All major democracies allow their intelligence services to intercept communications data in enormous quantities – most parliaments have even expanded those powers in recent years. As the stakes for fundamental rights and democracy are high, it is important to ensure signals intelligence is executed in the least intrusive and most democratically legitimate way.
In an online event on 18 March 2021 the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung and the Heinrich Boell Foundation presented the new international online repository intelligence-oversight.org, which features and discusses good practices from democracies that reformed legislation and oversight on bulk collection in the wake of the Snowden revelations. It features a wide range of high-water marks from different national surveillance regimes and shows that each nation – despite constitutional and political differences, and irrespective of individual reform trajectories – has a lot to learn from its international partners.