OSINT-6 CHANGELOG 260314
Espionage fiction often treats the right badge, clearance, or assignment as a universal key. Real institutional access is narrower. A person can belong to an organization, hold a security clearance, and still lack access to a particular compartment, system, mission, facility, or record.
The United States Factbook adds three forms of support built around that distinction: Office Compartment Authorization, Interagency Mission Designation, and Sponsored Cover Package. Each entry records its issuer, eligibility, access, limits, verification, termination, and interaction with the core rules.
Office Compartment Authorization grants access to one defined body of ACO information, personnel, systems, facilities, communications, or resources. It remains tied to an assigned function and Need to Know. General clearance, senior rank, or Office membership doesn't substitute for the named authorization.
Interagency Mission Designation records temporary participation in one approved mission. It can open specified briefings, facilities, communications, transportation, equipment requests, and coordination channels. The designation can't transfer police powers, military command, diplomatic status, surveillance authority, spending authority, or another organization's statutory powers.
Sponsored Cover Package supports a false identity through employment, records, communications, financial activity, travel history, credentials, and verification contacts. The package grants only the access that the recorded identity can plausibly receive. It doesn't supply professional competence, immunity, unrestricted system access, or powers absent from the role.
We could have represented each of these as Advantage on a broad category of checks. That approach would make access feel portable and permanent. The entries instead ask a series of concrete questions: Who issued the status? What does it open? How is it verified? When does it end? What remains exposed after termination?
This structure makes credentials useful without allowing them to override authority, cover, Exposure, Alert, Need to Know, or Compartmentation. Access becomes a documented relationship with limits rather than a bonus printed on the character sheet.