The Tunisian secret police serves as one of the linkages or legacies between state-building as an historical process and governance as a contemporary practice. The secret police excelled in spying on citizens, infiltrating civil society groups, trolling emails and social media sites for information, and harassing, intimidating and torturing suspected opponents of Ben Ali’s regime. Do the secret police archives pose a challenge for transitional democracy in Tunisia? By neglecting to critically engage the past, the rhetoric of “how to move forward” can sometimes turn into a system where the crimes of the past are simply repacked but allowed to slowly creep back into the repertoire of the powerful. More than the issue of disbanding the secret police, however, many Tunisian key actors, from public officials to NGOs to voters, want to bring the security system and the archives under civilian control as a mechanism of preserving collective memory and permitting informed public debate about the repressive past. The public dimension of personal, group and collective identities rests on the codification, institutionalization and symbolization of events that strongly mark individuals and communities. Social memories, to be effective, must be celebrated and commemorated. A crucial role is partaken by memory mediators, by memory entrepreneurs, that, in a continuous way, try to reiterate certainties and roots, to fixate and crystalize traditions, against the challenging effect of the improbable and the unforeseeable. By their own work, the identity mediators try to impede the thinking of alternatives, by closing the celebratory field. But, alongside official memories and identities, strive performative identities, activated and consolidated in the quotidian, in many practices of de-objectification and resistance. By neglecting to critically engage the past, the rhetoric of “how to move forward” can sometimes turn into a system where the crimes of the past are simply repacked but allowed to slowly creep back into the repertoire of the powerful. My paper closes the gap on the research on what constitutes, consolidates, and even eclipses public authority in the Tunisian case as it makes the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy.