Theta Project

Theta Project was an intelligence and security agency officially operating under the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation between the years 2058 and 2070. For all intents and purposes, it was the United States' method for enforcing LSECT and researching magic on a federal level.    

Background

  Nearly two years after the first proposal of LSECT to the UN, it was finally put into effect. The United States, already unsteady with the continued activities of the Great Church, created a branch agency of the FBI dedicated to the enforcement of LSECT. This branch, known as Theta Project, made use of military-grade equipment to crack down on so-called Extra-Conceptual Threats. However, they quickly ran into several fundamental problems.   First and foremost, LSECT was unnecessarily vauge and bureaucratic. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of magic-using humans, magical creatures, and other entities were already living within the United States borders. LSECT could sort them roughly into their level of military might, but had absolutely no method for determining whether they were actually dangerous. A Full Moon threat, completely immune to conventional weapons, could be a pacifist. Worse yet, they could be a key member of local infrastructure, or they could be working for the United States government to begin with— a preliminary investigation revealed that nearly 0.5% of government officials had experience with magic. Due to this wild oversight, each target had to be established individually, making the process of actually following the law a slog.   This effectively made Theta Project a funnel for federal-level police brutality. People of color, citizens below the poverty line, Shifted, and other visibly magical minorities were the overwhelming targets of arrests. Processing was slow and victims were often detained for several times longer than they should have been, even with clean records. False positives on magic use were extremely common, and again, there was absolutely no guarantee that somebody who used magic was actually breaking the law.   Due to these problems, as well as the constant LSECT rewrites that made the law inconsistent, Theta Project's priorities shifted from law enforcement to hard research. Ironically, having a branch of the FBI run experiments with magic led to many purely beneficial inventions; this included the documentation and use of medical magic in hospitals throughout the country, enchanted silicon chips that reduced cost and size in the computer parts industry, and "foreign" intelligence communications with many under-the-radar groups of magical creatures, such as forest spirits and Demons.   However, when a particular lab of Theta Project began to research magic-based military technology, the creation of the Drones led to Theta Project's superiors shutting down the agency permanently.    

Trivia

  The symbol theta (ϴ) was used for the agency because it superficially resembled the Ghostbusters logo. This was quickly changed to the archaic meaning of theta as a symbol for death (as in, the death of magic). When LSECT became increasingly unpopular and the actions of Theta Project were called into question, the matter was dropped entirely for the sake of PR.