Rights, media and mass-surveillance in a digital age

Intelligence agencies are used by political elites to further the national interest and protect national security. Nation-states can be upfront about sacrificing certain human rights via the process of 'derogation' from human rights treaties, but this requires a specific set of circumstances. Following the events of '9/11' and developed in the context of the War on Terror, the Bush administration developed highly secretive torture-intelligence policies (the Detention and Interrogation Program), and tasked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with carrying them out. This chapter examines the challenges faced by the press and NGOs (as key civil society actors) in holding political-intelligence elites to account on secretive policies that abuse non-derogable human rights. It refers to a paradigmatic contemporary case study of civil society's attempts and challenges in holding political-intelligence elites to account, namely the Bush-era torture-intelligence policy during its most secretive phase. There is very little research examining the relationships of influence between intelligence agencies and civil society.