Democracy needs to be defended, and intelligence is the first line of defence. However, the liberal-democratic norm of limited state intervention in the lives of citizens means that security and accountability are in tension insofar as their first principles are diametrically opposed: whereas openness and transparency are hallmarks of democratic governance, operational secrecy - in relation to other states, to democratic society, and to other parts of government - is the essence of intelligence tradecraft. Intelligence accountability reconciles democracy and security through transparent standards, guidelines, legal frameworks, executive directives, and international law. Evolving executive, legislative, judicial and bureaucratic mechanisms for intelligence oversight and review have become a distinct feature of democratic regimes.

Over recent decades administrative and executive accountability have been enhanced with legislative and judicial review. Using a most-similar systems design to compare intelligence accountability in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, this book opens expands compliance as the sine qua non of intelligence to gauge effectiveness, efficiency, and innovation across the intelligence community. In the context of changing technology and threat vectors that have significantly affected, altered, and expanded the role, powers, and capabilities of intelligence, this book compares the institutions, composition, practices, characteristics, and cultures of intelligence accountability systems across the world's oldest and most powerful intelligence alliance. In an asymmetric struggle against adversaries who subscribe to an existential logic that is informed by neither rules nor principles, accountability has to reassure a sceptical public that the intelligence and security community plays by the same rules that democracies are committed to defend.

Christian Leuprecht (Ph.D, Queen’s) is Class of 1965 Professor in Leadership, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College, on leave as Matthew Flinders Fellow at Flinders University in South Australia. He is a recipient of RMC’s Cowan Prize for Excellence in Research and an elected member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada. He is president of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 01: Armed Forces and Conflict Resolution, Munk Senior Fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute and cross-appointed to the Department of Political Studies and the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University where he is also a fellow of the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations and the Queen’s Centre for International and Defence Policy. An expert in security and defence, political demography, and comparative federalism and multilevel governance, he has held visiting positions in North America, Europe, and Australia, and is regularly called as an expert witness to testify before committees of Parliament.

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