:Rich, for heaven's sake.  This is not concealed in any way, shape or form. That you've not paid attention to it in the past does not mean it is concealed. We don't appoint "our own watchdogs", we appoint the Audit Subcommittee, which investigates concerns about the use of checkuser and oversight permissions. There's nothing to be embarrassed about here; only frustration that several years after the fact you're showing up and complaining that nobody told you something that had been as well publicised as we could make it. The Arbitration Committee has a fiduciary duty to the WMF to grant access to checkuser and oversight permissions only to those who meet WMF and community standards. As well, the Committee has a duty to the community to do its best to ensure that these roles are filled by individuals who are capable, available and are able to communicate their actions appropriately: in the case of checkusers, without violation of the privacy policy, and in the case of oversighters, to confirm what action has been taken (if any) to the requesting party. If the community-based CUs and OSs fall behind, it is usually arbitrators who will step in and fill in the gaps, so that the community continues to receive responses to their requests.  For the record, as recently as 4 years ago, oversight requests often took days if not weeks to respond to, and SPIs were frequently weeks behind.  Now we're more likely to get complaints because an oversight request has taken more than an hour to be addressed, or an SPI took more than a day.  It's darn tough to meet these expectations given the staffing we currently have, which is why we are about to seek out more community members willing to share the workload.