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This comprehensive volume discusses the various challenges of establishing and maintaining accountable and democratically controlled intelligence services, drawing both from states with well-established democratic systems and those emerging from authoritarian systems and in transition towards democracy.

Sean Kippin and the Democratic Audit team assess the ways in which the UK's four main security services are scrutinised, to ensure that they are operating legally and in the public interest. For matters that must be kept secret, 'compromise' forms of scrutiny have now been developed in Parliament. But how effectively or independently do they work?

"This study offers a new and detailed examination of parliamentary scrutiny of the British intelligence and security agencies. Through detailed analysis of parliamentary business, coupled with interviews with MPs, peers and senior officials, it examines the various mechanisms by which parliament seeks to scrutinise the secret state, and assesses the extent to which parliament has both the capacity and the will to provide effective oversight of intelligence and security policy and agencies. In addition to providing a detailed analysis of the impact of the Intelligence and Security Committee, this is the first book to examine the various other means by which a range of parliamentary bodies including select committees, all-party groups and individual parliamentarians have sought to scrutinise the intelligence agencies and the handling of intelligence by government"--