WASHINGTON – The first public meeting of a Bush administration "civil liberties protection panel" had a surreal quality to it, as the five-member board refused to answer any questions from the press, and stonewalled privacy advocates and academics on key questions about domestic spying.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which met Tuesday, was created by Congress in 2004 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, but is part of the White House, which handpicked all the members. Though mandated by law in late 2004, the board was not sworn in until March 2006, due to inaction on the part of the White House and Congress.

The three-hour meeting, held at Georgetown University, quickly established that the panel would be something less than a fierce watchdog of civil liberties. Instead, members all but said they view their job as helping Americans learn to relax and love warrantless surveillance.

"The question is, how much can the board share with the public about the protections incorporated in both the development and implementation of those policies?" said Alan Raul, a Washington D.C. lawyer who serves as vice chairman. "On the public side, I believe the board can help advance national security and the rights of American by helping explain how the government safeguards U.S. personal information."

Board members were briefed on the government's NSA-run warrantless wiretapping program last week, and said they were impressed by how the program handled information collected from American citizens' private phone calls and e-mail.

But the ACLU's Caroline Fredrickson was quick to ridicule the board's response to the administration's anti-terrorism policies, charging that the panel's private meetings to date largely consisted of phone calls with government insiders and agencies.

"When our government is torturing innocent people and spying on Americans without a warrant, the PCLOB should act – indeed, should have acted long ago," Fredrickson said. "Clearly you've been fiddling while Rome burns. This board needs to bring a little sunshine. So far America is kept in the dark – and this is the first public meeting you have had."

Lisa Graves, the deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, asked the board two simple questions: Did they know how many Americans had been eavesdropped on by the warrantless wiretapping program, and, if so, how many?

Raul acknowledged in a roundabout way that the data existed, but said it was too sensitive to release. Graves then asked if the board had pushed to have that data made public, as the Justice Department is required to do with typical spy wiretaps.

Raul declined to say. "It is important for us to retain confidentiality on what recommendations we have and haven't made," he said.

Graves tried to push the issue of whether the board was going to be public or private, but chairwoman Carol Dinkins politely cut her off and ended the question-and-answer session.

Board member Lanny Davis, who had introduced himself by saying he grew up in a household where the ACLU was considered a "heroic organization," jumped in to explain why the nation's most prominent privacy board won't be transparent about whether it is urging more transparency.

"Congress put us in the office of the president, we didn't," Davis said. "Had Congress wanted us to be an incensement agency, it would have made us independent."

The sparsely attended meeting shaped up as a mostly one-way conversation, with attendees offering suggestions on how the board could transform itself into an effective organization by building on the work of earlier government privacy panels.

Fred Cate, a cybersecurity professor at Indiana University, stressed that anti-terrorism programs that collect and sift through data on Americans – such as the no-fly list and the recently announced Automated Targeting Center that has been computing terrorism quotients for those flying in and out of the country for more than five years – need to have a robust way for people to contest the scores and underlying data.

"Redress seems to be the foundation of any system," Cate said. "The only certainty in this entire field is that there will be false positives."

The committee members largely kept their views to themselves, and the press was barred from posing questions during the two short public question periods. Dinkins, the board's chairwoman, who is a partner at the same law firm where Attorney General Alberto Gonzales once worked, offered little beyond pleasantries. Another board member, Francis Taylor, never spoke.