[Terry_Roll]

>One way to make it worse would be to connect all those agencies to a central aggregator that acts on their behalf. I'm surprised to see so many comments in this thread advocating for exactly that kind of centralization of power.

So here in the UK, Special Branch are the intermediate between the security services and police forces, but dont be fooled into thinking UK police forces are independent, there are official channels which is what gets reported and the public are allowed to know about and then there are unofficial channels, in financial stock trading, this could be likened to Dark Pools.