Private Intelligence Agency

Private intelligence agencies are private companies employed by individuals, companies, groups or governments to assist in providing intelligence for a situation. The industry boomed after the events of 9/11 as governments and corporations began to outsource most of their intelligence analysis as third-party contractors. A PIA (sometimes referred to as a PIC, or Private Intelligence Company) is tasked to look for needed intelligence through information that is either readily available through the internet or other public sources (including databases that may or may not be linked to the government). In other cases, PIAs provide intelligence or specialist services for consultations or on-the-ground work to assist a government agency, private company or an individual who can pay the fees. This sometimes involves certain people like the Reformed Criminal, Expert Consultant, white hat hacker or intelligence analyst.

However, the private intelligence industry became more publicly infamous for conducting social media influencing/manipulation campaigns, creating fake information and news, opposition research, information warfare and malicious hacking. This sometimes involves Corporate Warfare or a corrupt official using a PIA's services to do his or her dirty work to avoid being connected. A PIA contracted to help fight the good guys may resort to Bringing in the Expert just in case they expect to have an uphill battle.

Depending on the scope of the work done, anyone recruited to work with a PIA would ideally need security clearances from their former government jobs if and when possible, in order to be able to view Classified Information.^note If an ideal candidate is found, but he or she doesn't have the needed clearance, the person would be rejected from being considered. Another way taken is to put said candidate in a position where clearances aren't needed until their application is processed.

While a PIA will be tasked to do what their clients require, there are times when the company will use its assets to complete internal objectives that are based on their own interests. This can go to the point of We Help the Helpless if the company's personnel are willing to do things that might be considered unethical to help someone in need. Sometimes, a government will use their services for Plausible Deniability reasons.

Just to give an idea on how important they are, The Washington Post estimates there are 1,931 private intelligence companies working for the U.S. government. To show how much power and importance they now have, Edward Snowden, who leaked thousands of documents on the NSA's global surveillance program, was not an NSA agent but actually employed by Booz Allen Hamilton.

A Sub-Trope of Private Military Contractors as some private military/security companies do provide private intelligence services to those who can afford it. Compare Elite Agents Above the Law for intelligence agencies established by the government that are designed to work outside legitimate oversight, and Private Detective for an older concept of professional investigators not directly affiliated with a police department in any official sense who take on cases that private citizens bring to them.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• D-Live!! has the Almighty Support Enterprises (ASE), a firm known to contract out specialists for clients when all things are about to go bad. The company is generally seen as the last chance one has to resolve a situation.
• Mai, the Psychic Girl has the Kaieda Intelligence Agency chasing after Mai through most of the story under a contract by the Wisdom Alliance after they find out Mai got high scores in a PK test. The KIA is known to be contracted for political mediation in the Middle East.
• Tesla Note has the Japan Safety and Promotion Company (JSPC) covertly given orders to investigate mysterious incidents worldwide that may have to do with the use of Tesla Fragments. Their efforts to secure the fragments are sometimes hampered by CIA teams while ensuring that the criminal syndicate "A Small House" doesn't get their hands on the crystals. Since Jingo Negoro is the chairman (and Botan's granddaughter), he's using the company assets to accomplish the promise he made to Tesla many years ago. When Botan was undercover at Rokumei Private Girls Academy in order to uphold the cover that she's still a student if and when she's not on JSPC ops, she gets help from Kuruma and Ryunosuke to investigate the bullying conducted by Onuki Misaki with JSPC resources being used to spy on her. It's later revealed to be secretly under the control of Tokyo, with the PIA name as a front.

Comic Books

• Buck Danny: Lady X's espionage organization is introduced as this. She's a spy who will work for anybody and against anybody as long as the money's right, the main novelty being that as an ace pilot who employs other such people, she's able to perform reconnaissance in places where more ordinary agencies might not be able to operate. Her first clash with Buck Danny comes when her aircraft are trying to penetrate and photograph all the details of Target Zero, a remote facility in the Alaskan wilderness where the Air Force develops and tests its ICBMs. In the next one, she nearly succeeds in stealing a prototype from the U.S. Navy, another area where she and her organization's expertise with aircraft gives her an edge over more ordinary intelligence networks.

