Secret police historically financed themselves from victims, becoming states within the state

Evidence

Only in one respect does the totalitarian secret police still resemble closely the secret services of nontotalitarian countries. The secret police has traditionally, i.e., since Fouche, profited from its victims and has augmented the official state-authorized budget from certain unorthodox sources simply by assuming a position of partnership in activities it was supposed to suppress, such as gambling and prostitution. These illegal methods of financing itself, ranging from friendly acceptance of bribes to outright blackmail, were a prominent factor in freeing the secret services from the public authorities and strengthened their position as a state within the state. It is curious to see that the financing of police activities with income from its victims has survived all other changes. In Soviet Russia, the NKVD is almost entirely dependent upon the exploitation of slave labor which, indeed, seems to yield no other profit and to serve no other purpose but the financing of the huge secret apparatus. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 957

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Foundations Module on bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion — the secret police as autonomous state-within-a-state apparatus.
• SHARE: The Fouche-era detail that secret police traditionally profited from vice they were meant to suppress is a narrow, specific tidbit for a history-of-surveillance enthusiast.