ABSTRACT
The extent to which states are able to penetrate their societies can be seen as a major indicator of their modernity. However, the state is only one of a large number of institutions attempting to exercise control via surveillance. It is an important, but not the only, player responsible for the movement towards what has been described as 'a total surveillance system'! or a 'maximum security society'. 2 Security intelligence agencies are part of the inner circle of the Gore-Tex state and here and in Chapter 5 their penetration of other levels of the state and society is analysed in terms of an 'intelligence process'. This consists of five main elements: planning and direction; collection; production and analysis; dissemination, and countering. This idea of a 'process' or 'cycle' has been most often applied to the analysis of foreign intelligence but it provides a useful framework also for the analysis of domestic security intelligence; for example, it is used in CSIS's first public annual report. 3
In using such a framework as an analytical device there is always a danger that the process under review appears to be far more rational and coherent than it really is. The idea of a process is used here because it gives us a means of discussing the different aspects of security intelligence. There is much to be said for Arthur Hulnick's suggestion that, in 'reality', it 'is much more useful to consider the intelligence process as a matrix of interconnected, mostly autonomous functions'.4 Either way it is important to keep in mind the variety of ideological and organisational distortions that infect the process. 5 First, however, in the light of the discussion in the last chapter of the problems of defining the key terms with which security intelligence agencies
operate, we must consider what they actually do; specifically, how surveillance relates to action. 6
This has been extensively discussed in North America and Australia, but not in the UK. In the Security Service Act, 1989, ' we are told that the function of the Security Service:
1(2) ... shall be the protection of the national security and, in particular, its protection against threats from espionage, terrorism and sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means. 1(3) It shall also be the function of the Service to safeguard the economic well-being of the United Kingdom against threats posed by the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands.
