My Profile

Thorsten heads interface's research on surveillance and democratic governance. He created the European Intelligence Oversight Network (EION) and is a Principal Investigator in the new collaborative research project GUARDINT, designed to address and to redress the gap between increasingly transnational surveillance practices and still largely national accountability mechanisms. Thorsten gave testimony before the European Parliament and the Bundestag on intelligence legislation, and his work appeared in various media outlets. He is a member of the advisory board on Europe/Transatlantic of the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin and the scientific committee of the Cyber and Data Security Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Thorsten holds a doctorate degree in political science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. In the past, Thorsten worked as Senior Fellow at the Brandenburg Institute for Society and Security, The Hague Institute for Global Justice, and as Advisor for the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). As Transatlantic Post-Doc Fellow for International Relations and Security (TAPIR), Thorsten studied national surveillance policies at the French Institute for International Relations (ifri) in Paris and the RAND Corporation and the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.