> n.b. I always find it funny how interested and intrigued yet abhorred so many people are when it comes to spycraft/espionage etc...

I was such a person. When I was in school I read the EU report on Echelon. There was so much basic espionage meta in there that shocked me. For example I had thought of signals intelligence as an aggressive act - an act of war. In the EU report SIGINT and broadly spying was introduced as a ordinary part of a decent intelligence function of a state.