Exactly how many intelligence agencies does the Empire have? It seems there are a lot of them. I wonder if each of those agencies has its own role and specializations in the grand scheme of things.
BTW, does the Empire has an agency specialized in codecracking?
Not all that many, actually. Strictly speaking, there’s just Admiralty Intelligence (the military intelligence function that benefits from having military minds doing the job; they know what to look for and what’s important in military terms) and Imperial State Security (whose five four directorates cover all other intelligence needs).
If one were to really stretch a point one might add the Office of Investigation and Pursuit to that, but that’s like calling the FBI[1], say, an intelligence agency because they perform infiltration and investigation of organized crime. It’s a very different sort of work.
As for specializations, Admiralty Intelligence aside, while the Directorates may all be part of the same organization, they do specialize. First Directorate is counterespionage and (post 1513) counterasymmetrism[2]. Second Directorate (“ExSec”) does forward intelligence: if agents are out there doing espionage, infiltration, reconnaissance, preemption, assassination, and sabotage, they’re probably from Two. Third Directorate (“IntSec”) is intelligence security, protecting the rest of ISS from infiltration and other threats. And Fourth Directorate is internal security and surveillance.
And then there’s the Fifth Directorate. Which doesn’t exist. If it did exist, it might be a special directorate which handles existential threats and lesser apocalypses under conditions of extreme secrecy and exigent ethics.
But it doesn’t. Of this we are assured.
Not a whole agency. They prefer to organize by function rather than by capability, and codebreaking is a function that every part of ISS is likely to need from time to time. There’s a cross-Directorate Cryptanalysis PWG[3] where most of the crypto boys are, but it’s all part of the same organization.
This isn’t the greatest example because the FBI do handle counterterrorism and counterespionage, which in the Empire aren’t OIP’s responsibility. They belong to First and Third Directorate. ↩︎
Counterterrorism, sort of. Their mandate goes beyond terrorism to include all forms of asymmetric warfare, even the ones no-one’s thought of yet. ↩︎
Primary working group. What the field agents call agent cells, the proxy adhoc calls working groups. ↩︎
Thank you kindly for a detailed and comprehensive answer 
Interesting. Wondering how the works and purview of the First Directorate differ from the Fourth.
The Fifth Directorate handles “lesser” apocalypses. It makes me wonder which agency is responsible for “greater” apocalypse. Perhaps it falls under ambit of the Black Fleet?
I suppose the Imperial intellignece agencies will handle signal intellignece in a similar fashion. Does the Empire have the NSA-equivalent?
Have thought the Black Chamber can be counted as one of agencies of the Empire. It seems I’ve been wrong.
How many “themes” the Repository of All Knowledge has under its remit?
has→have. It seems the message cannot be edited once it has been replied 
I think the proper parsing of the phrase
is that it handles existential threats (which are the largest possible apocalypses) and other apocalypses lesser than existential threats.
But there’s room for ambiguity.
It’s a question of focus. Fourth Directorate is mostly preventative, and inward-focused. They do a lot of routine but necessary work in areas like infrastructure security, for example, and preventing passive (such as SIGINT and IMINT) espionage, but they also keep an eye out for subversion and sedition, and other internal threats that have sneaked past the outer lines of defense. This makes them reactive, for the most part.
First Directorate, on the other hand, leans outward to intercept and deal with foreign active espionage (i.e., spies, saboteurs, assassins, etc.) and asymmetric threats (terrorism et. al.) well before they get that close.
It’s rolled into the Directorates: as I said, they prefer to organize by their role in the overall intelligence picture rather than by their methods, so it’s handled by more cross-Directorate PWGs like the Passive Observation PWG.
It’s a little confusing because there are two unrelated groups which both call themselves the Black Chamber. The senior existential threats people inside the Fifth Directorate, who are part of an agency if not one in their own right, and Special Acquisitions over at the Repository, who aren’t.
(Since neither Fifth Directorate nor Special Acquisitions likes to be examined too closely, they’re both quite comfortable with the confusion this causes. )
The big themata are Acquisitions (collecting new information and artifacts), Aesthetic (specializing in art), Archivist (collation and preservation of the collection), Athenaeum (responsible for their facilities), Censorious (protectors of intrinsically dangerous informationÂą), Curatorial (librarians, curators - basically the people who run all the libraries, museums, and galleries under their aegis), and Decryptic (responsible for research and theory).
