Assembly News Agency

 A group of reporters that officially work for the Assembly, covering items of interest Union wide for GalNet Channel One. Many of the reporters also unofficially report / debrief with Union Intelligence.

 Historically, government agents on Terra have used journalist credentials as a cover for espionage as far back as the 1950s OTT. Some historians feel this goes back centuries earlier.

 In the 1970s OTT, after the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigated the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), that reports by Rolling Stone magazine and The New York Times revealed that journalists from myriad news organizations had served the agency in various capacities, sometimes with the full knowledge of their employers. Austin Goodrich became one of the first examples of a journalist-spy to be publicly disclosed.

 The Times reported that at least 22 American news organizations, including CBS News and Time, Life and Newsweek magazines, as well as The Times itself, “had employed, though sometimes only on a casual basis, American journalists who were also working for the C.I.A.,” and that “in a few instances the organizations were aware of the C.I.A. connection, but most of them appear not to have been.”