which is the bulk of your intelligence gathering and analysis, really.
Yes, I said that.
Thus, why you don't rely on any single method or source.
Then we seem to agree that pirate points aren't irrelevant when contemplating fleet recon.
There are huge gapes or 'conceits' in the universe simply because of the blind-spots of the creators.
Sure. And sometimes it's because they want a certain aesthetic; something to be true in-universe regardless of reality. Whether they understand that reality or not.
And in BT, surveillance requires proximity.
One more thing back to the Recon issue: Your HUMINT is limited not only by access to an enemy's infrastructure, but also by the fact your agents are handing their reports to a third party government for transmission, and that third party government has a vested interest in crippling your efforts.
Comstar.
Only when those guys are, well, around, in-universe.
But even during those days, intel organizations in-universe tended to courier the bits of info they really cared about.
Never mind that most of the time, it simply doesn't matter if C* knows. Even if we presume in-universe knowledge of the handful of times C* abused their knowledge, their list of interventions is incredibly tiny. So who cares if they can figure out this intel report on the goings on of this Marik Militia unit I've been observing? The canon list of C* abusing that kind of knowledge in some way can be counted on 2 hands. I doubt any intel agency has standing orders to avoid C*, the cost of that policy is too great given the penalty it imposes.
Talk to an IT guy, and feed him some drinks, and when he's good and buzzed, ask him if there's anything that goes through his servers he can't, with some dedicated effort, crack right down to the machine code.
99.9% of IT people can't do that at all. That's a conceit of movies, same as having someone who's a "scientist" that is an expert in multiple fields. Just not a thing.
Now, you might get him to bitch about some blatant vulnerabilities that the brass just won't let him fix, which could prove to be some exploit some malware you have can attack, but that's not what you're talking about.