Say you’re the President. Don’t like the privacy control board that Congress required you to form? You remember, the one that was created to oversee new warrantless NSA wiretaps on people here in the United States? How would you avoid all of that congressional oversight?
The answer was actually very simple. Just don’t nominate anyone to sit on the the board. And then it won’t exist.
In a 2007 measure implementing 9/11 Commission recommendations, Congress reconfigured the oversight committee, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board. The intent was to make the board more independent of the White House, require it to be bipartisan and make it more accountable to the public.
The original board was already described as a sham, filled with Bush insiders . The board members functioned as PR shills for the White House. Their role seemed to be to sell the idea that spying on our own citizens somehow makes us all safer. The press wrote that the board would not answer any questions from the press, privacy advocates, or academics during introductory press conferences.
When the original board members’ terms were not renewed, no new board members were seated. Then the board was dissolved when terms for the board’s original members expired on Jan. 30.
It concerns me, more than a bit, that the privacy and civil liberties checks and balances in this new wiretapping initiative has been quietly eliminated. It also concerns me that telcos like AT&T are going to receive retroactive amnesty for spying already done for the NSA.
