Chapter Ten: Current trajectories and future challenges for public oversight

In this concluding chapter, we assess the major findings from each of the chapters and return to the original question posed in the introduction, of how the public can perform more effective oversight digital surveillance for intelligence purposes. Each chapter presented case studies of moments when public oversight has been attempted, and either succeeded, or failed or achieved mixed outcomes. The chapters analysed moments when the public required intelligence agencies to explain and justify surveillance and change surveillance practices when they amounted to abuse (McCarthy and Fluck, 2016). Some of these cases involved intelligence and surveillance laws or state-sanctioned data processing systems that the public feared had surveillant potential. Others followed the well-recognised shock-driven approach to intelligence reform, where controversies around surveillance abuses came into the public domain through whistleblowing or the leaking of intelligence information, and these controversies galvanised public action of various kinds (Johnson, 2018, p.209-246). This chapter uses a summary of the main chapter findings to address key research questions and to develop a set of theoretical propositions about public oversight and the conditions under which it is likely to succeed.