ABSTRACT The relationship of the intelligence services with openness has been elusive and erratic, changing at the path of the scandals that shaked politics and public opinion. At different rhythms and marked by their national contexts, different intelligence services have embarked over the last two decades in different initiatives to promote societal awareness and a better understanding among society on the intelligence function. In this paper, a theoretical framework is proposed for understanding those openness strategies implemented by the intelligence agencies. The paper discusses two potential approaches to openness with a spectrum of mixed approaches in-between them. The first consists of generating and maintaining a (good) image/reputation and, the second is to legitimize its existence and its role within the State.
ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has fostered a greater appreciation of the significance of health security and intelligence capabilities. This article examines health security and intelligence capabilities in the United States and other countries, with a view to raising awareness of biological threats across the Five Eyes community. New biotechnologies offer vaccines, therapies, and healthcare solutions, but also present biological threats that must be managed. This article begins by discussing the rise of biological threats and the relative lax regulatory environment in the United States and overseas. The second part then examines the growing importance of health security intelligence and the role it can play in response to this potential threat. The third part focuses on intelligence collection, capability, and threat mitigation, and how this could be mobilized to address harmful impacts of biological threats. The final part of the article provides recommendations for building an intelligence capacity within ICs as well as associated regulatory reforms.
Since December 2019, Coronavirus has been spreading rapidly across the world. From its early stages, while the rest of the world was still new to COVID-19, Italy was one of the first and most severely hit countries. The chronic nature of the COVID-19 outbreak and untimely treatments were translated into an unstable social and emotional environment. This study explores the societal response to the first wave of the pandemic outbreak in Italy, looking at geographic variations, social and policy perspectives, and sentiments across northern, central, and southern regions. For this study, we collected nearly three million tweets associated with the coronavirus outbreak in the Italian regions of Lombardy, Lazio, and Sicily, during the months of March-May, 2020. A sentiment analysis was developed to (i) identify the spatio-temporal distribution of the polarity patterns of anger, fear, and joy; (ii) test correlation between these sentiments and COVID-19 cases; and (iii) determine the statistical significance between the sentiments across geographies. Findings provide insights on the relationship between sentiment variations and spatio-temporal case distribution associated with regional differences. These findings align with those of the "Track IT. COVID-19 International Survey," that investigated the societal response of Italians to the new measures enforced by local governments. Overall, the findings of this study can be weaved together into important implications for emotional wellbeing and economic perspective.
ABSTRACT Contributions to the Italian intelligence studies literature have seen an expansion since the major reform of Italian intelligence introduced in 2007. Italian civil society also increasingly recognizes the importance of intelligence. This paper first explores Italian intelligence studies literature as it stands today before considering the academic research. The six main categories of Italian intelligence literature are presented within: history, sources of intelligence, international relations and geopolitics, theories of intelligence and theoretical frameworks, great figures and memoirs, law enforcement, and the fight against criminal organizations. A short comparative analysis between the Italian literature and international intelligence studies is drawn which includes a comparison of categories, topics, key questions, and projects. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to draw a likely depiction of the state of Italian intelligence studies.
This article examines the activities and controversies of the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) within the context of the 1976 “B Team” competitive analysis exercise. While this policy-based red team exercise failed to help the intelligence community (IC) to avoid an intelligence failure in the months preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the external narratives focusing upon it served as a conceptual “red herring” for an accurate assessment of its activities and thus helped to distort intelligence reform efforts in the post-failure period. Ultimately, this case casts further doubt upon the utility of red teams within a policy environment.
