Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Season 1

A heavy-assault multiped tank runs amok under the control of an unknown hijacker. After going on a destructive spree at the Kenbishi Industries testing facility, the multiped takes off towards the urban area of Niihama. Kusanagi briefs her squad at Section 9 HQ, explaining that the tank's designer, Takeshi Kago, died a week before, and that no terrorist organization has claimed credit for the heist. Since the military refuses to get involved unless terrorism is the motive, Section 9 is called in to stop the tank.

A series of android suicides prompts Section 9 to investigate the manufacturer. While Section Head Daisuke Aramaki questions the plant manager, Kusanagi and a Tachikoma covertly hack into the plant's database to try and uncover any possible wrongdoings by the manufacturer. As it turns out, all the androids were of the same model, an obsolete product known as the GA07_JL android.

An old friend of Togusa's named Yamaguchi is murdered after sending him pictures concerning an unsolved case involving a hacker known as The Laughing Man. His investigation leads to the discovery that the members of The Laughing Man task force have all been implanted with cybernetic surveillance devices called interceptors, which reside in the vision center of the subject's brain, recording everything they do. Shortly thereafter the information is leaked by Section 9, prompting the Police to call a press conference to announce their findings regarding the interceptor devices. During the broadcast, the mysterious hacker known as The Laughing Man returns, hijacking a police official's cyberbrain and delivering a threat to the Superintendent General.

Section 9 suspects that the police investigators handling The Laughing Man case are using their primary suspect, a former Serano Genomics, Inc. programmer with a shady anti-corporate past, as a decoy to hide some form of higher-level corruption. Aramaki orders Section 9 to commence around the clock surveillance of the programmer in an attempt to catch him in the act.

Things go fairly haywire as Kusanagi suspects that The Laughing Man has inserted a virus into the police units guarding the Superintendent General. As Section 9 members struggle to evacuate the Superintendent General to safety, the anti-virus team at HQ races to develop a vaccine to protect against it. After the immediate threat is averted, Aramaki orders Section 9 to open their own investigation into the Laughing Man case.

It has come to the attention of the Minister of Home Affairs that Jenoma revolutionary leader Marcelo Jarti has been visiting Japan regularly every five months. Jarti is one of the world's foremost wanted men, and has been targeted for assassination by commandos of the United States Delta Force and United Kingdom Special Air Service (SAS) a total of six times; miraculously, he has survived each of these attempts. When Jarti returns to Japan following the most recently failed assassination attempt, Section 9 is called in to trail him and determine why Jarti has been visiting their country and receives unexpected results.

Kurutan, a friend of Kusanagi's, calls the Major to the hospital where she works to look into the source of a young girl's heart transplant. It seems that the heart she received was given without consent of the owner's parents. The girl's doctors feared she might have had to be given a full-cyborg conversion, a thought that stirs painful memories for Kusanagi. Aramaki, believing that the culprits may be tied to a mass kidnapping ring, orders Section 9 to look into the case for connections between the organs, the company that sold them, and the Yakuza.

Kusanagi enters a chat room dedicated to The Laughing Man. Various crackpot (and a few plausible) theories are passed around JFK-style as the chat room members view various bits of evidence from the Laughing Man case. While in the chat room Kusanagi hones in on an older man who seems to have more knowledge about The Laughing Man incidents than the others in the room. After confronting the man and exchanging information with him, Kusanagi and one of the other members in the chat room are suddenly transferred out of the chat room and experience unexpected results.

Marco Amereti, a former American Imperial Navy Petty Officer turned serial killer, has arrived in Japan and for the last two months has murdered several women by slicing the skin off their torsos in the form of a t-shirt. American CIA officers have been dispatched to Japan, ostensibly to assist Section 9 in their effort to track down and apprehend Marco before he can strike again. When the CIA officers show no surprise at the developments in the case Ishikawa hacks into the CIA database to find out why.