Earlier this month, the Obama Administration said it was convening a "high level group of outside experts" to review intelligence operations and conduct a meaningful review on the American surveillance infrastructure.

But a new report published late Wednesday from ABC News reveals that four of the panelists have longstanding ties to government and intelligence infrastructure, leading some legal scholars outside government to question how independent it actually will be. (It's not known if the panel will have more members beyond the named four.) Thursday’s White House press conference aboard Air Force One did not address the issue. ABC added that the White House is expected to formally announce members of that panel on Thursday, and so far, the government has not denied ABC's report.

The panel is supposed to present initial findings to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper by November 2013, with its final recommendations due before the end of the year. According to ABC News, the group consists of four names: Michael Morrell, Richard Clarke, Peter Swire, and Cass Sunstein.

A top spy, a counter-terrorism official, and two law professors

Morrell is a veteran of the CIA, having served as acting director of the agency twice: once in 2011 and once from 2012 to 2013.

Clarke is also a veteran of government, having served as a counter-terrorism advisor during the George W. Bush Administration. Later, he was appointed as special advisor to the president on cybersecurity. After leaving government in 2003, Clarke founded Good Harbor Security Risk Management, a cybersecurity consultancy.

Swire, a law professor and privacy expert currently at the Georgia Institute of Technology, also noted on his website that he served during the Clinton Administration as “Chief Counselor for Privacy in the US Office of Management and Budget, the only person to date to have government-wide responsibility for privacy policy.” Back in 2004, Swire also wrote one of the best-known academic articles on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the 104-page article, he outlines an extensive history of the statute and proposes new reforms.

Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor, formerly served as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and is married to Samantha Power, the current United States ambassador to the United Nations. Journalists and legal experts have rediscovered an academic paper that Sunstein authored in 2010, in which he called for governments agents to “enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic, or implications for political action.”

Clarke, Swire, and Sunstein did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. We were unable to locate an e-mail address for Morrell, the former CIA official.

“It’s especially hard not to be skeptical”

When asked about their opinions on the choice of these four, various legal experts expressed a mixture of doubt and praise as to the effectiveness of these supposed picks.

“The picks show that the president's commitment to having ‘independent’ and ‘outside experts’ review the spying programs is false,” Mark Jaycox, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars. “All the picks are thorough Washington insiders.”

Other law professors held similar sentiments.

“They all clearly have strong connections to the Administration, so I think skepticism about how independently they will operate is warranted,” Clark Asay, a law professor from Penn State University, told Ars. “It’s especially hard not to be skeptical and to accept the Administration’s message of ‘trust us, we’re taking care of this’ when they clearly haven’t and are only trying to do so now because of public fallout from Mr. Snowden’s revelations.”

On the other hand…

Many, though, believe that for such a group to be effective, it by definition needs strong ties to the government.

“Choosing insiders has positives and negatives: On the one hand, choosing insiders makes it more likely that they can move the levers of power,” Robin Feldman, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, told Ars by e-mail. “On the other hand, choosing insiders makes it more challenging for them to have the independence.”

Meanwhile, Orin Kerr, a privacy law expert and professor at George Washington University acknowledged in a Thursday blog post on the Volokh Conspiracy that while the group isn’t as diverse as he might like, “perhaps that was necessary because everyone needed to have a security clearance, which presumably they all have or recently had. But it’s not as large or diverse a group as I would like to see.”

Dorothy Glancy, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, told Ars that the selection “looks like a reasonably good working group,” although she lamented the lack of women in the group. The professor also noted that Cass Sunstein was a colleague of Barack Obama’s at the University of Chicago when he was a professor of law there.

“Cass is particularly insightful about government organizations, administrative agencies, and their limitations,” Glancy added. “He is generally libertarian in his philosophical views—a good perspective to have on the panel. The word is that the president listens to Cass, who is known to be direct, frank, and unusually intelligent. Cass will likely contribute a great deal in terms of how to manage a large and famously non-transparent agency.”

Still, the EFF’s Mark Jaycox continued in his e-mail that he seriously doubts the panel’s independence.

“That's why a Congressional investigation, led by a new committee, must be tasked to fully look into the spying on innocent Americans and the secret law supposedly justifying it (which we got a glimpse of with yesterday's release of a legal opinion),” he wrote. “The government's disclosures and news reports elicit more questions than answers. These questions must be answered for the public to have a proper debate on the Constitution and our country's spying regime—especially when that regime is being turned on innocent Americans' phone calls and e-mails.”