Smaller ones come and go over the ages, but these are the ones that stuck around.
This doesn’t mean censorship as we know it, to be clear. It means imprisoning hideously dangerous information-life that will pwn your brain and wear you around like a finger-puppet if you accidentally comprehend it.
The closest to censorship as practiced on Earth is done by the Archivists, who decide what gets placed in the Library of Lies, which placement doesn’t stop anyone from reading it. It just slaps a big label on it to the effect of “this is both STUPID and DANGEROUSLY WRONG, and if you believe it, YOU WILL BE TOO”.
I think the proper parsing of the phrase is that it handles existential threats (which are the largest possible apocalypses) and other apocalypses lesser than existential threats.
But there’s room for ambiguity.
Thank you for correction! Had thought existential threats include all types and degrees of possible apocalypses, but I think your parsing is the correct one.
It’s a question of focus. Fourth Directorate is mostly preventative, and inward-focused. They do a lot of routine but necessary work in areas like infrastructure security, for example, and preventing passive (such as SIGINT and IMINT) espionage, but they also keep an eye out for subversion and sedition, and other internal threats that have sneaked past the outer lines of defense. This makes them reactive, for the most part.
First Directorate, on the other hand, leans outward to intercept and deal with foreign active espionage (i.e., spies, saboteurs, assassins, etc.) and asymmetric threats (terrorism et. al.) well before they get that close.
Thank you so much for satisfying my curiosity. Your polity is so fascinating and well-structured.
Wondering if there’s any standard equipment used by the Fifth Directorate. To face existential threats, they must be well-armed and well-prepared. Could they call upon the Black Fleet in a pinch? Though it will probably be an overkill. May you please explain relationship between the Fifth Directorate and the Black Fleet?
Are there any organizations that ISS considers competitors? OPSEC, perhaps?
How the Admiralty Intelligence relates with the Startarchy? There might be some overlaps with their portfolios.
It’s rolled into the Directorates: as I said, they prefer to organize by their role in the overall intelligence picture rather than by their methods, so it’s handled by more cross-Directorate PWGs like the Passive Observation PWG.
Thank you for clarification!
It’s a little confusing because there are two unrelated groups which both call themselves the Black Chamber. The senior existential threats people inside the Fifth Directorate, who are part of an agency if not one in their own right, and Special Acquisitions over at the Repository, who aren’t.
(Since neither Fifth Directorate nor Special Acquisitions likes to be examined too closely, they’re both quite comfortable with the confusion this causes.
How lovely. Are the Acqusitions and Special Aquisitions distinct agencies? Or is the latter under the jurisdiction of the former?
What exactly is the Imperial Hand, if they aren’t included in the Imperial agency apparatus?
The big themata are Acquisitions (collecting new information and artifacts), Aesthetic (specializing in art), Archivist (collation and preservation of the collection), Athenaeum (responsible for their facilities), Censorious (protectors of intrinsically dangerous informationÂą), Curatorial (librarians, curators - basically the people who run all the libraries, museums, and galleries under their aegis), and Decryptic (responsible for research and theory).
Smaller ones come and go over the ages, but these are the ones that stuck around.
That is truly awesome! Curious to know how the Censorious performs their jobs if their “games” are so dangerous. Don’t they need military-grade equipment and training at the bare minimum?
Are all themata and their agents unarmed?
If you don’t mind, may you please provide some examples of research and theories of the Decryptic? What is their role in the grand scheme of things?
Thank you kindly.
They have the usual intel equipment (which is often pretty sparse - there’s only so loaded out you can be when you’re supposed to be acting covertly, fancy pocket gadgets notwithstanding), but the nature of their missions tends to be really variable, so it’s hard to standardize. For example:
Not much overlap, you know?
They also have a tendency to end up getting really weird at the worst times, so if a Fifth Directorate agent goes to the quartermaster and says something like, “I need a poison angel, a deck of marked playing cards, five hundred feet of buckycable, eight micrograms of antimatter, and an original Picasso rolled up and concealed within a salami sausage,” the quartermaster will just sigh and say “Early or late period on that Picasso?”
