>>What outfit they got you with these days? >MI5? SIS? - Respectively, the UK's >internal security agency, and the Secret >Intelligence Service, commonly (but >inaccurately) known as MI6.
>
>In fact, MI5 is also an incorrect name.Wellllll... sort of. As near as I can work out, "MI6" is completely wrong, in that the agency itself insists it's not called that (although I note that, possibly in an example of a marketing department bending to inevitability, they include it, in an almost vanishingly low-contrast typeface, in their official logo), whereas MI5 answers to that name officially but would like it on record that it is also the Security Service. Or something along those lines. Like a lot of things about the British government, up to and including their dang constitution, the nomenclature of their spy agencies is kind of an ad-hoc half-assed mess. :)
Interestingly, if you search "MI6" on wikipedia, it redirects you to a page titled "Secret Intelligence Service", but if you search "security service", the disambig links to a page entitled "MI5", not "Security Service (UK)" or the like.
--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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