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"Intelligence oversight"
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Spy watching : intelligence accountability in the United States
\" All democracies have had to contend with the challenge of tolerating hidden spy services within otherwise relatively transparent governments. Democracies pride themselves on privacy and liberty, but intelligence organizations have secret budgets, gather information surreptitiously around the world, and plan covert action against foreign regimes. Sometimes, they have even targeted the very citizens they were established to protect, as with the COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and 1970s, carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against civil rights and antiwar activists. In this sense, democracy and intelligence have always been a poor match. Yet Americans live in an uncertain and threatening world filled with nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons, and terrorists intent on destruction. Without an intelligence apparatus scanning the globe to alert the United States to these threats, the planet would be an even more perilous place. In Spy Watching, Loch K. Johnson explores the United States' travails in its efforts to maintain effective accountability over its spy services. Johnson explores the work of the famous Church Committee, a Senate panel that investigated America's espionage organizations in 1975 and established new protocol for supervising the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the nation's other sixteen secret services. Johnson explores why partisanship has crept into once-neutral intelligence operations, the effect of the 9/11 attacks on the expansion of spying, and the controversies related to CIA rendition and torture programs. He also discusses both the Edward Snowden case and the ongoing investigations into the Russian hack of the 2016 US election. Above all, Spy Watching seeks to find a sensible balance between the twin imperatives in a democracy of liberty and security. Johnson draws on scores of interviews with Directors of Central Intelligence and others in America's secret agencies, making this a uniquely authoritative account. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Towards democratic intelligence oversight: Limits, practices, struggles
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.
Journal Article
Public Health Risk Management, Policy, and Ethical Imperatives in the Use of AI Tools for Mental Health Therapy
Background: The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in mental health therapy presents a compelling yet deeply fraught opportunity to address widespread disparities in access to psychological care. Recent empirical evidence reveals that these AI systems exhibit substantial shortcomings when confronted with complex clinical contexts. Methods: This paper synthesizes key findings from a critical analysis of LLMs operating in therapeutic roles and argues for the urgent establishment of comprehensive risk management frameworks, policy interventions, and ethical protocols governing their use. Results: LLMs tested in simulated therapeutic settings frequently exhibited stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health conditions and responded inappropriately to acute clinical symptoms such as suicidal ideation, psychosis, and delusions. Real-world evaluations reinforce these concerns. Some studies found that therapy and companion bots endorsed unsafe or harmful suggestions in adolescent crisis vignettes, while others reported inadequate chatbot responses to self-harm and sexual assault queries, prompting concern from clinicians, disappointment from patients, and calls for stronger oversight from policymakers. These failures contravene fundamental principles of safe clinical practice, including non-maleficence, therapeutic alliance, and evidence-based care. Moreover, LLMs lack the emotional intelligence, contextual grounding, and ethical accountability that underpin the professional responsibilities of human therapists. Their propensity for sycophantic or non-directive responses, driven by alignment objectives rather than clinical efficacy, further undermines their therapeutic utility. Conclusions: This analysis highlights barriers to the replacement of human therapists with autonomous AI systems. It also calls attention to the regulatory vacuum surrounding LLM-based wellness and therapy applications, many of which are widely accessible and unvetted. Recommendations include professional standards, transparency in training and deployment, robust privacy protections, and clinician oversight. The findings underscore the need to redefine AI as supportive, not substitutive.