Bear in mind that their job is much more to prevent existential threats than to face them. If their missions succeed the way they prefer them to, the threat itself is successfully averted before it ever becomes a major issue, and the galaxy keeps on spinning without any idea that there was anything to worry about.
If an ex-threat does manage to become fully manifest, they can call on pretty much any resource necessary to deal with it, but if that becomes necessary, that’s a big failure on their part.
There’s not really a direct relationship. The Black Flotilla’s part of the Imperial Navy’s Capital Fleet - it’s just the classified one that holds all the non-intelligence ships that they’d rather keep off the books and out of sight: a motley collection of superweapons for the most part.
Externally, pretty much all the rest of the intelligence organizations in the Worlds and others involved in the Great Game. Internally? They have a friendly rivalry with Admiralty Intelligence in the areas where their responsibilities overlap, but they’re not really competitors; they know they’re on the same side.
Much the same as it is with the rest of the Imperial Military Service; they’re its data acquisition organization. They like to keep a clear line of demarcation, so their portfolios don’t overlap in general, although in time of war, Intelligence does work particularly closely with Data Warfare and Indirection & Subtlety.
Special Acquisitions is a specialist group inside the Acquisitions Theme, yes.
A Hand is over and above the normal operation of the Imperial Service. They’re special plenipotentiary agents of the Imperial Couple - since they can’t be everywhere, they can empower these highly trusted agents to speak with their voice and authority to take care of matters that regular channels can’t: combined auditors, troubleshooters, diplomats, marshals, and spies.
(And when I say plenipotentiary - well, the usual Warrant that empowers them reads something along the lines of:
What the bearer does is at my order and in my Voice, for the good of the Empire. Render him every assistance.
Linariel II, Coronal
.)
Well, as unarmed as any random Imperial, which is usually not entirely. But a few security guards and groups like Special Acquisitions aside, they’re librarians in a very polite society, and as such rarely need more than a stern and disapproving look to deal with problems they encounter day to day.
They do need certain things to do their job, but while the level is at least equivalent, it’s very different in type. You can’t shoot ideas, after all, and military training doesn’t prepare you for books that read you back.
But they are well-provided with cognitive enhancements, mental firewalls, and at-a-distance handling equipment, and trained to cultivate extremely high levels of mental discipline and focus.
There are various small sub-themes doing Repository-specific research, but most of what they do is very “meta”, for want of a better word. They train a lot of the best cross-field synthesists, because there is a vast spectrum of knowledge out there, and the Repository is where it all comes, sooner or later.
The synthesists of Decryptic are the ones trained to reflect on this with the context of the whole collection, or as much as they can hold at once, and find obscure correlations between distant pieces of data, or between today’s new entry and things that have been sitting in the stacks for a millennium, or in completely different areas no-one would ever have thought of comparing. Or they find holes: hidden or obvious, but still gaps in the big picture of All Knowledge that need someone to look into them and find what’s there.
And by doing this, they guide researchers all over the Empire to investigate these correlations that they’d never have found on their own, and discover whole new vistas of knowledge thereby.
Dealing with the terrorists themselves, on the other hand, can safely be left to First Directorate or regular military. 5D agents are much too rare and expensive to waste on such routine work. ↩︎
What’s that? I found one reference on the main site, which didn’t give any details.
A tame mini-god which kills things dead.
A “tame mini-god” and “kills things dead” sound like metastable mutual conditions at best.
Kills only things on the target list. A weakly godlike entity that killed what it felt like would not qualify as “tame”.
A weakly godlike entity, that is to say, one that out-think all but a few other sophont entities within its light cone, by definition cannot be “tame”. It may agree with your goals, it may share your interests, it may even hold your beliefs, but if it wants badly enough to act otherwise, it will be able to subvert any merely-sophont obstacles in its way.
People who think anything else wind up paperclip-optimizing zombies.
Keep in mind that the Empire has watertight goal structures for their AIs. Sure the AI can outthink you, but if it does not harm your cause (and yes, full genie-anti-finagling is in effect when I say that) in pursuing its orders as a subset of its own terminal goals, then the difference between it following your orders to a tee and it being creative in its execution is academic.
Besides, what’s a mini-god when you have a Transcend uber-pantheon over your shoulder that can easily slap it dead?
And if it agrees with your goals/interests, it is as tame as any other sophont is.
