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A black operation or black op is a covert operation typically involving activities that are highly clandestine and often outside of standard military protocol or even against the law.

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Black ops missions often fit into the plausible deniability category, in which there is no claim of responsibility for the action, and/or a false flag operation is used to give the appearance that another actor was responsible, or – most often – black operations involve extensive arrangements so as to be able to hide the fact that the black operation ever occurred. Black military operations, or paramilitary operations, can be used by various secret services to achieve or attempt to achieve an unusually sensitive goal. The methods used in black operations are also used in unconventional warfare. Depending on the precise situation in a given case, and the level of authoritarianism of the national government or other responsible party, some tasks will be conducted as black operations, while there are usually other activities that can be admitted openly. Black operations may include such things as assassination, sabotage, extortion, spying on allied countries or one's own citizens, kidnapping, supporting resistance movements, torture, use of fraud to obtain funds, use of child soldiers, human experimentation, trafficking in contraband items, and false flag operations, among others.

In business any high-risk assignment, proposed and funded by the employee using his own time on company equipment with the manager's consent and understanding that the company owns the results, is also referred to as a black operation,^{[citation needed]} because no entries exist for said project in the company's task planning or scheduling. If the project fails, then the employee pays the price of their failure. If the project succeeds, the employee is compensated and even, sometimes rewarded for initiative.

References [link]