Who's Watching The Spies?: Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability

by Hans Born, Loch K. Johnson, Ian Leigh

Given recent experiences with terrorism, clearly even the most democratic societies have a legitimate need for secrecy. This secrecy has often been abused, however, and strong oversight systems are necessary to protect individual liberties.

The assembled authors, each well known in the international community of national security scholars, bring together in one volume the rich experience of three decades of experimentation in intelligence accountability. Using a structured approach, they examine the strengths and weaknesses of the intelligence systems of Argentina, Canada, Germany, Norway, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While these democracies have experimented with methods to make intelligence more accountable, they all have different political systems, political cultures, legal systems, and democratic traditions, thereby presenting an exceptional opportunity to examine how intelligence accountability evolves under disparate circumstances. The contributors draw together the best practices into a framework for successful approaches to intelligence accountability, including a prescription for a model law.

255 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Hans Born is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), Geneva, Switzerland, where he heads the DCAF's research working groups on Parliamentary Accountability of the Security Sector and Legal Aspects of Security Sector Governance. He co-authored Security Sector Reform in Transitional Societies (2002), Parliamentary Oversight of the Security Sector: Principles, Mechanisms and Practices (2003) and The "Double Democratic Deficit": Parliamentary Accountability and the Use of Force under International Auspices (2004).