Australian Secret Intelligence Service

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) is the Australian government intelligence agency responsible for collecting foreign intelligence, undertaking counter-intelligence activities and cooperation with other intelligence agencies overseas. ASIS is equivalent to the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) or the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

According to its website, the mission of ASIS is to:

Protect and promote Australia's vital interests through the provision of unique foreign intelligence services as directed by Government.

ASIS is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio and is housed within DFAT's headquarters in Canberra. Its current Director-General is Nick Warner.

Read more about Australian Secret Intelligence Service:  History, Royal Commissions Examining ASIS

Famous quotes containing the words australian, secret, intelligence and/or service:

    “The Australian mind, I can state with authority, is easily boggled.”
    —Charles Osborne (b. 1927)

    “The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
    —Donald Davidson (b. 1917)

    “In the service of Caesar, everything is legitimate.”
    —Pierre Corneille (1606–1684)