The Syndicate Worlds Internal Security Service or ISS for short, can best be conceptualized as a merging of the Gestapo and SS in space. The ISS serves a variety of rolls for the Syndicate Worlds such as spying, censoring media, generating propaganda, and compliance enforcement. One might find an ISS agent acting as a secret police officer, the kind that drags political dissidents off to labor camps, assuming they don’t simply execute them, or serving as a loyalty officer aboard a Mobile Forces Unit. For these reasons the Internal Security Service is both feared and hated by everyone earning them the nickname “Snakes,” due to the fact that it is in their mandate to spy and force compliance of Syndicate Worlds citizens. They are also completely fanatical in their loyalty and devotion to the Syndicate Worlds, so much so that they would sooner commit suicide before being captured and interrogated themselves by the Alliance, an angry populace, or vengeful CEO. Many characters note that it takes a special kind of crazy to be a snake. It is unclear if ISS officers undergo mental conditioning of some sort, but such practices are not beyond the scope of the Syndicate Worlds. The ISS has been mentioned frequently in The Lost Stars novels.
Organization and Distribution[]
Organization[]
The ISS is organized in a corporate hierarchy like every other branch of the Syndicate Worlds, with CEO’s at the top. The most ranking ISS officer in a system or attached to a Mobile Forces fleet is often referred to, derogatorily, as the “Senior Snake.”
The ISS agents use code words and passwords to communicate between units. Those are never written, only memorized. It is said than if a agent forgets the day's password will be executed.
Distribution[]
ISS officers can be found distributed throughout the civilian or planetary population, military forces, and the Syndicate Worlds leadership, serving a variety of functions to ensure the security and preserve the authority of the Syndicate Worlds.
Operations[]
The headers of Loyalty Officers; Intelligence, Counterintelligence and Cyberwarfare; Censorship and Propaganda; and Secret Police are not taken from the books, but are instead accurate descriptions of the types of jobs that ISS officers perform.
Loyalty Officers[]
These are some of the most hated snakes around and the known ones are usually the first to die when mutiny strikes. They are mostly distributed throughout the Military.
Mobile Units[]
On Syndicate Mobile Units, ISS loyalty officers oversee the compliance and loyalty of the workers and crew. There is at least one Snake hard-point on every Mobile Unit which acts a the ships local ISS HQ. To ensure loyalty, the ISS have worked up a failsafe suicide switch, named Option Armageddon, with which to quickly detonate their own ships power core as insurance against mutiny. It is standard ISS operating procedure for the snakes attached to a Mobile Forces fleet to reach out and make contact with local snakes in the system their Mobile Units fleet is moving through upon arrival. Contact is made over ISS secure channels. The attached ISS loyalty officers may take a more direct or passive roll in the governing of fleet operations, though more often than not, behind every Mobile Units CEO is a smiling snake. This is particularly true after the Second Battle of Prime, ending the Alliance-Syndicate War, and leaving much of the former Syndicate Worlds systems in chaos or open rebellion. After that, the ISS put dozens of their agents in every mobile unit, to keep them loyal.
Ground Forces[]
ISS loyalty officers can also be found peppered throughout the Syndicate Ground Forces for much the same reasons as the Mobile Units. Again, their job is to ensure the loyalty of the Ground Forces by any means necessary, including summary execution for disobeying orders. After the 2nd Battle of Prime and the subsequent revolts occurring across syndic space, they began deploying their the families of their ground forces units to the front along with them as an "incentive" to keep them loyal.
Secret Police[]
These are ISS officers who oversee civilian population centers and Syndicate Labor Camps. They spy on the workers and arrest and interrogate all political dissidents and traitors. Once arrested and interrogated, defendants may face a kangaroo court which will always find them guilty, and wind up in a Syndicate Labor Camp at best or executed at worst, assuming they are not simply disappeared. The planet-side ISS secret police operate out of ISS HQ the location of which may or may not be known and to which there may or may not be a secret backup. To help force loyalty and compliance amongst the local planetary populace, the ISS have buried Nuclear Weapons underneath Syndicate civilian population centers.
Vipers[]
Vipers are the special forces attached to the ISS. They are completely fanatical zealots who never surrender and do not let themselves be taken prisoner. They mostly operate in smaller teams to achieve specific goals rather than large military actions. Because of this, most Vipers wear stealth suits and operate more or less independently in teams of one to three, though several teams may be deployed in an ISS Viper action.
Censorship and Propaganda[]
Whether or not the ISS officer is serving on a Mobile Unit, embedded amongst the Ground Forces, or acting as the secret police, censorship and propaganda play an integral part of many snakes jobs. It is important for ISS officers to monitor and censor everything from the media, to personal communications, that goes against official Syndicate doctrine. Going hand in hand with censorship is the propaganda that is generated to replace the offending censored material.
Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Cyber-Warfare[]
The most straight forward of all of the ISS jobs is to spy on the enemy and feed them false information when and where they can. In regards to cyberwarfare, the ISS has the most cutting edge technology in the Syndicate when it comes to viruses, backchannel communications, and cyberwarfare/defense.
Deep Snake[]
The term Deep Snake refers to ISS officers that are secretly and deeply embedded within all power structures throughout the Syndicate Worlds and, it is theorized, throughout many Alliance systems. They may be a high, low, or mid ranking Syndic depending on their specific mission which seems to mostly be observe and report unless otherwise activated.
Senior Snake/ISS CEO[]
The term Senior Snake refers to the most senior ISS officer in a system or attached to a Syndicate Mobile Units fleet and usually holds the rank of CEO. Those Senior Snakes assigned to a system have the nuclear codes to activate the nuclear weapons buried underneath Syndicate population centers. One may presume that the Senior Snake assigned to a fleet has the codes to detonate the Mobile Units power cores, though the books would suggest that the local snakes aboard any Mobile Forces Unit have the ability to blow their core in case of mutiny. Senior Snakes are some of the most hated of the ISS because they are not only ISS, but CEO's as well.
Aftermath of the Alliance-Syndicate War[]
Internal Security Service activity has been heightened with the end of the Alliance-Syndicate War. Many former Syndicate Worlds systems are in chaos or open rebellion against the government on Prime. Because of this, the ISS and the Syndicate Worlds have resorted to more and more extreme measures to maintain control. This has also, theoretically, had the effect of weakening the ISS as they have had to expend much in the way of resources and personnel to achieve the control they have. Several characters in The Lost Stars series note just how many snakes they have massacred in Midway and across the worlds of the proposed Phoenix Stars.
Ironically after the end of the war there was a reported increase of volunteers to serve into the ISS.