Establishing how lines of demarcation have come to be perceived and considering recently published reports with a view toward identifying areas of obfuscation, this paper suggests reasons for the present confusion and argues that whether a difference exists between security intelligence and criminal intelligence depends on the ultimate objective of the activity in question. Three factors contributing significantly to the confusion between criminal and security intelligence require particularly close scrutiny: inadequate conception of the police role; the vagueness of existing statutes; and the ambiguity of labels that are applied in security intelligence. The failure to understand the nature of the police role emerges as the most significant source of confusion. 73 references