ABSTRACT
Intelligence is an inescapable necessity for modern governments. Few states take the view that they can dispense with an intelligence service and none is sufficiently immune from terrorism or the inquisitiveness of its neighbours to forgo a security service. It is true that a variety of patterns for organising security and intelligence exists. Some states (for example, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey) have a single agency for security and intelligence (both domestic and external). Others have distinct agencies for domestic and external intelligence and security, with either separate or overlapping territorial competences, as in the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary and Germany. More rarely, a state may have a domestic security agency but no acknowledged or actual foreign intelligence agency; Canada is the exemplar of this approach. A further variable is that either intelligence or security services may have either a more pro-active mandate or be restricted to the gathering and analysis of information. However, whatever the precise organisational structure or governmental setting, security and intelligence pose a common set of challenges for accountability the world over.
