The International Criminal Police Organization, more known as INTERPOL, is an international organization that facilitates worldwide police cooperation and crime control. Headquartered in Lyon, France, it was founded in 1923 as the International Criminal Police Commission. INTERPOL provides investigative support and training to law enforcement worldwide in battling three major areas of transnational crime: terrorism and organized crime, its broad mandate covers every kind of crime, including crimes against humanity, child pornography, drug trafficking and production, political corruption, copyright infringement, white-collar crime. The agency helps coordinate cooperation among the world's law enforcement institutions through criminal databases and communications networks. INTERPOL has an annual budget of around €113 million, most of, provided through annual contributions by its membership of police forces in 181 countries, its day-to-day operations are carried out by the General Secretariat, staffed by both police and civilians and led by the Secretary General Jürgen Stock, the former deputy head of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office.

As of 2013, the General Secretariat employed a staff of 756. The General Assembly, composed of all member countries, is the governing body, electing the Executive Committee and its President—currently Kim Jong Yang of South Korea—to supervise the implementation of INTERPOL's policies and administration. INTERPOL seeks to remain as politically neutral as possible so as to fulfill its mandate. In the first part of the 20th century, several efforts were taken to formalize international police cooperation, but they failed. Among these efforts were the First International Criminal Police Congress in Monaco in 1914, the International Police Conference in New York in 1922; the Monaco Congress failed because it was organized by legal experts and political officials, not by police professionals, while the New York Conference failed to attract international attention. In 1923, a new initiative was taken at the International Criminal Police Congress in Vienna, where the International Criminal Police Commission was founded as the direct forerunner of INTERPOL.

Founding members included police officials from Austria, Belgium, China, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden and Yugoslavia. The United Kingdom joined in 1928; the United States did not join Interpol until 1938, although a US police officer unofficially attended the 1923 congress. Following Anschluss in 1938, the organization fell under the control of Nazi Germany, the Commission's headquarters were moved to Berlin in 1942. Most members withdrew their support during this period. From 1938 to 1945, the presidents of the ICPC included Otto Steinhäusl, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. All were generals in the SS, Kaltenbrunner was the highest ranking SS officer executed after the Nuremberg Trials. In 1946, after the end of World War II, the organization was revived as the International Criminal Police Organization by officials from Belgium, France and the UK, its new headquarters were established in Paris from 1967 in Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris. They remained there until 1989.

Until the 1980s, INTERPOL did not intervene in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in accordance with Article 3 of its Charter, which prohibited intervention in "political" matters. In July 2010, former INTERPOL President Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption by the South African High Court in Johannesburg for accepting bribes worth €156,000 from a drug trafficker. After being charged in January 2008, Selebi resigned as president of INTERPOL and was put on extended leave as National Police Commissioner of South Africa, he was temporarily replaced by Arturo Herrera Verdugo, the National Commissioner of Investigations Police of Chile and former vice president for the American Zone, who remained acting president until the appointment of Khoo Boon Hui in October 2008. On 8 November 2012, the 81st General Assembly closed with the election of Deputy Central Director of the French Judicial Police, Mireille Ballestrazzi, as the first female president of the organization. In November 2016, Meng Hongwei, a politician from the People's Republic of China, was elected president during the 85th Interpol General Assembly, was to serve in this capacity until 2020.

At the end of September 2018, Meng was reported missing during a trip to China, after being "taken away" for questioning by "discipline authorities". Chinese police confirmed that Meng had been arrested on charges of bribery as part of a national anti-corruption campaign. On 7 October 2018, INTERPOL announced that Meng had resigned his post with immediate effect and that the Presidency would be temporarily occupied by INTERPOL Senior Vice-President Kim Jong Yang of South Korea. On 21 November 2018, INTERPOL's General Assembly elected Kim to fill the remainder of Meng's term, in a controversial election which saw accusations that the other candidate, Vice President Alexander Prokopchuk of Russia, had used INTERPOL notices to target critics of the Russian government; the role of INTERPOL is defined

Charles Henry Ferguson is the founder and president of Representational Pictures, Inc. and director and producer of No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq and Inside Job, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Ferguson is a software entrepreneur and authority in technology policy. A native of San Francisco, Ferguson was educated as a political scientist. A graduate of Lowell High School in 1972, he earned a BA in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, obtained a PhD in Political Science from MIT in 1989. Ferguson conducted postdoctoral research at MIT while consulting to the White House, the Office of the U. S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, several U. S. and European high technology firms. From 1992–1994 Ferguson was an independent consultant, providing strategic consulting to the top managements of U. S. high technology firms including Apple Inc. Xerox and Texas Instruments. In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, one of the earliest Internet software companies, with Randy Forgaard.

