Crime prevention is to a large extent based on information acquired via contacts with the regular police force, other authorities and organisations, foreign intelligence and security services, and with the use of various intelligence gathering activities, including interrogations, telephone tapping, covert listening devices, and hidden surveillance cameras.

[12][13] The origins of the Swedish Security Service is often linked to the establishment of a special police bureau (Polisbyrån) during the First World War in 1914, which reported directly to the General Staff, predecessor of the Office for the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

[14][15] The bureau's main mission was protecting national security (e.g. counter-espionage), and its first chief was Captain Erik af Edholm.

[14] The group of officers working at the State Police did not have the means to monitor phone calls or to intercept and open mail.

This, and the general lack of staff and financial resources worried the chief of Sweden's military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Carlos Adlercreutz, who felt the country needed a more powerful security agency if Europe once again ended up in war.

[19] In 1946, following a post-war parliamentary evaluation, operations were significantly reduced and once again organized under the State Police, mainly tasked with counter-espionage.

[21][22] The period between 1939 and 1945 was marked by extensive foreign intelligence activity in Sweden, resulting in the arrest of numerous spies and enemy agents.

Some of the most significant cases were the 1971 Yugoslavian embassy attack in Stockholm and the hijacking of Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 130 a year later.

[26] It nevertheless sparked the resignation of the National Police Commissioner Nils Erik Åhmansson and the head of the Department, Sune Sandström, following the revelation of the Ebbe Carlsson affair in 1988.

List of current and past executive officers:[42] The Security Service's role in Cold War counterintelligence is referred to in the second and third novels of the best-selling Millennium series by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson.