Public Security Section 9

Sitting beneath the Ministry of Home Affairs, this intelligence branch runs through Shirow's anime and manga and is sometimes rendered as Public Safety Section 9 in translation. The original movie gives it other labels still, calling it the Shell Squad or Security Police Section 9. Its people are drilled across a wide span of disciplines, from ordinary investigation all the way to combat inside the net.

The outfit's design borrows from Germany's GSG-9, and in earlier years its operatives ran joint exercises with the 22nd Regiment of the British SAS. On paper it began as a search and rescue body, yet in practice it is a counter-terrorist and anti-crime network working inside Japan's National Public Safety Commission. Its agents may move with or without official blessing, staying almost invisible to the public. Recruitment pulls proven talent out of other groups; the unit takes no volunteers.

In the first film the Major is sent to watch a building in New Port City, where a foreign power schemes to poach a local engineer capable of repairing the Project 2501 bug. Under her thermoptic camouflage the team closes in, and when the foreign official refuses to surrender the engineer, she cuts him down. Stand Alone Complex then pits the section against the Laughing Man affair, with the Major impersonating the culprit to expose a government plot aimed at the Micro Machine company. When officials learn of the probe, they dissolve the unit and turn on it; Umibozu troopers and their Type 303 Armed Suit robots storm the headquarters. The members hold out, then slip away through the sewers of New Port City, and though they are captured with the Major seemingly dead, the whole collapse proves to be one of Aramaki's gambits, staged to leave the true suspect exposed.

The second season, 2nd GIG, opens with the group still unofficial after an amendment to the Special Forces Bill, drawn into a hostage standoff at the Chinese Embassy staged by the Individual Eleven over refugee policy. Promised full restoration and a fresh budget covering the Tachikomas, provided no hostages die, the section threads the crisis while the refugee question drives the whole run. Solid State Society finds it reshaped and enlarged after the Major departs, now headed by Togusa, investigating cyberbrain suicides and the abduction of some twenty thousand children by a Wizard Class hacker called the Puppeteer. By SAC_2045 the unit has been shut down; Aramaki lingers at the Interior Ministry as an advisor while the Major, Batou, Ishikawa, and Saito form the mercenary crew GHOST and fight in California's Sustainable War, until a new prime minister orders Section 9 rebuilt to face the emerging post-humans.

Aramaki chairs the section as its chief, with Motoko Kusanagi serving as field commander, a cyborg counted among the world's finest hackers and melee fighters. Batou, a former ranger with visible cybernetic eyes and reinforced limbs, works the field alongside the mostly human Togusa, whose family life and conscience keep him grounded as the team's moral center. Ishikawa handles covert intelligence and technology, Saito operates as the class-A sniper with his satellite-linked Hawkeye, and Pazu and Boma round out the field roster, the latter managing heavy weapons and rear support. Later recruits span Azuma, Yano, Maven, Kuro, Reiko, Sitara, Ladriya, Tsunagi, and the MIT-trained Purin Ezaki.

The section also fields a line of walking think tanks. The manga's Fuchikoma were swapped for the Tachikoma in Stand Alone Complex over rights issues, both AI machines developing childlike personalities through a shared satellite link. Heavier Uchikoma units appear later, the Arise era brings the red Logikoma, and gynoid Operators plus the prototype bioroid Proto handle day-to-day support inside a headquarters hidden in Niihama-shi behind the front of a private security firm.