Journal Article
Watching the watchers : parliament and the intelligence services
\"This study offers a new and detailed examination of parliamentary scrutiny of the British intelligence and security agencies. Through detailed analysis of parliamentary business, coupled with interviews with MPs, peers and senior officials, it examines the various mechanisms by which parliament seeks to scrutinise the secret state, and assesses the extent to which parliament has both the capacity and the will to provide effective oversight of intelligence and security policy and agencies. In addition to providing a detailed analysis of the impact of the Intelligence and Security Committee, this is the first book to examine the various other means by which a range of parliamentary bodies including select committees, all-party groups and individual parliamentarians have sought to scrutinise the intelligence agencies and the handling of intelligence by government\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Transformation of State Security and Intelligence Services in Poland – A Job Still Unfinished
There was no external, NATO-like institution that could propel reforms in anticipation of future political gains. [...]the security services had traditionally been the mainstays of communist power, enveloped deep in secrecy and notorious for oppressing opposition activists. [...]the incumbent democratic governments, still weak and besieged by political and economic problems, were reluctant to move in aggressively and to formally abolish the communist security services in their entirety, fearing possible consequences. The same is true for the right to carry out covert and intrusive surveillance operations vested in several agencies in Poland.4 So the fact that any given agency is authorized to interfere covertly with private property or use intrusive surveillance techniques does not place this agency in the intelligence sector in Poland. Since the conceptual lines of division are so blurred, the only way to identify and delineate the intelligence sector is by following the practical approach taken by the executive authorities and reflected in the wording of the laws, both existing and projected. [...]the first reorganization of communist security services was introduced by the very communist general and mainly served to facilitate the process of concealing the crimes and abuses of the communist service from the new government.
Journal Article
The Ford Administration, the National Security Agency, and the “Year of Intelligence”: Constructing a New Legal Framework for Intelligence
In the mid-1970s, Congress and the judiciary moved to regulate the National Security Agency (NSA) at a moment when such regulation might have restricted the growth of electronic surveillance. The Ford administration played a crucial role in preventing that from happening. It did so by controlling the flow of intelligence information to Congress and by establishing a flexible new legal framework for intelligence based on broad executive orders, narrow legislation, and legal opinions written by executive branch lawyers. This framework fostered a perception of legality that headed off calls for comprehensive legislation governing intelligence. The Ford administration’s actions protected NSA from meaningful regulation, preserved the growth of electronic surveillance, and sustained executive branch preeminence in national security affairs. The episode proved formative for the Ford administration officials involved—including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Antonin Scalia—and solidified the central role of executive branch lawyers in national security policymaking.
Journal Article
Intelligence and Civil Protection in the UK: Assimilating \Risky\ Information in an Uncertain World
This article examines the structure of the UK's intelligence gathering regime and assesses how key structural characteristics affect subsequent risk calculations about threats to UK domestic security. It is suggested that intelligence information is at best partial, contingent, and drawn from multiple sources. However such \"raw\" intelligence is then subjected to a system of bureaucratic \"processing\" that has at least three identifiable tiers and is centrally driven. Such systemic characteristics facilitate a process whereby complexity and variety are \"rationalized away\" in the search for \"consistency.\" What is reinforced is a deficit in risk communication whereby pre-processed information is selectively disseminated from the \"top down.\" These problems are compounded by a weak oversight function and, currently, insufficiently robust \"firewalls\" at the very pinnacle of the intelligence framework.
Journal Article
“Veillant Panoptic Assemblage”: Mutual Watching and Resistance to Mass Surveillance after Snowden
The Snowden leaks indicate the extent, nature, and means of contemporary mass digital surveillance of citizens by their intelligence agencies and the role of public oversight mechanisms in holding intelligence agencies to account. As such, they form a rich case study on the interactions of “veillance” (mutual watching) involving citizens, journalists, intelligence agencies and corporations. While Surveillance Studies, Intelligence Studies and Journalism Studies have little to say on surveillance of citizens’ data by intelligence agencies (and complicit surveillant corporations), they offer insights into the role of citizens and the press in holding power, and specifically the political-intelligence elite, to account. Attention to such public oversight mechanisms facilitates critical interrogation of issues of surveillant power, resistance and intelligence accountability. It directs attention to the veillant panoptic assemblage (an arrangement of profoundly unequal mutual watching, where citizens’ watching of self and others is, through corporate channels of data flow, fed back into state surveillance of citizens). Finally, it enables evaluation of post-Snowden steps taken towards achieving an equiveillant panoptic assemblage (where, alongside state and corporate surveillance of citizens, the intelligence-power elite, to ensure its accountability, faces robust scrutiny and action from wider civil society).
Journal Article
Boards, Commissions, and Committees: USAINSCOM Army Intelligence and Security Command Intelligence Oversight Board
U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Intelligence Oversight Board is responsible for Intelligence oversight of [Intelligence operations; Military budgets; Defense contracts] within U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command
Government Document