Intelligence and
National Security

This workshop held an initial discussion on the history, structure, and legal framework of both the UK and US intelligence communities. It then moved on to cover the structural issues that are often found in intelligence communities, with a discussion of how these structural issues can be countenanced.

This workshop covered the problems with intelligence analysis, and potential institutionalised practices that could lead to intelligence failure. It then moved on to cover how structural analytical techniques can be used to counteract problems such as groupthink, or cognitive rigidity.

This workshop started by covering three schools of thought on intelligence failure: the traditional, the reformist, and the contrarian schools. It then moved onto a discussion on reasons for failure, and why these reasons exist, e.g. poor analysis. The workshop then moved onto a consideration of the intelligence failure surrounding 9/11, tasking students to answer why 9/11 happened, and how it could've been stopped.

This workshop covered how the relationship between intelligence communities and policymakers work, with a main focus on the UK in the context of the Iraq War. It included a discussion of how the intelligence and policymaker relationship should look, before moving onto how intelligence communities can avoid avoid politicisation and remain objective in their work.

As part of this workshop, students were tasked with coming up with covert action plans; covering propaganda, political action, economic action, paramilitary, and direct action operations; for an assigned nation state. These plans were brought into the workshop and scored on their viability. This was done to teach concepts such as plausible deniability, as well as to help students understand how covert action fits in the intelligence community.

This workshop covered the key questions of how oversight works in both the UK and US intelligence communities. The majority of the workshop was dedicated to a discussion of how oversight should work in an intelligence community. This discussion mainly centred around who should oversee the intelligence community, and how we choose the people that oversee the community.

This workshop was mainly centred around strategies of passive and active counterintelligence. The students were tasked with desgining a  counterintelligence strategy that covered physical, cyber, and communications security. This task was designed to get students to think about how counterintelligence can fit into their assignments, and the problems that counterintelligence can face and how these problems can be overcome.