Intelligence Oversight in Times of Transnational Impunity

This book adopts a critical lens to look at the workings of Western intelligence and intelligence oversight over time and space.

Didier Bigo is a professor of International Political Sociology at Sciences-Po Paris-CERI, France, and a part-time professor at King's College London, Department of War Studies. He is the author or editor of many books, including Data Politics (2019) and Extraordinary Rendition (2018), most recently. Emma Mc Cluskey is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Westminster, London. She is the author of From Righteousness to Far Right; An Anthropological Rethinking of Critical Security Studies (2019) and co-editor of Security, Ethnography and Discourse (2022). Félix Tréguer is an associate researcher at the CNRS Center for Internet and Society and a former postdoctoral fellow for the GUARDINT project at CERI-Sciences Po. He is a founding member of La Quadrature du Net, an advocacy group dedicated to the defence of human rights in relation to digital technologies.

Introduction 1. From radical contention to deference: A sociogenesis of intelligence oversight in the United States (1967-1981) 2. Transformations of the transnational field of secret services: The Reasons for a systemic crisis of legitimacy? 3. The code of silence: Transnational autonomy and oversight of signals intelligence 4. From abuse to trust and back again: Intelligence scandals and the quest for oversight 5. An analysis of post-Snowden civil society accountability 6. Transversal intelligence oversight in the United States: Squaring the circle? 7. The anatomy of political impunity in New Zealand 8. Liberty, equality, and counter-terrorism in France 9. Intelligence oversight collaboration in Europe 10. Torture and security service mass surveillance