I applaud the Danish Government and I wish other countries politicians would have the courage to respect the origins of their mandate to govern. And before this descends in to ‘what-about-isms’ I can name at least 5 countries whose over-sight bodies should pay attention.<p>"The fact that the head of the Danish Military Intelligence Service is a willing participant in circumventing the agency tasked with holding his own intelligence service legally accountable is mind-blowing and must be deeply concerning to the minister."
The watchdog, the article refers to, Tilsynet med Efterretningstjenesterne, was created on 1 January 2014 as a result of the Snowden leaks in 2013. It is government run, but completely independent from the intelligence agencies and members are appointed by a committee in parliament (except the chairman, who must be a judge on the supreme court).
> According to local media, the Defence Intelligence Service is accused of failing to investigate allegations of espionage in the armed services. It has also been accused of obtaining and passing on information about Danish citizens.<p>The secret intelligence services in your country are not working for you or your safety, and this is not a secret. If you believe so you have not been following the news the last thirty years (before that they had a scape goat for their behaviour).
When I read about western intelligence agencies, one can't help but look at the last decade or so and ask, what was it they said their job was again, specifically?
Intelligence agencies in Nordic countries are really small, just few hundreds people per agency and limited budgets. Even if they go rouge, what they can do is limited. Number of people in the field is even smaller. This creates problems of it's own because their counterparts quickly learn to recognize their faces.<p>For comparison, FBI Counterintelligence Division alone has 1-2 people per 10,000 Americans. Add different intelligence and surveillance agencies under DHS and others to that list and it's easy to see that the US has insane amount of domestic surveillance manpower per capita.
On the flip side intelligence also uncovers huge networks of despicable people.<p><a href="https://www.thelocal.dk/20161021/danish-man-ran-scandinavian-only-paedo-ring" rel="nofollow">https://www.thelocal.dk/20161021/danish-man-ran-scandinavian...</a>
Could you imagine a government agency spying on its own citizens? In America that would be illegal and unconstitutional.<p>We would have to immediately defund that agency.