This chapter analyzes the performance of the United Kingdom’s legislative intelligence oversight body, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC), from its reform via the 2013 Justice and Security Act, through the nadir of the Snowden leaks, to a renewed sense of independence and political will from 2015 to 2024. It focuses on three areas of investigation—lethal drone strikes in Syria, detainee mistreatment and rendition during the “war on terror,” and the ISC’s Russia report—as well as the remit and resourcing of the ISC. Paradoxically, the obstruction the ISC encountered during this period is also a measure of success: Both government and agency resistance were limiting factors, but the very fact of this resistance demonstrates the ISC’s independence and political will in pursuing oversight. Nevertheless, legislative oversight of intelligence emerges as a site of executive–legislative struggle rather than cooperation, something that is likely to shape it into the future.

Loch K. Johnson is a leading figure and one of the most familiar names in the study of intelligence. He is one of its pioneers and key thinkers. Over some 40 years, his academic career developed in parallel with the field of Intelligence Studies, a field he has done much to shape. His work has influenced generations of students, academics, and practitioners. His first book on intelligence, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation, was published in 1985, by which time he had already published several important articles, including the ‘Seven Sins of Strategic Intelligence’ in World Affairs in 1983. As with A Season of Inquiry, a number of these early articles focused on two aspects of intelligence that would come to form a particular focus of his writing: oversight & accountability and covert action. Loch’s contribution to thinking about these topics has been enormous. It is simply not possible to study either of them without referring to his work. In recent years, he has produced magisterial studies of each, which represent the culmination of a career devoted to observing and analysing them; Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (2018), and The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy (2022). However, the contribution of Loch Johnson’s published output to the study of intelligence is much broader than this. For this reason, the bibliography of his books, journal articles, and book chapters on intelligence that follows the interview here represents an invaluable resource, providing details of the approximately 30 books, 100 journal articles, and 50 book chapters on intelligence that he has produced to date (although even this does not include other forms of output, such as his contributions to government publications or newspaper commentaries). This body of work also includes landmark contributions to thinking about intelligence theory, and publications that situate the study of intelligence within the broader study of US foreign policy. Indeed, through the emphasis Loch gave to intelligence in books, such as America as a World Power, the way he explained intelligence in books, such as Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs, and situated it within the wider American political culture in books like America’s Secret Power, he has done much to increase recognition of the centrality of intelligence to teaching and thinking about foreign policy and politics more generally, and provided resources via which this could be taken forward. His body of work also includes the series of handbooks and multi-volume reference works on intelligence that he has edited for Routledge, Praeger and Oxford University Press. However, Loch’s most significant editorial contribution to the development and shaping of Intelligence Studies is to be found in his role as editor of this journal from 2001 to 2019, a lengthy period that amounted to over half its existence at the time he stepped down as editor, and one of the experiences he reflects on in the interview below. In setting out Loch’s contribution to Intelligence Studies, it would be remiss of me not to mention the enormous contribution he made as a teacher and PhD supervisor over the 40 years he spent at the University of Georgia, in relation to which he received numerous awards. Amongst other awards,

One key indicator of the vibrancy of Intelligence Studies as a field of academic enquiry over recent years has been the emergence of a discrete current of Critical Intelligence Studies (CIS). Debate as to what precisely CIS means, or the scope of what 'Critical' (or 'critical') denotes, continues but the articles collected together in this special issue represent a menu of opportunities connected by a desire to extend notional boundaries so as to better understand the phenomenon of intelligence and its various impacts. Within this, one notable contribution this volume makes to thinking about the nature of CIS and its relationship to the field more generally is in its emphasis on the benefits CIS approaches can offer to intelligence practice.

This chapter focuses on the ethical challenges posed by the still rapidly developing sphere of digital intelligence. States invest in intelligence and data collection to provide a sound basis for their decisions, especially regarding the security, safety and health of their citizens. Digitization is the conversion of any form of information into numerical form. The example of the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates this well. Modern digital surveillance, including the use of apps on mobile devices and monitoring of digital personal information, has provided health authorities in nations such as South Korea, Singapore and China the public health benefit of powerful tools for assisting in testing and tracking programmes limiting the spread of the virus. The principle of right intention does not rule out deception in the course of an intelligence operation, such as inserting into the digital code of malware clues that attempt to encourage a false-flag attribution to a third country.

As this special issue of Intelligence and National Security on 'Developing Intelligence Theory' is published, it is a decade since its three editors decided to put together an initial volume presenting the current state of conceptual thinking about intelligence. Stephen Marrin provides an evaluative review of the theoretical literature on intelligence that has been published since the Intelligence Theory volume. Comparative analysis should not be just spatial but also temporal: intelligence has been a presence in almost all societies, ancient and modern. From early democratic orders to the contemporary liberal–democratic state; one question that prompted early contributors to the academic literature on intelligence was that of the impact of intelligence practice on liberal–democratic politics. Brantly notes: '… intelligence analysis is at the dawning of a new era, a digital era in which information collected from everything from toasters and coffeemakers can now be incorporated with human sources'.

Secret intelligence is widely accepted as essential to the tasks and a legitimate function of the nation-state, indeed one on which its legitimacy ultimately rests. The very purpose of acquiring intelligence is to improve governmental decision-making by reducing ignorance about the activities of those who mean harm, the dictators, terrorists, cyber attackers, narcotics gangs, pirates, people traffickers, and other serious criminals. The historical tradition for intelligence agencies has been consequentialist, justifying to themselves and their political masters the ethical rightness of their actions by the harms that their interventions prevented. The best that could be done would be to seek more detail, for example in published National Security Strategies, of what the priority threats are that justify intelligence capability. The secrecy that attaches to intelligence is at the root of a number of the ethical tensions that intelligence practice generates in liberal democratic contexts.