Annex 1: Data collection and coverage
across countries. Some have been operating for several
decades, and some for several years. With regard to
their background, mainly lawyers are active or work in
the civil society organisations. Their legal expertise in
some cases is supported by technical experts, or certain
knowledge is developed through the involvement in the
activity field. Many of these organisations have been
involved in litigation on a variety of issues related to
data protection or privacy, including cases on alleged
unlawful data processing by intelligence agencies.
All the interviews were carried out by senior FRA
research staff members, who travelled to the selected
Member States. Most interviews were conducted face
to face, with a few undertaken by telephone to suit the
needs of the interviewee(s) and the researchers (ie, to
find a time slot in the agendas and to reduce travelling).
On average, interviews lasted about one-and-a-half
hours. Most of the interviewees kindly agreed to the
interviews being audio recorded. When recording was
not possible, notes were taken during the interview.
For this reason, two FRA representatives were present
during the interviews.
Most of the interviews took place in the respective
national languages of the countries. FRA staff
translated the anonymised transcripts and notes of
the interviews from Italian and Swedish to English.
The Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European
Union translated the anonymised transcripts and notes
of the interviews from French and German to English.
The information retained its classified status, with
a security grading ‘confidential’ assigned.
Interview content
The semi-structured interviews were designed to obtain
detailed accounts of the following issues:
•• assessment of the institutional setting of the authority, its mandate, power, and legal framework
and its latest developments;
•• implementation of oversight in practice, scope and
content of oversight processes, including measures
to ensure that intelligence gathering is compliant
with fundamental rights;
•• assessment of remedial mechanisms for individuals
in case of fundamental rights violations;
•• needs for reform, possible improvements in daily
activities to ensure the fundamental rights compliance of the intelligence services and its oversight.
Interview guidelines followed the same structure of
mainly open questions that were used to set an agenda,
with the freedom to change the order of questions
depending on the answers. The pre-defined structure
contributed to capturing the perspectives and opinions
of different actors involved about the same issues,
with some adjustments in relation to the specificity
of the experiences.
The sequence of the questions and the topics covered
during each interview differed across different
institutions, taking into account their relevance
(including recent developments in the Member
State, the institution’s powers and competences,
etc.). Therefore, there are differences in the nature
and volume of information obtained from different
respondents, which might lead to varying levels of
consistency in the conclusions or findings on specific
themes due to the volume of information. Overview of
oversight operational practices, which was discussed
only during 16 interviews, is an example. Although the
discussions provided valuable in-depth information on,
and explanations and understanding of, the procedures
carried out by the oversight bodies, the analysis,
generalisation and presentation of the data are limited
due to the specificity of each institution, Member State
context, and confidentiality issues. They mainly provide
background information. For most cases, the main focus
was on identifying trends in the data, i.e. looking for and
combining statements and opinions that were similar or
identical across different research participants. Table 3
provides a list of themes presented in the report and
the number of interviews that covered them.
Data analysis
The analysis of the data collected through the semistructured interviews was carried out by using the
qualitative data analysis software ‘NVivo 10’. The data
analysis was constructed around the main topics and
questions asked, following the interview guideline,
and the key findings from the legal analysis of the
28 EU Member States. No interview or response to
a specific question was considered on its own. Constant
comparison of the data that went through automated
and manual coding (categorising data on the basis of
similarity, repetitiveness of the observations, concepts,
topics and issues raised) enabled the researchers to
identify emerging themes and opinions. The findings
from the fieldwork contribute to understanding different
aspects of intelligence collection and its oversight; it
does not aim to validate the legal analysis results.
In the data analysis process, an inductive approach
was mainly applied, which aimed to generate new
information from the data (raw interview text data),
explore the research subject matter from a different/
new perspective (along the legal analysis), and establish
(develop) understanding of the underlying opinions
and views that are evident in the raw data collected
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