RELIC
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The Religious and Ecclesiastical Liberties Intelligence Center (RELIC) is a Urcean intelligence gathering service that is a component of the Office for Foreign and Domestic Intelligence Service's Department for Analysis. RELIC is a number of specific region-or-topic based intelligence centers under the Department for Analysis. RELIC's specific mission is to identify threats to religious liberty of the Catholic Church in general, minority Catholic groups, or individual prominent Catholics within its geographic mission area. Under its official mission, RELIC identifies such threats and identifies them either for local law enforcement, allied intelligence services, Urcea's own Department for Operations, or in some specific instances to local non-state actors such as the Audonian Democratic Traditionalist Front.
Beyond its official responsibilities, RELIC has been credibly described, though never acknowledged, as a clandestine covert operations agency. Various intelligence agencies around the world, as well as domestic leaks of classified documents, have described RELIC as the primary operator against targets it identifies. RELIC has been accused of assassinations, kidnappings, providing direct operative support to pro-Catholic rebel organizations, and operating black sites in areas under which it operates. For these activities, RELIC has been criticized by the League of Nations, many individual nations, and the Urcean Conference of Catholic Bishops, though its alleged operations are continually denied by the Government of Urcea.
History
Structure
RELIC-WEST
RELIC-EAST
RELIC-INVEST
RELIC maintains a venture capital fund, established in 2014, which it uses to invest in technology startups. While the types of businesses invested in have never been disclosed, various leaks indicate that RELIC invests heavily in both surveillance software as well as anti-surveillance software, and many technology sector analysts have speculated that RELIC has access to backdoors in several major encryption services that have become widely used since the 2010s.
Activities
Alleged operations
Alleged black sites
International response
RELIC has been broadly condemned both for its official and unofficial operations. Objections to its official operations are loudest in both Daxia and Ardmore, which characterize RELIC as a "Urcean interior ministry for other nations' sovereign territory" and as a spy organization. As such, in both countries, Urcean nationals are regularly targeted and searched to find connections to RELIC, real or imagined. Its unofficial activities have drawn more wide condemnation worldwide, including by the League of Nations.
Cooperation
While RELIC's alleged activities have been highly condemned by some actors, leaked documents indicate a general widespread cooperation with RELIC by a variety of states. Most prominently, sources and documents have indicated a close working relationship between RELIC and Burgundie's intelligence agencies due to an overlap of anti-Catholic, anti-Occidental organizations in Audonia. Due to the presence of alleged black sites in their countries, Bulkh, Mehristan, and Quetzenkel are understood to have at least some cooperation with RELIC.