Film

• The East: The film's protagonist Sarah Moss is an operative of one named Hiller-Brood, hired by various corporations to infiltrate the titular eco-terrorists who targeted them. However, Sarah begins to agree with the East over time, changing sides by the end and getting fellow operatives to help them from within.
• In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Lisbeth Salander works under Milton Security as a private investigator. MS is known to have computer science experts for cybersecurity while running traditional private security contracts.
• James Bond:
  • In the original continuity, SPECTRE, a criminal organization that's often contracted by governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain to run operations for them. (See the literature section for more details).
  • In the rebooted continuity, Quantum^note later revealed to be either a branch of, or a predecessor to, the rebooted SPECTRE has this as part of its job description. Quantum of Solace shows them cooperating with the U.S. government and with a U.S. friendly rogue general to overthrow the elected government of Bolivia while leaving the U.S. officially uninvolved. The movies notes that they've done this before, having been hired by multinationals to carry out the (real life) overthrow of President Aristide's Haitian government when its reforms started cutting into their bottom line.
  • In Spectre, we have Nine Eyes, a global surveillance network built entirely from private money and contracted by nine of the most powerful governments in the world to provide them with electronic intelligence. There are such high hopes for it that the British government is planning to use them to replace their human intelligence capacities altogether. Unfortunately, the Nine Eyes contractor turns out to be SPECTRE, a global criminal organization that intends to use its newfound status to support its criminal operations and manipulate world politics.
• The Kingsman franchise has the PIA of the same name, which works independently of the British government to ensure the protection of the U.K. and British nationals. Similarly, the United States has the Statesman agency.
• The title organization from Men in Black is this crossed with Law Enforcement, Inc. and, more bizarrely, Immigration, Customs, and Border Patrol, Inc. Its job is to monitor and regulate alien activity on Earth as well as protect the planet from ill-intentioned aliens.
  Jay: What branch of the government do we report too?
  Kay: None. They ask too many questions.
  Jay: So who pays for all this?
  Kay: Oh, we hold patents on a few gadgets we confiscated from our visitors. Velcro. Microwave ovens. Liposuction.

Literature

• The Case Files of Yakushiji Ryoko has JACES, a private security company created by Hiroko Yakushiji, rooted from the post-World War II PSC Japan Empire Security Services (JESS). Ryoko, his daughter, sometimes uses JACES's private intelligence assets to help her solve a case. Given that she's publicly known to be the next head of JACES, Ryoko justifies the use of said company resources. Not that the public sees it Ryoko's way. To them, they see her as being too entitled since she's rich.
• The Genesis Code has Lassitter Associates, which makes its money by investigating persons or other businesses of interest for its clients. Several of the people employed by the company are specialists in the fields of forensic accounting, computer programming and police investigation. Sadly, its founder Joe Lassitter has become disenchanted with the business because more often than not, the ones who can afford his services are not nice people and usually use the information gained to undermine far more scrupulous rivals and opponents.
• Jack Ryan gives us Hendley Associates a.k.a. "the Campus," which is half this and half Covert Group with Mundane Front. It's an unofficial agency set up after 9/11 to "gather and act upon intelligence" - meaning that they're plugged into the information the CIA and NSA receive and occasionally act on it by sending assassins out to deal with threats to the U.S. While it was set up by President Ryan and maintains ties to government intelligence agencies, it's entirely privately funded (through its front organization, a trader in stocks and bonds) and does not report to any government authority (this was in fact the entire point of setting it up, as Ryan thought too many politicians couldn't be trusted to do what was necessary to protect the homeland).
• James Bond:
  • SPECTRE is a borderline example. While many of its schemes are completely self-directed and it's deeply involved in criminal activity right from the start, it also functions as a private contractor for jobs that government intelligence agencies aren't willing or able to do themselves. At the start of Thunderball (their first appearance), MI6 doesn't know much about them, including their name, but they did know that there was a new intelligence group operating in Europe whose services they, as well as their French and American counterparts, had used in the past. Their plot in their next appearance, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, is also implied to be something they were contracted to do by the Soviet government. Not all their clients are government agencies: it's noted that they provided consulting services for the British great train robbery of 1963, for example.
  • The Union, SPECTRE's Spiritual Successor from the Raymond Benson novels, is in a similar situation in that it's largely a criminal organization but often works as an intelligence contractor for government agencies and other interested parties. In their first appearance, they've been hired by the Chinese government to steal a new aeronautical technology from the British government. In their second, they're hired by a Spanish nationalist to provoke an incident with Britain with the ultimate aim of returning Gibraltar to Spain. In their third and final one, a Japanese ultranationalist has hired them to carry out an act of terrorism against the West.
• A couple examples from Star Wars Legends:
  • Shadows of the Empire: Much of Black Sun's power stems from its intelligence network, second only in skill to perhaps the Bothans', and Leia asks for their help in finding out who's targeting Luke for death as a result (not knowing that they're the culprits). Other books explain that Black Sun has gathered blackmail material on government officials across the galaxy using its spies and gets these people to aid them as a result.
  • Talon Karrde's organization slowly becomes this over the course of The Thrawn Trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn duology. While it's originally introduced as simply another faction of smugglers (albeit a very well-run one), it quickly becomes clear that its true strength comes from Karrde's talent for gathering information. The New Republic comes to depend on him more and more for this over the years. Then, when they and the Imperial Remnant finally sign a peace treaty, his status is regularized when he's set up as a private intermediary between the two governments, his information network being contracted to verify that both parties are abiding by the terms of the treaty.

