Edited by Didier Bigo, Emma Mc Cluskey, and Félix Tréguer

This book adopts a critical lens to look at the workings of Western intelligence and intelligence oversight over time and space. Largely confined to the sub-field of intelligence studies, scholarly engagements with intelligence oversight have typically downplayed the violence carried out by secretive agencies. These studies have often served to justify weak oversight structures and promoted only marginal adaptations of policy frameworks in the wake of intelligence scandals. The essays gathered in this volume challenge the prevailing doxa in the academic field, adopting a critical lens to look at the workings of intelligence oversight in Europe and North America. Through chapters spanning across multiple disciplines – political sociology, history, and law – the book aims to recast intelligence oversight as acting in symbiosis with the legitimisation of the state’s secret violence and the enactment of impunity, showing how intelligence actors practically navigate the legal and political constraints created by oversight frameworks and practices, for instance by developing transnational networks of interdependence. The book also explores inventive legal steps and human rights mechanisms aimed at bridging some of the most serious gaps in existing frameworks, drawing inspiration from recent policy developments in the international struggle against torture. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, sociology, security studies, and international relations.

London; New York: Routledge, 2024. 311p.

By Prithika Balakrishnan

Incarceration has become the norm for those who assert their innocence. A staggering number of defendants are incarcerated prior to the adjudication of their cases—a reality that has become a central paradox of an American criminal justice system which holds axiomatic the presumption of innocence. Recent attempts to address pretrial mass incarceration through bail reform and the COVID-19 pandemic compassionate release programs have embraced digital surveillance, resulting in unintended and little-understood consequences. This Article examines how the expanded use of pretrial GPS surveillance is radically changing the presumption of innocence by implicating punitive measures absent constitutional protections and amplifying the racial disparities in our criminal justice system. Largely viewed as a substitution for physical detention and therefore a less onerous intrusion on a defendant’s liberty, pretrial GPS surveillance erodes fundamental liberties under the guise of criminal justice regulation. These highly racialized but invisible repercussions include harms to physical and psychological health, freedom of movement, privacy, and future economic self-determination. I argue that, in light of these substantial harms, courts must examine how they evaluate technological surveillance, affording defendants substantive and procedural due process protections where there currently are none. Part I of this Article charts the ways in which bail reform and the COVID-19 pandemic-related compassionate release programs have resulted in the expansion of pretrial GPS monitoring far beyond the footprint of physical incarceration. Part II, examining an empirical case study as a basis, details the specific and racialized harms imposed by technologically-mediated restraint. Part III offers a substantive and procedural due process framework for how courts should weigh these harms. Finally, I argue for a re-assessment of United States v. Salerno to recognize future dangerousness as a fundamentally racialized concept that, guided by increasingly sophisticated means of constant surveillance, oversteps the boundary between regulatory and punitive purposes.

71 UCLA L. Rev. 478 (2024), 61p.