Well... what's OSA today?... the answer is not so straightforward.
First than all it's not a KGB-like department. There are no spies or anything like that. It occoured to me that occasionally some Private Eye get hired, but they are always external people.
OSA follows more or less the standard organigram of an Org. Seven divisions and all that.
Beside the usual suspects, like HCO, Treasury and Qual, responsible for recruiting, ethics, staff matters, money, auditing and training, there are other divisions around.
The division 4 is split in three, Div 4a (Investigation), Div 4b (legal department), and Div 4c (Public Relations). Many people working at Hollywood BLVD noticed each staff member not only wear a badge indicating the org (OSA or otherwise), but also the division. For PR reason the Div4a remained "OSA Div4a" on the badge. It would have left many Los Angeles tourists googled eyed seeing a badge stating "investigations" or something in that order.
Division 6 handles the Social Reforms (laws against the Co$), and includes the CCHR and all its ramifications.
Perhaps the most boring department, at least for me, was the 4b, legal, since not only they take care of the major court cases, but pretty much all the legal paperworks that enters the orgs. That could include even small fines for littering by spreading fliers, or threats to cut the electricity in an org if the bill was not paid on time.
Public Relations, handles, indeed, public relations. Their statistics include how much positive media they "reached", deducted by the amount of negative media someone else "generated". Each time someone publish something negative anywhere on a public media, it remains on their stats until "handled", which can be as easy as publish on the same paper a "rectification", down to discredit the source itself publicly. For the records the "Office of the President", is just part of this deparment at OSA Int. Hebert Jenzths (one day I will be able to spell his name), is just a OSA Int staff member under the CO OSA Int.
Investigation, Div 4a, is much less glamourous and more tedious than it seems. No operatives are openly sent out to collect data, although it might happen anyway by accident. All the data is collected by DSAs about all percived, real or probable, threats to the well-being of the Co$ in a particular area (or globally). The main stats are Threats-Predicted and Threats-Handled. The point system is very complex, and it was always subjected to revisions. The rationale behind the point system of those two stats is the severity of the threats, and the reach of the threats (local, regional, national or global).
With the advent of the Internet craze in mid 90s, those stats created an artificial internal stir: for example if the teenager Jo Blow sent a message to a newsgroup stating "LRH ate my balls", it would have counted as a Global Threat and would have even priority over a national court case in Germany. I guess they now fixed that, but that can explain their initial irrational behavior.
Attached to the OSA Operations there are several "All Clear Units", there used to be one in Italy handling a national court case lasted for a decade that initially shut down 10 centers. There are also, to my knowledge, two other all-clear units in Europe, one in Belgium and one in Germany. There could be more around.
An All-Clear Unit is formed to specifically address a national threat, such as the Belgian goverment not recognizing the Co$ as a cult, or the German banks who refuse to give loans to known scientologists, fearing they won't see the money back, since it happened before.
All-Clear units are formed mainly by non-sea org members but closely scrutinized by the national OSA office. All-Clear units have full support to do anything in their power to solve the local situation.
All the data is collected by OSA Int in a database, operated by INCOMM, called "mongo", which is accessible thru the terminals given the right username/password. It is based on a custom made Progress Database Engine, the standard Progress Database Software is not able to read it (I tried it
).
The main reason I joined this Blog is that I just discovered that Mike Rinder Blew! I am really wondering what happened there.