There's even more bad news. In the newly released directive, there is no longer any mention of assessing how federal surveillance programs affect "our privacy," or figuring out how to make sure that there is "no abuse."

What happened to those goals? The closest the Monday directive comes to them is an instruction to remember "our need to maintain the public trust" as one of many policy considerations.

Forget whether abuses are happening, or whether privacy rights are in fact being protected. Clapper need only probe the perception of trust. Remember, this is a man with a demonstrated willingness to tell lies under oath when he decides doing so serves the greater good. How might he interpret the charge to make sure that public trust is maintained? I strongly suspect his approach will involve hiding certain truths that, if exposed, would diminish public trust more.

The reforms Obama announced last week were wholly inadequate. Still, having promised them to the American people, the least he could do is follow through on his meager pledges. "For students of history, this will be a familiar pattern," Tim Lee writes in the Washington Post. "In 1975, President Gerald Ford created a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to examine allegations of abuses by American intelligence agencies. But the commission's close ties to the executive branch prevented it from doing a thorough and vigorous investigation of the intelligence agencies' activities. Instead, truly vigorous oversight came from independent committees created by Congress."

Got that, legislators? Duty calls.

Update: The White House is pushing back against the many outlets who've reported that James Clapper is leading the review, according to The Guardian:

The White House has moved to dampen controversy over the role of the director of national intelligence James Clapper in a panel reviewing NSA surveillance, insisting that he would neither lead it nor choose the members. Statements by Barack Obama and Clapper on Monday night were widely interpreted as the director of national intelligence being placed in charge of the inquiry, which the president had announced on Friday would be "independent". The apparent involvement of Clapper, who has admitted lying to Congress over NSA surveillance of US citizens, provoked a backlash, with critics accusing the president of putting a fox in charge of the hen house. But the White House national security council insisted on Tuesday that Clapper's role would be more limited. "The panel members are being selected by the White House, in consultation with the intelligence community," national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said. The DNI had to be involved for administrative reasons, because the panel would need security clearance and access to classified material, she added. After the White House and the Pentagon released their statements saying Clapper had been asked by Obama to "establish" the panel and report its findings, media outlets reported this to mean Clapper heading the panel and choosing the members.

I've followed up with a U.S. National Intelligence spokesman who contacted me about this article in hopes of getting a fuller explanation of Clapper's role.