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Why make an opinion when you can make an educated guess? But I'm inviting people to think about this along with me.
Mostly the question is inspired by how Hayate and Fate spoke in StrikerS about "illegal excavations" by people looking for overtechnology, mass-based weapons, and Lost Logia.
I wondered what a "legal" excavation would entail, given that these scavenger hunts were likely happening on unadministered or uninhabited worlds.
I doubt that the Scrya stop to ask permission to dig on such out-of-the-way worlds, or that the TSAB took care to police them or send anyone along to monitor their activities. They probably openly book civilian/commercial ships in order to get to their destinations, but since when does "non-clandestine" mean "legal"?
Still, I suppose that's not a fair question to ask about a statement that's possibly just silly no matter how you look at it, so I'll move on.
The principle difference between "graverobbers" and the Scyra are the things they intend to find and what they intend to do with them. Graverobbers go looking for anything people are willing to pay money for, or anything they can use. The Scrya are looking for clues to the past.
These are not mutually exclusive things, since there are people who are willing to pay money for the secrets of the past. Consider this possible scenario:
The Scrya and a band of graverobbers ended up touching down at the same dig site. At first, they ignore each other -- the Scrya don't want a fight and calling the authorities would only provoke one, and the bandits don't want a fight because that will earn them the wrath of the TSAB.
Only they each have the poor luck to land on the sides of the ruin that doesn't contain the things they want -- turns out the armory was over THERE and the public library was over THERE. Oops.
So, outside the eye of the law and without the power to safely perform a citizen's arrest, the Scrya Clan might step aside and let the bandits make off with the weapons while the bandits leave the library largely unmolested.
The Scyra Clan probably is not interested in going out of their way to help the TSAB police weaponry and Lost Logia. Finding the Jewel Seeds was a fluke and something the Scrya handed off to the feds as quickly as possible. Then, notably, only one of them bothered to do anything after the Jewel Seeds went missing, and he was likely the youngest and most idealistic member. He was also the one who personally found them and felt the most responsible.
The Scrya Clan might also have know exactly about the sorry state of the Infinite Library and how little care the feds took to organize and research all of the information recovered about other worlds and the past. If so, they would probably keep looking primarily for themselves, the academic community, and the good of future generations.
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