The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is Australia's national security service, which is responsible for the protection of the country and its citizens from espionage, sabotage, acts of foreign interference, politically motivated violence, attacks on the Australian defence system, and terrorism.
ASIO is comparable with the United Kingdom Security Service (MI5) and the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). As with MI5 officers, ASIO officers have no police powers of arrest and are not armed. ASIO operations requiring police powers are co-ordinated with the Australian Federal Police and/or with State and Territory police forces.
ASIO Central Office is in Canberra, with a local office being located in each mainland state and territory capital.
Read more about Australian Security Intelligence Organisation: Command, Control and Organisation, Relationships With Foreign Agencies and Services, Archival Material
Famous quotes containing the words australian, security, intelligence and/or organisation:
“The Australian mind, I can state with authority, is easily boggled.”
—Charles Osborne (b. 1927)
“Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)