Yes, you heard correctly when President Obama made that promise about his administration. The latest Bloomberg Businessweek reminds us how Obama has fallen short of that mark.
One check against Washington’s vast counterterrorism efforts is supposed to be the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. In a June 17 interview with Charlie Rose, the president said, “I’ll be meeting with them, and what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation” about privacy.
The board is staffed with five presidential appointees who get top secret security clearances and, in theory, the power to shape both legislation and regulations to assure that espionage undertaken in the name of the Patriot Act or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t trample on the public’s privacy rights. That’s how the 9/11 Commission, which proposed the board in 2004, envisioned it would work.
Hamstrung by Congress and ignored by two presidents, the board has been powerless. After neglecting it during his first term, Obama met with board members for the first time on June 21. They never weighed in on the NSA’s Prism program, and had they tried, it’s questionable whether the board would have gotten very far. Its recommendations aren’t binding; the White House, spy agencies, and lawmakers aren’t required to take its advice. And its mandate is virtually impossible to carry out: It’s supposed to tell the public if the government’s secret programs are overreaching, yet it can’t reveal any classified details.
The article blames former President George W. Bush for neutering the privacy board, then offers this addendum.
The panel has fared no better under Obama. He didn’t begin nominating members until he’d been in office for two years, and even then he submitted an incomplete slate. It wasn’t until both parties began pushing bills to boost the country’s cybersecurity that Obama and Senate Republicans worked to fill out the board in an effort to overcome objections from companies and privacy advocates.
