Obama had stressed that 'a high-level group of outside experts' would be included. | REUTERS W.H. surveillance board insider-heavy

President Barack Obama pledged he’d appoint “outside experts” to review the country’s surveillance practices, but he’s since tapped largely insiders for the key posts.

The group, formed to examine the policies and procedures at the National Security Agency as it tracks terrorism suspects’ digital communications, is composed mostly of Washington types, many with connections to the very intelligence establishment they’re now tasked with scrutinizing in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks.


There’s Michael Morell, a CIA veteran who once led the agency on an interim basis; Richard Clarke, a top counter-terrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations; and Cass Sunstein, a well-known academic who did regulatory work for the Obama White House and is married to United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power. The panel also includes Peter Swire, a former Clinton administration privacy expert, and Geoffrey Stone, a top professor at the University of Chicago Law School who knows the president.

Announcing the inquiry at an Aug. 9 press conference, Obama described it as “a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies” — and he stressed it would be “independent.”

“I think it’s fair to say that by stressing the idea of an independent review board, the appointees don’t live up to what most people view as independent,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

What Obama was actually seeking, Harris said, was a group to look at the internal management and effectiveness of surveillance programs. She added the board has a “very broad mission, and I’m going to withhold judgment until I see what they do.”

Obama formally commissioned the so-called Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies in a memo earlier this month. The mission: to “assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”

“We need new thinking for a new era,” the president said at his press conference. “We now have to unravel terrorist plots by finding a needle in a haystack of global telecommunications, and meanwhile technology has given governments, including our own, unprecedented capability to monitor communications.”

Now that the members have been announced, though, critics find the roster lacking.

“There are no technologists on that committee,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the ACLU. Soghoian was the first in-house technologist at the FTC, where he assisted the agency’s lawyers on investigations that later resulted in settlements with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Soghoian said there’s “no way” for the new surveillance review group to address the burgeoning debate over surveillance when it’s composed primarily of lawyers and career Washington types.

The White House, for its part, did not comment for this story.

The members do bring to the table government expertise — and, in many cases, previous experience with intelligence programs and security clearances. That includes Morell, a multi-decade CIA veteran, as well as Clarke, who’s now a cybersecurity consultant. Sunstein served until recently as the chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Swire, a top professor now at Georgia Tech, also serves as a fellow with the Center for American Progress. He has spent months leading discussions between industry and privacy advocates over how to implement a voluntary Do Not Track system to help consumers avoid commercial Web tracking — but Swire stepped down from the post this week.

Stone, meanwhile, knew the president when Obama, too, taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

The board does not include technology executives, some of whom — like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google engineer Vint Cerf — huddled with administration officials and the president himself days before Obama announced the review.

It’s also lacking civil liberties advocates, though Harris said the surveillance review panel “has a different mission” from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal watchdog that is already surveying the NSA and other agencies’ civil-liberties protections.