Live-Action TV

• The Blacklist: By the time Season 9 starts, Aram left the FBI and has founded a private intelligence company that specializes in cybersecurity known as Flagify along with his partner, Nick. Through the company, Aram promotes ShadowSee, which tracks down piracy incidents anywhere in the world, and Greylock, which tracks key words for sentiment analysis. Aram and Nick are trying to pitch their products to an angel investor named Henry Conroy. When Aram uses his products to help Cooper and the others to rescue a kidnap victim, Conroy is impressed enough that he's willing to pitch in and invest. As of "SPK", Nick buys Aram's shares in Flagify so that he can work full-time for the FBI again.
• Bull has the Trial Analysis Corporation (TAC), a risk management firm that is hired to conduct mirror jury dry runs and hire themselves out as defense attorneys in most cases. TAC has an in-house private intelligence capacity, but it's mostly used to help dig around the internet for information regarding the victim and anyone else involved with Danny James running down the leads when possible. In "Gone", Taylor Rentzel runs the company's private intelligence unit to track down who kidnapped Astrid. She also does some unethical hacking... sometimes. Before Taylor was around, Cable used to do private intelligence research when needed.
• Burn Notice: The "Burned Spies Organization" (no official name given) is this, a spy agency made up of agents that have been burned with regular intelligence organizations so that they could then be recruited into the BSO. Originally founded by a DIA psychiatrist who hated to see talent go to waste, the relationship it maintains with the government is very murky: it recruits heavily from agencies like the CIA, maintains its own contacts with them, and sometimes works with them, but it's never made clear to what extent the U.S. government is a client that uses them to run off-the-books operations, and to what extent it's simply a target they're trying to penetrate and exploit (though they like to claim it's the former). The closest thing to a mission statement we ever get comes from one of their senior managers:
  Vaughn: Some things, governments do well. Like running a military. Or a post office. And then there are some things they need help with. Things best done by people who no longer have ties to the government.
  Michael: Like burned spies.
  Vaughn: Precisely. That's where we come in.
• The Equalizer (2021) has Bishop Security, a private military company founded by William Bishop. BS provides contracts for anyone who needs security or intelligence services. Sometimes, Robyn works with Bishop by asking for any intel the company can acquire since she only does her vigilante work either alone or with Mel. In some instances, Bishop's private intelligence does get in her way due to some of his clients who may be against Robyn's clients.
• Leverage: Redemption: RIZ Security, the main villain from Season One, qualifies. It's a private company that heavily recruits former military and intelligence personnel and offers security services for many of the rich and powerful, be they national governments or private individuals. For a high enough price, those services can go well beyond simple security and stretch to include straight-up acts of terrorism, as in the season finale when they nearly took down the entire U.S. electric grid. Even the Leverage, Inc. crew treats them as The Dreaded:
  Hardison: These are the guys you call if you're a dictator and you want someone disappeared.
  Harry: Yeah, these guys are past security. It's more like having your own private army.
• In MacGyver (1985) and MacGyver (2016), the Phoenix Foundation is this, though with some differences in continuity. In the original series, it was exactly what it appeared to be, a think tank and government contractor that was sometimes hired by the U.S. government to run an intelligence operation (though it was just as often contracted for much more mundane uses, like running environmental surveys or developing a safe disposal procedure for nuclear missiles). In the rebooted series, the think tank aspect is mostly a front for what's actually an American black ops organization; when it suffers a major infiltration and is shut down by the U.S. government, it reacts by going private and continuing its mission as a completely self-funded PIA.
• A character subplot of NCIS: Los Angeles has Eric Beale resign from NCIS' Office of Special Projects (OSP) to work on a technological project under wraps with orders from Hetty during the events of Season 11. It later turns out to be a legitimate product known as Kaleidoscope 2.0, which is used to collect and analyze information from the internet to various databases. Eric uses his experience working on it to create a private tech company and is made a DOD contractor in Season 12 to help OSP take down terrorists and other bad guys, using information that Kaleidoscope can collect. He later leaves for good, with Nell turning in her resignation to join Eric in Japan.
• NCIS: New Orleans has Apollyon, which is said to be a PIA that conducts rogue operations. However, NCIS investigates them and learns that the group uses the PIA identity as a cover for their real purpose, an underworld espionage network.
• Person of Interest has Decima Technologies, a PIA based in Shanghai, China that is rumored to have covert links to the Chinese Ministry of State Security. It's led by ex-MI6 agent John Greer, who took the task to establish the A.I. known as Samaritan. It later takes contracts from Washington DC to use Samaritan, masquerading it an anti-crime/terrorist A.I. system to help law enforcement agencies after taking out Vigilance. As they do their independent ops in America, DT relies less and less on MSS assistance. Team Machine works to take it down since allowing Samaritan to take over the internet means total world domination.
• Rubicon has the American Policy Institute (API), which is a fictional counterpart of similar institutes like Booz Allen and Stratfor.
• S.W.A.T. (2017): In the episode "Sentinel", the LAPD has to contend with vigilante wannabees trying to get cash rewards as incentives thanks to crime reports being posted on the Sentinel Guard app, a public security social media app managed by a private security company named Sentinel.