Vermeer created FrontPage. In early 1996, Ferguson sold Vermeer for $133 million to Microsoft, which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office. After selling Vermeer, Ferguson returned to writing, he was a visiting scholar and lecturer for several years at MIT and Berkeley, for three years was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Ferguson is the author of four books and many articles dealing with various aspects of information technology and its relationships to economic and social issues. Ferguson is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a director of the French-American Foundation, supports several nonprofit organizations. For more than 20 years, Ferguson had been intensely interested in film, attended film festivals such as the Telluride Film Festival for over a decade. In mid-2005, he formed Representational Pictures and began production of No End in Sight, one of the first feature-length documentaries on post-war Iraq. No End in Sight won a special jury prize for documentaries at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar in 2008 in the documentary feature film category.

Ferguson received a nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay for the film. Inside Job, a feature-length documentary about the financial crisis of 2007–2008, was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2010 and the New York Film Festival and was released by Sony Pictures Classics in October 2010, it received the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Ferguson credits narrator Matt Damon for contributing to the film the structure of the ending, in addition to his narration duties. On May 1, 2011, The New York Times reported that Ferguson had agreed to make a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for HBO Films. According to the IMDb the film is scheduled for release in 2013, but that project was mothballed. On September 30, 2013, Charles Ferguson wrote on the Huffington Post that he would be cancelling his CNN documentary on Hillary Clinton due, not just to pressure from the Clintons and their allies, but from the Republican Party, to stop pursuing the project.

In the article Ferguson lamented that "nobody, I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film. Not Democrats, not Republicans – and nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration." In a June 2013 interview with former President Bill Clinton, Clinton told Ferguson that he and Larry Summers couldn't change Alan Greenspan's mind about the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated derivatives and helped fuel the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession. Congress passed the Act with a veto-proof supermajority. Ferguson thought Clinton was "a good actor" and that this was a lie Ferguson wrote, the Clinton Administration and Larry Summers lobbied for the Act and, along with Robert Rubin attacked advocates of regulation. Ferguson directed the first major documentary about the Watergate Scandal. Entitled Watergate, the 260-minute film had its European premiere at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology. With Charles R. Morris. Three Rivers Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-8129-2300-1. CS1 maint: others High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars. W. W. Norton & Company. 1999. ISBN 978-1-58799-065-6; the Broadband Problem: Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma. Brookings Institution Press. 2004. ISBN 978-0-8157-0644-1. No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos. PublicAffairs. 2008. ISBN 978-1-58648-608-2. Predator Nation. Crown Business. 2012. ISBN 978-0307952561; this is a companion to the movie Inside Job, providing citations for many of the claims in that movie. No End in Sight Inside Job Time to Choose Watergate Charles Ferguson on IMDb Representational Pictures, his film production company Dec. 2010 Interview with KGNU's Claudia Cragg on'Inside Job' Charles H. Ferguson on Charlie Rose C-SPAN Q&A interview with Ferguson about No End in Sight, October 28, 2007 DemocracyNow interview about Predator Nation, 2012 Official site for the movie Inside Job

Scary Cow is a community-based independent film production cooperative in San Francisco. Scary Cow is an indie film co-operative based in California. Focused on teaching adults how to make films, it uses its website and in-person meetings to help filmmakers meet each other, pooling talent and financing, putting together a crew to create short films within a four-month time period; every four months, Scary Cow holds a screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. The audience members are provided ballots to vote for their favorite films; those ballots are tabulated and budgets are provided to the teams with the most votes. This encourages the teams with the best films to continue working together and creating additional films in the future. Founded in February 2006 by Jager McConnel, Scary Cow has created over 200 films since inception. On October 10, 2010, the 12th Scary Cow Film Festival was screened at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Nineteen short films were screened. Audience and Judges awards were given to nine films: The Magic Man Rock Hard, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Sexual Detergent Violet Is Single Dryertheque 7 Minutes in HELL Autumn Rose Deep Red One of Two Clues Voices From Pakistan Official site Scary Cow Films on Vimeo Yelp Listing