Chapter One: Making the case for public oversight of intelligence-driven surveillance: Key issues and core concepts

This chapter deals with the core concepts engaged in this book and how they are understood, especially public oversight and how it can be distinguished from other forms of oversight. It also introduces the chapters in the volume. It examines the assumptions about democracy underpinning conventional oversight by formal oversight entities, as well as those underpinning the more radical and participatory forms made possible by public oversight. The chapter also sets the basis for the chapters focussing on the practices of the media and civil society organisations as a neglected but much needed dimension of oversight (Kniep et al, 2023, pg. 7). While being case study based, we explain how each chapter illuminates different elements of public oversight, and what it takes to build it, sustain it and make it effective. Doing so allows us to start developing a theoretical basis to predict conditions in which public oversight can succeed. The chapter also considers some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas in researching intelligence and surveillance in semi-authoritarian contexts. We also explain that the chapters are written by academics, civil society practitioners and journalists, and so there is a mix of more descriptive and theoretical approaches. However, overall, the volume tilts more to the critical paradigm, in that the researchers were motivated by a commitment to using their research to call the powerful to account, and in the process aimed to change how intelligence is organised to include a broader range of oversight actors as legitimate actors.