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)
“I feel a sincere wish indeed to see our government brought back to it’s republican principles, to see that kind of government firmly fixed, to which my whole life has been devoted. I hope we shall now see it so established, as that when I retire, it may be under full security that we are to continue free and happy.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”
—Pierre Simon De Laplace (1749–1827)
“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)