Many people don't know that there was a thing called secret police, so people are not informed about the roles they play. There were many different roles that the secret police had that allowed them to control citizens. Although there were many roles filled by the secret police of a totalitarian government, its primary role was to have the power to act outside of legal restrictions. Instead of enforcing the rule of law, secret police organizations were specifically expected to operate above and beyond the law. Acts of terror and intimidation such as kidnapping, interrogation, torture, internal exile, forced disappearances and assassinations were not uncommon and were in fact very popular (Berman, Ilan para 1&2). Secret police forces operated entirely or partially in secret. Almost all of their operations were hidden and hidden from the general public. They were sometimes hidden even from the government, except for senior executive officials. Even though most of the operations are hidden from the citizens, they actually still knew the laws and the consequences that came with violating those laws. The consequences of breaking laws in this type of government were cruel and might have been considered unreal nowadays ("The Secret Police"). Most of the time, citizens of a totalitarian government were so fearful of these consequences that going about their daily lives was difficult. The secret police had the power to observe and control anything a person did. Therefore, people constantly felt paranoid and always watched what they did to make sure that their actions were not overly suspicious, even if they were legal and accepted by the government. All telephone conversations could be recorded for the government to listen to, any mail... middle of paper... secret police could break into a house between midnight and dawn to capture people suspected of conflict (“The Secret Police ”). A totalitarian government is completely different from the United States government; for this reason secret police forces were unheard of. However, just because they are unheard of doesn't mean these forces didn't exist. These forces played a huge role in totalitarian governments and how their societies and countries were dictated. Some of the secret police forces could have been compared to the Nazi ones dictated by Aldolf Hitler, but some were also different. Secret police forces had many roles in a totalitarian government, but their primary role was to have the power to act outside and above the law. This meant that some forces had the unsupervised power to give whatever consequences they wanted, no matter how cruel it might have been.