body charged with gathering intelligence against Rebel forces and protecting the Empire from them by implementing very harsh measures. Its personnel have military-style [[LightIsNotGood white uniforms]] and serve alongside the regular armed forces. After the [[TheHeist Aldhani heist]] embarrasses the Empire, an Imperial decree sees their power expanded to the level seen under Literature.