Who are the security services employed by? I certainly wouldn't call them private industry!

Did you mean to say it's not elected government officials? Just curious, because I definitely consider a country's intelligence apparatus to be completely and wholly part of its "government", and would be surprised to find someone who didn't.

'The government' refers to something different in the US than in (most of?) Europe.

My American friends were mightily amused and amazed when Belgium spent >500 days without government a couple of years ago, but of course they were interpreting the word in a much more encompassing way than it is done in Belgium. 'The goverment' is really just a couple of dozen people (with perhaps a couple of dozen assistants each).

Gouvernement/regering translate to administration or cabinet or whatever each country designates its executive branch.

I was thinking of government as the elected officials, the rest is the civil service and departments including the security services.

I was trying to say the security services will always press for more powers and it's the job of politicians to know when to resist those requests.

In France, government only refers to the ministers. Prime minister is chief of the government, meaning only the other ministers. But the president is the "chef d'état", (chief of state), and I guess what you call government, we call it "the state". So, for a French citizen at least, a country's intelligence is not part of the government but part of "the state".

But a Country's intelligence apparatus doesn't 'govern'. I'm not trying to be deliberately argumentative but it seems to me that there is a clear and obvious distinction between a government and the organisations tasked by it to provide intelligence.

See discussion of "permanent state" passim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9902497

The security services have a large amount of operational discretion and privileged access to ministers. They have the ability to present secret "evidence" which cannot be publicly challenged.

Let's not forget that the CIA effectively ran the governments of several Latin American countries, and in the UK Northern Ireland was effectively governed by the police Special Branch.

Read about the Dulles brothers. They forged very strong connections between overt and covert foreign policy and industry.

I'm actually reading the book Brothers by David Talbot right now. It covers the relationship between John and Bobby Kennedy and includes a pretty good section about how in the 50s the Dulles brothers basically dictated foreign policy. There was a lot of friction when JFK came into office because, especially after the Bay of Pigs, he didn't let them get away with things.

The book does veer somewhat into unfounded conspiracy territory, but I think it's an interesting read so far and the author doesn't come across as crazy so much as skeptical.

> There was a lot of friction when JFK came into office because, especially after the Bay of Pigs, he didn't let them get away with things.

And there is the essence of why we want transparency, oversight, restricted privacy etc. I generally feel that if everything the security services did was publically available (at least on level with civilian police) there would be a lot of friction but they would get immersurably better.

I don't see why gorgak's comment got flagged unto death. The Dulles brothers caused the term "banana republic" to be coined by O. Henry because the US government was toppling governments and killing large numbers of people on behalf of United Fruit. It is also generally accepted that the Communism scare they put up was bunk.

He's been hell banned I believe. Anything he posts is automatically killed.

The politicians decide what to fund. The police and border forces want more funding but are forced to make endless cuts. I guess spying is something they can ask for that is relatively cheap compared to traditional police work.