Britain's security service MI5 is growing fast.
It will have doubled in size within a few months from where it stood on 9/11, but it is also moving out of London.
By 2011, it is expected to have 4,000 staff, of whom a quarter will be based in the regions as it opens eight new regional centres, as well as a new secret operations centre.
A central aspect of this expansion is closer co-operation with local police forces.
Greater Manchester was the first force to set up a counter-terrorist unit and it now works hand in glove with the security service.
"Actually you can't any more tell who's the cop, who's the spook. I think that's probably the test," explains Manchester Chief Constable Mike Todd.
Targets
"I have to say, when it comes to the sort of tasking, co-ordinating meetings every week between the police service nationally and the security service, there's no shortage of targets that we've got to deal with."
A tour around the unit by its head, Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Porter, reveals operations spread across a number of floors, with teams of analysts, surveillance officers and counter-terrorism officers working with local communities and officers on specific issues like prisons or terrorist funding.
Their aim is to generate investigative leads in-house as well as pursue leads that come from MI5 or other intelligence agencies.
The unit is also designed to work on community engagement and co-operation.
"Our worst nightmare is intelligence coming in and getting lost in the system and then, after an attack, realising we had intelligence which hadn't been developed"
"When you look at the link between the service and the police, it reaches literally from the director general of the security service, the chief constable, right the way down to a community police officer working in one of our communities," explains Ch Con Todd.
The police and MI5 also work closely together on a project called Rich Picture designed to spot early signs of suspicious activity within communities.
There are many motivations for this intimate co-operation, but one of the most important is the experience of 7 July, 2005.
In 2004, during an MI5 investigation into a group of men in south-east England, the man who would go on to be the ringleader of 7/7, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was photographed and followed to his home in West Yorkshire.
But he was never investigated further.
MI5 says there was no evidence at the time that he was likely to carry out an attack in the future, but one of the questions that has been asked is whether the communication between MI5 and West Yorkshire Police was close enough in this case, and whether the police were told of Khan and his links.
Since new details came to light, the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee has been investigating this subject for a second time, with a report due soon.
"We do know MI5 informed West Yorkshire Police," says the committee's chairman, Paul Murphy MP.
"What we are now doing in the committee is looking at the detail behind all that."
Senior police officers say that one of the lessons learns from that experience is not just the need for closer communication between police and MI5, but also the need to make sure that the police expand their counter-terrorist capability in line with that of the security service.
Otherwise, the danger will be that stockpiles of intelligence leads generated by MI5 start building up which the police do not have the capacity to follow up.
The great fear is "another MSK" as one counter-terrorist officer put it, referring to the 7/7 ringleader.
"Our worst nightmare is intelligence coming in and getting lost in the system and then, after an attack, realising we had intelligence which hadn't been developed," explained a senior officer.
Secret location
As well as the regional stations, MI5 is also in the process of building what it calls an "operations centre" outside of London.
While the regional stations focus on investigations, the operations centre will be designed to allow the rapid response of surveillance and other officers around the country in emergencies and on short notice.
The exact location is being kept secret.
But even with the growth and regionalisation, those at the front line say hard choices still have to be made about who to investigate and who to prioritise.
"You can never say that you have enough to meet a threat which is as broad and deep as this threat is," argues Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command and national co-ordinator for terrorist investigations.
"We make choices knowing that there is always the risk that it might be the wrong choice."
The Real Spooks - MI5 and Counter Terrorism since 9/11 continues on BBC Radio 4 on 11 December at 2000 GMT. It will be repeated on 16 December at 1700 GMT.
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