Towards democratic intelligence oversight: Limits, practices, struggles

Abstract

Despite its common usage, the meaning of ‘democratic’ in democratic intelligence oversight has rarely been spelled out. In this article, we situate questions regarding intelligence oversight within broader debates about the meanings and practices of democracy. We argue that the literature on intelligence oversight has tended to implicitly or explicitly follow liberal and technocratic ideas of democracy, which have limited the understanding of oversight both in academia and in practice. Thus, oversight is mostly understood as an expert, institutional and partially exclusive arrangement that is supposed to strike a balance between individual freedom and collective security, with the goal of establishing the legitimacy of and trust in intelligence work in a national setting. ‘Healthy’ or ‘efficient’ democratic oversight then becomes a matter of technical expertise, non-partisanship, and the ability to guard secrets. By analysing three moments of struggle around what counts as intelligence oversight across Germany, the UK, and the US, this article elucidates their democratic stakes. Through a practice-based approach, we argue that oversight takes much more agonistic, contentious, transnational, and public forms. However, these democratic practices reconfiguring oversight remain contested or contained by dominant views on what constitutes legitimate and effective intelligence oversight.

Civic Intelligence Oversight: Practitioners’ Perspectives in France, Germany, and the UK

“…The prevalent marginalization of civic practices in research and political discourse on intelligence oversight goes along with a liberal understanding of democratic oversight that puts an emphasis on balance, delegated expertise, and the integrity of state secrets (Kniep et al 2023). A comprehensive understanding of democratic intelligence oversight, however, needs to account for the de facto productive and often more adversarial forms of civic oversight that ensure a participatory contestation of surveillance by intelligence agencies in the public sphere (Hillebrand 2012;van Buuren 2014).…”

“…Conceptualizing freedom as non-domination, the proactive, unpredictable scrutiny implemented as civic oversight is by no means secondary to delegated oversight (Newell 2018). Instead, it is in its form indispensable and in its effect central to the democratic scrutiny of surveillance practices, including that of delegated oversight bodies (Caparini and Cole 2008;Kniep et al 2023;Matei 2014). While we assume the centrality of civic oversight and its equivalence in necessity to delegated oversight, our survey leaves the exact theoretical location of civic oversight vis-à-vis intelligence agencies to those we survey.…”