Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinman
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By 'Proper' I mean a general Intell Service.
The Navy looks for military threats.
MOJ looks for criminal threats.
The IISS looks for ???.
There is no political/General Intell Service.
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Another way to look at it is that the Imperium has a multitude of intelligence agencies -- so many that they're diffused down below the level of detail of an Imperium-wide organization chart. Each is devoted to a specific kind of intelligence, and coordination of analysis goes up the chain of command of the larger divisions of government, to be coordinated as the regional nobility see fit. The nobles of the Spinward Marches would likely be watching for the next mischief from the Zhodani, coreward Vargr, and rimward Aslan. The nobles near the rim would be watching for mischief from the Solomani. Nobles to trailing would be watching for trouble from the K'kree (and ignoring the Hivers, unless the Hivers want attention). Nobles along the coreward frontier would be watching for trouble with Vargr and the humans who were part of the Ziru Sirka but never joined the Imperium after the Long Night. And nobles in the seemingly comfortable interior would be watching for internal dissention -- and watching each other.
What does the IISS spy upon? Everything. But it's specialty seems likely to be open source intelligence. One of my high school acquaintances was really good at learning languages, and when he joined the Army they sent him to Russian language school. His main job in the Army wasn't listening to covertly gathered communications, it was to read and listen to open communications -- Soviet television, radio, newspapers, public government documents, etc. -- and write reports on them for analysts to combine with covertly collected information. Or maybe he translated covert sources too, but didn't talk about that because he wasn't supposed to. In any case, there's a lot a good spy agency can learn without actually "spying" in the sense of gathering data covertly.