An executive order may allow the collection of American electronic communications that routinely cross international borders, a panel of experts appeared to agree Friday. But what exactly is being done under Executive Order 12333? The experts wouldn’t say.

The high-profile panel at an American Bar Association conference in the nation’s capital primarily was comprised of officials close to secret U.S. intelligence efforts gathered to discuss what's often described as the more expansive and least understood U.S. surveillance authority.

“People need to understand what their government thinks it can do” under the executive order, insisted Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First, who was the only non-governmental panelist.

Officials, however, were relatively tight-lipped about the order, which whistleblower John Napier Tye said last year allows massive data collection on U.S. citizens without oversight from the courts or Congress.

Lara Flint, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chief counsel for national security, outlined similar concerns as Tye, saying U.S. communications routed or stored on servers outside the country may be inseparable from purely foreign content collected overseas.

A leader of the National Security Agency, perhaps surprisingly, did not push back on the vague concern regarding surveillance efforts that remain secret to the public.

“The Constitution and the Fourth Amendment, which is our guiding principle, is geography based,” said NSA Executive Director Corin Stone, who described it as difficult to pinpoint the geographic origin of data zipping through international communication networks.

Stone said current policy “doesn’t go far enough” to address concern about the matter.

A significant portion of the panel’s time, however, went to congratulating the U.S. government for efforts to increase transparency and respect privacy rights following exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden’s bombshell 2013 disclosures, which prompted legislation to end the dragnet collection of American phone records but has yet to trigger dramatic electronic surveillance reforms.

“We should actually be quite proud,” Stone said. "We’ve been in quite a learning process over the past few years about how to be transparent.”

David Medine, chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), hailed the U.S. as unique in having an independent board such as his able to draft reports on ongoing intelligence operations for the sake of transparency.

Medine’s board was dormant until Snowden’s leaks. Since then, it has released lengthy reports on the call-records collection program and on use of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs collection of U.S.-based Internet records through "upstream" direct interception or the PRISM program in partnership with Internet giants.

The PCLOB currently is investigating applications of Executive Order 12333, conducting two “deep dives” into specific programs run by the NSA and the CIA. Medine said the scope of the executive order is so large the board is struggling to get a big-picture understanding of it.

Panelists notably did not offer a uniformly uncritical take on surveillance oversight.

Nancy Fortenberry, general counsel of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, said her review body only can oversee programs that spy agencies disclose. Designated informants with the agencies may not be told about certain closely held information, she said, and sometimes agency workers are unsure what information to share anyhow.

“The information that does not make it to the designees [within intelligence agencies] does not make it to the oversight board,” she said, echoing a frequent criticism of the one-sided Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees many intelligence efforts but not overseas collection performed under Executive Order 12333.

Emerging technologies, Fortenberry added, continuously alter the type and volume of data circulating the Internet, which affects policymaking about what to do with intercepts. “Things of that nature will have to be constantly addressed” as new technologies emerge, she said.

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After the panel, Medine told U.S. News not to read anything into his restrained discussion of the executive order.