State Security Investigations Service
[4] Originally formed during the colonial era in 1913 as the Intelligence wing of the National Police, the service was reformed and reorganized following the 1952 coup d'état to suit the security concerns of the new socialist regime.
Recruits were carefully screened and selected on the basis of political reliability, and practicing Muslims were virtually barred during the Nasser era.
During the Sadat and Mubarak eras, the agency continued its focus on radical Islamists but eased up on the suppression of the Liberal opposition.
The SSIS excelled in planting moles and infiltrators within Islamist groups, a practice that would later be carried out with ruthless efficiency by the agency's trainees in Algeria and Syria.
[citation needed] In a report in 2002, the United Nations Committee against Torture expressed "particular concern at the widespread evidence of torture and ill-treatment in administrative premises under the control of the State Security Investigation Department, the infliction of which is reported to be facilitated by the lack of any mandatory inspection by an independent body of such premises.
Protesters state they raided in the buildings to secure documents they believed to show various crimes committed by the SSI against the people of Egypt during Mubarak's rule.
"[12] Most notably at the Nasr City HQ in Cairo were many acquired documents which seemed to prove mass surveillance of citizens as well as torturing tools and secret cells.
"[13] McClatchy Newspapers reported that, when there was much uncertainty about the validity of documents which emerged, "[p]erhaps the most controversial document to ricochet around Internet message boards was one that purport[ed] to lay out State Security's involvement in [the] deadly church bombing on New Year's Day in the port city of Alexandria.
The legitimacy of the document hasn't been determined, but its distribution touched off protests Sunday in Cairo by hundreds of Coptic Christians.
"[14] Other documents uncovered included names of judges involved in fixing elections and those of a small number of Egyptians who were informants.
The publishing of these names posed a moral dilemma for some of the protesters, balancing the danger the informants would be put under against anger at having been spied on.
[15] Officials from the service complained that during Mohamed Morsi's year in office, the Muslim Brotherhood had access to its files and created security breaches.
A former leader of al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri mentioned this killing: "Ra'uf Khayrat was one of the most dangerous officers in the State Security Intelligence Department who fought the fundamentalists.
