Oversight and intelligence networks: Who guards the guardians? – GUARDINT

GUARDINT aims to address and redress the gap between increasingly transnational surveillance practices and national oversight mechanisms. Due to the expansion of intelligence networks and digital data collection and sharing, the traditional ways to understand and to practice the control of intelligence services have become dated and inefficient. Yet, robust intelligence oversight is crucial for the legitimacy of and public confidence in modern security. GUARDINT builds empirical and conceptual tools to shed light on the limitations and potential of oversight mechanisms. It theorises intelligence oversight through an International Political Sociology (IPS) approach to understand the concrete practices and the formal and informal roles of oversight. Using the IPS approach, the project examines intelligence oversight in a threefold way: as a democratic mechanism, as socio-technical networks, and as an emerging transnational practice. Second, it compares the efficiency and legitimacy of oversight bodies in different European countries. Third, it examines the possibilities and challenges for oversight bodies to operate at a transnational scale. By doing so, the project will generate tools and platforms to promote transnational collaboration. Overall, GUARDINT seeks to revitalise our democratic imaginary and to reinforce transnational connections by proposing creative solutions for effective democratic control of transnational intelligence cooperation within and beyond the EU.