Bear in mind the following is my personal opinion only, and I don’t speak for anyone else and can’t know their own thoughts. But I’ll provide my perspective on the CRS.

The CRS isn’t disorganized, really. It’s *demoralized* when it comes to the subjective security aspects of the job. The other stuff— endorsements, for example— is going along great.

That demoralization is largely the fault of the Assembly itself, particularly bad actors within it. You have to know the history of security in TSP to understand why the CRS appears as it is today. It used to be much more active and involved. But when we found out Belschaft was involved in shady conversations with Empire-led Osiris, an enemy region at the time, and tried to take *some action* to deter future misbehavior, it nearly sparked a constitutional crisis.

Not to re-litigate, but the CRS had very good reason to punish Belschaft, a player that had plotted to coup before, had been caught in many lies, and was now found to be chatting with an enemy (Neo Kervoskia, Empire and Osiris leader) asking if there was anything he could do to help Osiris against TSP. His defense was that he was doing “intel,” despite not being authorized by anyone and that not being verifiable in any way. The CRS went to the Assembly, the Assembly passed very strict and specific laws on what the CRS could do, and we published a huge investigation, more in-depth than this region had ever seen or has seen since. The result of that investigation was the CRS decided not to ban Belschaft, but to prohibit him from seeking office for a finite time.

That exploded into a full-blown crisis. Cormac, who had practically crafted the law authorizing us to do so, went full-on populist anti-CRS when it turned out his home region of Osiris was implicated and we were revealing the Empire connections to it all. And the Assembly went along with it, hook, line, and sinker. Nobody cared about the evidence we had. Nobody cared about the careful analysis or the unprecedented investigation. The moment it became about Cormac and Belschaft yelling about corruption, violation of rights, etc., it became all about PR and politics. I was the only one left who cared enough to push back, because who the hell wants to fight that battle?

From that moment on, the CRS has been reluctant to do much of anything on security. Everyone who was around for the Bel-Cormac mess fears that the Assembly will simply fall into populist uproar no matter how solid of a case we have. And frankly, the response to Souls’ proscription kind of reinforced that for me. I can’t speak to his motivation, but I’d be willing to bet Roavin wanted that proscription to go through the Cabinet because of the CRS’s reluctance to do anything that would provoke even the slightest bit of debate. And while I would have handled things different (I would’ve revealed the evidence from the get-go), I saw the way the Cabinet and Assembly responded. And it was almost entirely about the PR, with the actual security considerations coming a distant second.

The issues we have aren’t with the specific institution, whether it be the Cabinet, the CRS, or anything new we create. The Assembly, and by that I mean our community, simply is bad at security. We appoint people to make security decisions, but once they’re made we take that back and demand the Assembly decide. We moralize about “democracy” and unilaterally disarm ourselves for the benefit of Gameplayers who don’t give a shit about democracy and want to destroy TSP. And most perniciously, we dismiss security concerns without valid reason. I can’t even count how many times I’ve laid out a case, based on historical and contemporary evidence, only to have it dismissed because “I just don’t see the reason to be concerned” or “But that’s the past, they might be different now.”

At the end of the day, if we’re going to create an institution that’s in charge of our security, we need to be willing to actually let them be in charge. That has always been our region’s major security failure. Despite creating these bodies and confirmed people into them, individual members of the Assembly always end up believing that they need a say. Inevitably, security decisions become political decisions.


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