Democratic Control Of Intelligence Services

The events of September 11, 2001 sharply revived governmental and societal anxieties in many democratic countries concerning the threats posed by terrorism, organized crime, the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, and other complex security threats. In many countries, public discourse of subjects traditionally considered part of social policy, such as immigration and asylum, have been securitized, while intelligence services have been granted greater resources and expanded powers. This comprehensive volume discusses the various challenges of establishing and maintaining accountable and democratically controlled intelligence services, drawing both from states with well-established democratic systems and those emerging from authoritarian systems and in transition towards democracy. It adopts a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, identifying good practices to make security services accountable to society and its democratic representatives. The volume will engage both academics and practitioners in the discussion of how to anchor these vital yet inherently difficult to control institutions within a firmly democratic framework. As such, it has clear relevance for these concerned with the control and oversight of intelligence and security issues in many countries.

This book addresses the development, and the challenges and impediments, to democratic oversight and review of the intelligence community in Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, the US and UK. The promotion of democratic oversight of the intelligence community has gained renewed significance in the aftermath of 9/11.

These days, it's rare to pick up a newspaper and not see a story related to intelligence. From the investigations of the 9/11 commission, to accusations of illegal wiretapping, to debates on whether it's acceptable to torture prisoners for information, intelligence—both accurate and not—is driving domestic and foreign policy. And yet, in part because of its inherently secretive nature, intelligence has received very little scholarly study. Into this void comes Reforming Intelligence, a timely collection of case studies written by intelligence experts, and sponsored by the Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR) at the Naval Postgraduate School, that collectively outline the best practices for intelligence services in the United States and other democratic states. Reforming Intelligence suggests that intelligence is best conceptualized as a subfield of civil-military relations, and is best compared through institutions. The authors examine intelligence practices in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, as well as such developing democracies as Brazil, Taiwan, Argentina, and Russia. While there is much more data related to established democracies, there are lessons to be learned from states that have created (or re-created) intelligence institutions in the contemporary political climate. In the end, reading about the successes of Brazil and Taiwan, the failures of Argentina and Russia, and the ongoing reforms in the United States yields a handful of hard truths. In the murky world of intelligence, that's an unqualified achievement.

Peter Gill develops a framework for the comparative analysis of security agencies, discussing what is known about the operations of security intelligence agencies in liberal democracies and, second, an agenda for research into the UK agencies, including: the ambitious nature of their mandate regarding "national security", "subversion" and "terrorism"; theways in which the agencies penetrate society and what they do with the information they gather; internal organizational questions such as recruitment and culture; the extent to which the agencies are controlled by ministers; and how the agencies' activities might be overseen by outside political bodies such as parliamentary committees and by citizens in general. - Concluding that not enough is known about how these agencies operate in the UK, the book argues the need for a thorough enquiry to investigate allegations, and to make proposals for a more democratic system of security intelligence.

This comparative analysis of the sometimes fraught process of achieving democratic governance of security intelligence agencies presents material from countries other than those normally featured in the Intelligence Studies literature of North America and Europe. Some of the countries examined are former Communist countries and several in Latin America are former military regimes. Others have been democratic for a long time but still experience widespread political violence. Through a mix of single-country and comparative studies, major aspects of intelligence are considered, including the legacy of, and transition from, authoritarianism; the difficulties of achieving genuine reform; and the apparent inevitability of periodic scandals. Authors consider a range of methodological approaches to the study of intelligence and the challenges of analysing the secret world. Finally, consideration is given to the success – or otherwise – of intelligence reform, and the effectiveness of democratic institutions of control and oversight. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intelligence and National Security.

"It was well known to the Greeks that the phenomenon of vagueness in natural language gives rise to hard problems and paradoxes, yet more than two millennia passed before Philosophy began to pay any degree of concerted attention to the challenges of vagueness to match the effort expended, for example, on the Liar paradox and its kin. This situation changed dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when the Sorites paradox in particular began to provoke a dramatic intensification of research and publication. Crispin Wright has been in the international vanguard of the resulting modern debates that have attracted some of the most distinguished contemporary philosophers of logic and language. The Riddle of Vagueness collects together fourteen of Wright's highly influential publications in this field. The chapters together encompass almost half a century of evolving thought on the central problems and challenges which vagueness poses: what exactly is vagueness, what does its pervasiveness in natural language show about the nature of language mastery, is it desirable to modify classical logic and semantics in the face of the Sorites and, if so, what form should the modifications take? Richard Kimberly Heck contributes a substantial introduction to the volume, providing an invaluable summary of these fundamental issues, and an overview and evaluation in depth of the evolving course of Wright's ideas about them."--Publisher's description