Transparency is an important legal and political value. It is relatively uncontroversial, however, for transparency to apply differently in the intelligence context since it relates to peace and national security. If it is different, what do we know about how transparency is applied through regulatory architecture and how intelligence actors and oversight understand it? What is the value of intelligence transparency? Comparing the five jurisdictions in one key intelligence sharing agreement the Five Eyes Alliance (FVEY), itself only revealed publicly in 2005, can illuminate whether there is a consensus on intelligence transparency. Utilising the FVEY as a case study, I seek to explore existing theories of transparency and analyse whether transparency should matter in the intelligence context. I argue that relying on general conceptions of transparency is not appropriate or accurate in the intelligence space but that this need not mean that transparency does not matter.
About the Speaker
Dr. Lydia Morgan
Assistant Professor at Birmingham Law School, UK
Dr. Lydia Morgan is an Assistant Professor at Birmingham Law School in the UK. She researches state power in the arena of national security, counter-terrorism, surveillance, and intelligence. Alongside her work on intelligence transparency, Dr. Morgan is finalising a monograph on state secrecy. In Accountability and Review in the Counter-Terrorist State (Policy/ Bristol University Press, 2019) co-authored book with Fiona de Londras and Jessie Blackbourn, she considered what a meaningful commitment to accountability should look like in a normalised and permanent counter-terrorist state.
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