Adam Molnar and I have a new paper on accountability and signals intelligence, which we will be presenting at the Security Intelligence & Surveillance in the Big Data Age workshop. The workshop will be held at the University of Ottawa later this month as part of the Big Data Surveillance partnership project that is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The paper focuses exclusively on the mechanisms which are needed for civil society actors to evaluate the propriety of actions undertaken by signals intelligence agencies. In it, we argue that Canada’s foreign signals intelligence agency’s public accountability reporting might be enhanced by drawing on lessons from existing statutory electronic surveillance reporting. Focusing exclusively on Canada’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), we first outline the relationships between accountability of government agencies to their respective Ministers and Members of Parliament, the role of transparency in enabling governmental accountability to the public, and the link between robust accountability regimes and democratic legitimacy of government action. Next, we feature a contemporary bulk data surveillance practice undertaken by Canada’s signals intelligence agency and the deficiencies in how CSE’s existing review body makes the Establishment’s practices publicly accountable to Parliamentarians and the public alike. We then discuss how proposed changes to CSE oversight and review mechanisms will not clearly rectify the existing public accountability deficits. We conclude by proposing a principle-based framework towards a robust public accountability process that is linked to those underlying domestic and foreign statutory electronic surveillance reports.

A copy of our paper, titled, “Horizontal Accountability and Signals Intelligence: Lesson Drawing from Annual Electronic Surveillance Reports,” is available at the Social Sciences Research Network as well as for download from this website.