Tabletop Games

• Cyberpunk 2020 has the MegaCorp Infocomp, formed by former members of the U.S. Government after "the Collapse". The company does all kinds of intelligence — from corporate espionage to open-source data gathering — for the right price.

Video Games

• After the events of Grand Theft Auto V, Franklin Clinton uses his experience working with Michael and Trevor to set up a PIA named F. Clinton and Partner in the Greater Los Santos Area. FCP takes on clients (from Los Santos-based actors/musicians to wealthy officials and rich families) who want FCP to run asset recovery, hostage rescue and intelligence analysis/support for them. In some missions, the online protagonist engages Merryweather contractors running a citywide surveillance program. Franklin is in charge of analyzing/getting mission support with Imani and the OP is the specialist recruited to help out.
• In Hitman (2016), Agent 47's targets in "The Showstopper" are Viktor Novikov and Dalia Margolis, the ringleaders of a private intelligence agency called IAGO. One of their favorite tricks is using fashion models as Honey Traps, and Agent 47 can disguise himself as uncannily similar-looking model Helmut Kruger to get close to them both.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy, a cutscene in the third game introduces R&A Research, a private consulting firm that was founded by former Big Bad Colonel Alan Richard and his subordinate Kanone Amalthea after the events of the previous two games. The firm makes use of a background in military intelligence to provide high-level economic and market research that can benefit the Kingdom of Liberl, and its clientele include regular civilians, politicians, and the Liberlian military as well.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Bluecorp^note In Japanese, its name is Konakarucha is Redd White's information gathering company. White employs it to get blackmail material on countless influential individuals to force them to be at his beck and call, to the point that some of them are Driven to Suicide just to escape from his clutches.

Webcomics

• Fisk Black from Better Days finishes a tour of duty in the Middle East and gets recruited by a private firm that conducts "black ops" against anti-American subversives. As the director puts it: "We're not Langley, but you can see it from here." Since U.S. agents killing foreign nationals is technically an Act of War, the firm subtracts dangerous foreign radicals while giving the U.S. government Plausible Deniability. Fisk learns that his father did this job for the same firm; that he was killed in action in Vietnam was a cover story.

Western Animation

• Archer is set in the unfortunately named ISIS corporation, a private-enterprise spy/intelligence-gathering business working on behalf of governments. It is eventually forced to close its doors after Washington DC reveals that they were never working on its behalf. While most of its personnel move to California briefly to do Private Detective work, they eventually join another PIA named the IIA or the International Intelligence Agency.

Real Life

• The Pinkerton National Detective Agency has served this role since its founding. It has since been bought by and merged with Securitas AB, and its portfolio nowadays include regular intelligence analyst consultations, GSOC (Glocal Security Operations Center) and on-the-ground checks on important facilities.
• In 2016, a consortium of British building and construction trade companies were found guilty of having kept illegal intelligence records on potential employees who were active trade unionists, with the intention of blacklisting them from continued work. Eight big construction firms ran their own intelligence unit called "The Consulting Association", which amounted to an illegal private intelligence firm maintaining information on militant left-wing workers. The Consulting Association was raided and closed down in 2009 but it took six years for the case to get to court.
• The NSO Group is an Israeli PIA that provides cybersecurity services, including the spyware known as Pegasus. Initially known for tracking down calls made by drug cartel leaders, the software has been reported to be used to spy on political dissidents, human rights campaigners and opposition groups and politicians. The company made the news after reports were made that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum authorized its use to snoop on the phones used by his ex-wife Princess Haya bint Hussein and some of her solicitors and close protection bodyguards.

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