This article explores the role big data play in the national security decision-making process. The global surveillance disclosures initiated by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have increased public and academic discussions about big data and national security. Yet, efforts to summarize and import insights from the vast and interdisciplinary literature on data analytics have remained rare in the field of security studies. To fill this gap, we explain the core characteristics of big data, provide an overview of the techniques and methods of data analytics, and explore how big data can support the core national security process of intelligence. We find that data analytics tools contribute to and influence all the core intelligence functions in the contemporary US national security apparatus. However, these tools cannot replace the central role of humans and their ability to contextualize security threats. In the last decade, big data has been an ubiquitous buzzword in academic and professional circles and in the media. Some commentators have praised big data as 'the new oil of the 21 st century', 'the world's most valuable resource' and 'the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming'. 1 The growth of big data analytics can be explained from a market-based perspective. On the supply side, data have become more readily available and processing power has kept increasing-as predicted by Moore's Law in the 1970s. Rapid advances in instrumentation and sensors, digital storage and computing, communications and networks, including the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, have spurred an ineluctable march towards the 'big data revolution', 2 generating and giving access to more and more data. Every day, humans directly or indirectly create 2.5 trillion megabytes of data. 3 As increasingly large amounts of data are captured from humans, machines,

This study takes stock of the field of Intelligence Studies thanks to a quantitative review of all the articles published in the two main journals in the field -Intelligence and National Security (INS) and the International Journal ofIntelligence and CounterIntelligence (IJIC). Particular attention is paid to the diversity of the authors publishing in these two journals and the evolution of the issues they discuss. Publications in the field are widely authored by males based in the United States and the United Kingdom who write about Western intelligence and security organizations. Recent years have seen a slight diversification in the field but further efforts will be necessary to develop a more eclectic body of researchers and research on intelligence and national security. A distinct influenceIsaac Newtown famously said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"to express the need to build research on previous discoveries. 1 Students of intelligence can now rely on a substantial body of literature to inform their research and contribute to knowledge in this specific field of study.2 Beyond a series of books dating back to the aftermath of the Second World War, two flagship journals have had a distinct influence on the field

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Covert action has long been a controversial tool of international relations. However, there is remarkably little public understanding about whether it works and, more fundamentally, about what constitutes success in this shadowy arena of state activity. This article distills competing criteria of success and examines how covert actions become perceived as successes. We develop a conceptual model of covert action success as a social construct and illustrate it through the case of ‘the golden age of CIA operations’. The socially constructed nature of success has important implications not just for evaluating covert actions but also for using, and defending against, them.