When Intelligence Crosses Borders, Oversight Should Follow

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The United States depends on intelligence that does not stop at its borders. A vulnerability discovered in Australian defense networks could matter to U.S. forces operating in the Indo-Pacific; malicious cyber activity detected by Canadian authorities could reveal techniques relevant to American networks. Within Five Eyes—the intelligence partnership among the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—information routinely moves among countries with different surveillance laws, courts, and oversight systems.

That creates a problem democracies have not fully solved. Intelligence cooperation has become international, but the institutions responsible for holding intelligence agencies accountable remain largely national. Information can cross borders more easily than oversight can.

Five Eyes oversight institutions themselves have begun confronting this gap. The Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council (FIORC), which brings together intelligence oversight and review entities from all five countries, already compares oversight practices and explores when members can cooperate on reviews and share their findings.

The United States should build on that work by making democratic oversight part of intelligence interoperability. Five Eyes partners should establish baseline safeguards for shared information, create procedures for coordinated reviews of cross-border intelligence activities, and publish aggregate information about compliance. Allies have spent decades making intelligence easier to share. They now need to make accountability easier to share as well.

Of the instruments of national power, intelligence is among the most valuable to U.S. foreign policy because almost every other instrument depends on understanding adversaries and anticipating threats. Cybersecurity makes that dependence particularly clear. Digital networks connect governments, militaries, financial institutions, businesses, and critical infrastructure across borders, while the actors targeting those systems can operate across those borders just as easily.

The national security case is substantial. According to the U.S. intelligence community's 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, cyber actors linked to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and ransomware groups continue to seek access to U.S. government and private-sector networks and critical infrastructure. Intelligence cooperation allows democracies to detect common threats earlier, compare evidence across jurisdictions, and coordinate responses.

Yet the same cooperation complicates accountability, and courts have already confronted the tension. In Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights examined Britain's bulk interception system alongside its receipt of intelligence from foreign intelligence services. The court found fundamental deficiencies in parts of the bulk-interception regime, including inadequate independent authorization, while concluding that the separate regime governing receipt of foreign intelligence contained sufficient safeguards.

That distinction is important. Intelligence sharing is not inherently incompatible with democratic rights. But the case demonstrates why safeguards must be designed for intelligence that moves between governments, not only for intelligence collected and used entirely within one country.

Consider information about an American that is collected by a foreign partner and later shared with a U.S. agency. Which country's rules determine how long it may be retained or who can search it? If agencies in several democracies contribute to an intelligence operation, which country's oversight institution can evaluate the operation as a whole?

Each Five Eyes democracy has institutions overseeing its own intelligence services. But national oversight provides only part of the picture when intelligence activity itself crosses jurisdictions. Governments have built sophisticated mechanisms for sharing intelligence internationally without equally integrated mechanisms for reviewing how that shared intelligence is used.

Oversight Should Follow the Intelligence

Five Eyes governments do not need to start from scratch. FIORC already brings together the relevant oversight institutions and explicitly seeks opportunities for cooperation on reviews. The United States should turn that emerging coordination into a more systematic framework.

First, Five Eyes partners should establish baseline safeguards for shared intelligence involving their citizens and residents. They do not need identical surveillance laws, but they should agree on minimum standards governing why sensitive information may be exchanged, how long it can be retained, which agencies may access it, and what protections apply when one country receives information collected under another country's rules. Intelligence sharing should not become a way for governments to circumvent restrictions they face at home.

Second, oversight should follow information across borders. When an intelligence activity substantially involves several Five Eyes countries, their oversight bodies should be able to conduct coordinated or parallel reviews rather than examining isolated national pieces. FIORC already provides the institutional connection among them. Its members should develop procedures for determining when a cross-border review is warranted, what information participating overseers can exchange, and how findings should be communicated across jurisdictions.

Third, Five Eyes governments should increase transparency about the rules without exposing operations. Intelligence agencies cannot publish active investigations, sources, or exploitable vulnerabilities. But oversight bodies can report how often coordinated reviews occur, broad categories of compliance problems they identify, and whether corrective action was taken. FIORC itself identifies greater transparency and public trust as objectives. Giving citizens more information about oversight would advance both without compromising intelligence operations.

The principle is straightforward: democratic accountability does not require citizens to know every secret their governments hold. It requires institutions capable of determining whether governments are keeping and using those secrets lawfully.

Democratic Constraints Can Be a Strategic Advantage

Authoritarian competitors do not face the same constraints. China and Russia can grant security institutions broad powers without comparable requirements for independent review or public transparency. Democracies operate through legislatures, courts, inspectors general, privacy protections, and public debate. Those requirements can appear inefficient, but they also distinguish democratic security institutions from the systems they are defending against.

This is not merely a civil-liberties concern. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence identifies public trust as an objective of Five Eyes oversight, while FIORC explicitly seeks greater transparency to enhance that trust. Oversight can therefore strengthen the legitimacy of intelligence institutions rather than simply constrain them.

The United States has confronted this tension domestically. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the government to target non-U.S. persons abroad for foreign-intelligence purposes. In its 2026 Section 702 report, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board staff concluded that the program remains one of the country's most valuable foreign-intelligence tools while finding that recent reforms have had positive effects on privacy, civil liberties, and agency compliance. Security capability and democratic restraint do not have to be opposites.

Artificial intelligence makes extending that principle internationally more urgent. Intelligence agencies can increasingly combine and analyze quantities of information that earlier systems could not realistically process. The ability to use shared information will expand rapidly; the ability to oversee its use must expand with it.

The United States has spent decades developing interoperability among allied militaries because collective defense fails when forces cannot operate under compatible systems. Intelligence cooperation needs a democratic equivalent. The countries sharing information should also share minimum expectations for how that power is reviewed.

That would be more than a privacy reform. It would demonstrate a democratic advantage in strategic competition. Authoritarian states can build powerful surveillance systems. Democratic alliances should demonstrate that they can build powerful intelligence systems while preserving independent scrutiny, legal restraint, and public trust.

Intelligence will remain one of America's most important sources of national power. A system that collects more information while becoming harder to scrutinize might make the state more capable, but it would not necessarily make democracy more secure. The better goal is intelligence cooperation strong enough to cross borders—and accountability strong enough to follow it.

Ayushi Chaudhary is an undergraduate at Temple University studying International Business and Economics, with a minor in Management Information Systems. A Boren Scholar, she spent the 2025–2026 academic year in Tokyo studying Japanese and U.S.–Japan security cooperation, and her research focuses on cybersecurity, emerging technology, economic security, and U.S. cooperation with allies in the Indo-Pacific.

This article was submitted to the Security and Democracy Forum’s Václav Havel Emerging Voices in Democracy Writing Competition and was selected as the Grand Prize Winner.