Portugal's Intelligence Watchdog Reports the Services Are Weighing AI Tools, and Asks Parliament Again to Settle Metadata
Two meetings, two inspections and 36 pages. The oversight council says the services performed within the law, and repeats a warning it has been making for years about the legal vacuum around metadata.
The body that watches Portugal's intelligence services has delivered its opinion on the first half of 2026 to parliament, and two lines in it are worth the attention of anyone who cares where the limits of surveillance sit. The services are weighing whether to build and use artificial intelligence tools internally. And the question of their access to telecommunications metadata, unresolved for a decade, is still unresolved.
The Conselho de Fiscalização do Sistema de Informações da República Portuguesa (CFSIRP) is a three-member body elected by the Assembleia da República. Its job, under article 9 of the framework law of the intelligence system (Lei n.º 30/84), is to follow and scrutinise what the Secretary-General and the services do, with particular regard to citizens' rights, freedoms and guarantees. Its 36-page opinion is published in full.
The threat list
The council sets out what the services are watching permanently: terrorism, organised crime, espionage, cybercrime, cyberthreats, sabotage, subversion, violent extremisms and radicalisation phenomena capable of compromising social cohesion, organised insurrection movements, and other hybrid or diffuse threats. It notes that most of these are not contained by national borders and can run simultaneously across political, economic, technological, social, military and informational dimensions.
What the oversight actually consisted of
In six months the council held two meetings with the Secretary-General of the SIRP and carried out two inspections of the Common Structures that report directly to him: the shared information technology department and the shared human resources department. Its remit also reaches the military intelligence centre, CISMIL, under article 34 of the framework law, and it works alongside a separate Data Oversight Commission that holds exclusive competence over the intelligence data centres.
It was during the technology inspection that the artificial intelligence question came up. The council records that it examined "the prospects relating to the eventual creation and internal use of tools based on artificial intelligence", framing it as part of the services' technological modernisation rather than as a decision already taken. The same inspection looked at open source intelligence, which the council treats as the growth area: it wants the services equipped with modern systems able to identify, collect, organise, cross-reference and analyse publicly available information.
Metadata, again
The council's clearest recommendation concerns telecommunications metadata. It considers it important that "a normative solution be found that allows the framing of access to metadata by the Intelligence Services, in terms compatible with the Constitution and with the necessary safeguarding of citizens' rights, freedoms and guarantees". It adds, pointedly, that it has been warning about the relevance of this matter for some time, and asks the legislator for a clear, balanced and constitutionally compliant solution.
That is a familiar ask. In June the head of the intelligence system, Vítor Sereno, petitioned for a constitutional revision to open metadata access to the services. The oversight council is not endorsing any particular route; it is saying the current legal vacuum is itself the problem.
People, not machines
For all the technology, the council's longest passage is about staffing. It says the services' performance in the half-year rested "in large measure" on the quality and commitment of their people, and that the recruitment and training effort begun at the end of 2025 should continue. It recommends multi-year recruitment planning rather than reactive hiring, and more flexible human-resources rules suited to intelligence work, because attracting new staff will not help if the most experienced cannot be retained.
Its overall verdict for the first half of 2026: the services carried out their responsibilities efficiently, in line with the priorities set for them, and globally within the constitutional and legal framework.