May you mind if I ask you about the organizational structure of the Fifth Directorate? I wonder whether it has a “proper” organization at all.
May you mind if I ask you about organizational structure of the Admiralty Intelligence?
Fifth Directorate organization is adhocratic, which isn’t particular to it - it’s adhocratic because ISS is adhocratic, which is adhocratic because the Imperial Service, its military subset partially excepted, is adhocratic.
Adhocratic, in this context, means that it’s not a rigidly-structured bureaucratic hierarchy[1], but rather a highly dynamic structure of working groups that continually readjusts itself to circumstances, with an ever-changing set of project teams and a whole lot of lateral communications.
So to take a look at ISS in particular - since the Directorates share a lot of PWGs, the shape of individual Directorates is best seen as something that emerges from the web of relationships, rather than a strict hierarchy, and so it’s easiest to look at ISS as a whole.
The core of ISS, what holds the agency together and communicates with all its parts, is the All-Seeing Eye, and the archai who runs and at least somewhat is it, Black Box. If we’re being poetic, we can think of it as a giant tree of data, whose roots form the complex communication network where messages are overwoven, onion-routed, encrypted, stenographized, and ultimately make their way back and forth from individual agents and agent cells via anything from normal-seeming extranet messages to intricately braided methane-yak fur wall hangings; whose branches reach out to touch proxy and attaché software; and whose crown is the conference room inside the Fortress where the Imperial Security Executive meet.
(It has a very nice circular table in it over which Black Box’s trigraphic avatar hangs. There’s a perfectly reassuring technical explanation for how it made a simple picture of a black box look like a deeply unsettling void cut out of the air, of course.)
So, details.
At the top of the whole organization is the Imperial Security Executive. It’s a committee of the heads of each of the five Directorates under an Imperially appointed chairman. CINCINT gets to sit in on their meetings to liaise and coordinate on behalf of Admiralty Intelligence, even though it’s a separate organization that isn’t answerable to the ISE. Their job is to oversee everything ISS does at the highest level: grand strategy is their forte. They present the Directorates with goals, policies, and considerations, and leave it to the Directorates and their working groups to break those down into strategies, tactics, and details opplans.
Next down in the structure is the proxy adhoc. (It’s called that because of their founder’s little joke.) This is where the working groups come in, both the big, permanent primary working groups focused on specific, long-term topics, and the little, temporary working groups which oversee particular operations. The Eye oversees all: one of the overwatch proxies forms a working group dedicated to an operation that needs doing, either on request or his own initiative, recruits the others he needs for his working group, coordinates with others, and then…
…the bottom level comes in, the agent cells, individual field agents, and technical assets scattered around the Worlds. The working groups call upon them to obtain information, and get things done. Again, this is all coordinated through the Eye, and its collection of sophisticated concealed communications channels. Agent cells are also organized adhoc, and have great tactical freedom of action; opords come down, and data goes back up.
(And how does data get out to the people elsewhere in the Imperial governance who need it? Those who can simply query the Eye ex officio aside… well, it’s still via the Eye. What ISS euphemistically calls an “intelligence attaché” is actually a piece of muse adjunct software that whispers just what people need to know in their mental ears, right at the time they need to know it.)
By comparison, Admiralty Intelligence is a more conventional hierarchy… by Imperial standards. The whole of the Imperial Service is adhocratic by design, but even though the Imperial Military Service would seem shockingly non-hierarchical (making use of highly distributed authority and command webs to keep up with the fast pace and complex nature of the modern battlespace) to the Earth eye, it is nonetheless more rigidly ordered than the rest of the Service, including ISS.
Insofar as there is hierarchy in ISS, it’s measured in experience and security clearances. ↩︎
…so Black Box is necessarily sharded by the realities of interstellar communication, and necessarily has all the clearance, if one manages to overwhelm and subvert a particular shard to exploit that.
You forget that Black Box is very good at not telling Black Box things Black Box doesn’t need to know, especially when Black Box might not be as safe as Black Box is. Black Box has all the clearance, but any given Black Box does not, you see[1].
(Black Box would feel sorry for any poor fools attempting to capture a shard of Black Box, but mercy is… outside the Box.)
As you would expect from the organization that has people traveling through uncontrolled space extract their codeword classified memories and transport them in a quantum-secured courier module. ↩︎