People play a key role in the intelligence process; they constitute intelligence organizations and formal structures; they fulfill intelligence procedures; they take part in informal groups, rituals and discourses; they define who their enemy is; they carry out operations; they work as case officers; they are recruited as agents; they live next door under cover; they analyze and interpret the collected information. In the end people decide if they want to believe the results presented to them. Despite NSA, hackers, digital surveillance and data mining are today in the eye of the public, the human factor cannot be ignored when studying intelligence. Thus, the fifth Need to Know conference was focused on different aspects of the human factor in the intelligence process.
The conference has been organized by the Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, the Center for Cold War Studies of the University of Southern Denmark, the Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, and the Baltic Intelligence and Security Studies Association.
The „Need to Know” conferences were founded in 2011 and take place annually. The focus of the conferences is on foreign intelligence and they invite scholars of intelligence studies as well as former practitioners to an interdisciplinary discussion of historical, current and methodological questions within the field. Intelligence studies have benefitted greatly from the opening of archives in Central Europe and it is the result of this research in particular, which has been presented on the conferences. The conferences have established themselves as an important meeting place for scholars from Europe, the US, Canada and Russia.