[Infowarrior] - Abracadabra! Bush Makes Privacy Board Vanish

[Richard Forno]

Abracadabra! Bush Makes Privacy Board Vanish
By Ryan Singel Email 02.04.08 | 12:00 AM
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/02/privacy_board

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly
empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board
without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush
administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the
United States.

The failure rankles Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins
(R-Maine), respectively chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate's
Homeland Security Committee.

"I urge the president to move swiftly to nominate members to the new board
to preserve the public¹s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and
civil liberties as we work to protect the country against terrorism,"
Lieberman said.

"The White House's failure to move forward with appointing the new board is
unacceptable, and I call on the administration to do so as quickly as
possible to prevent a gap in this vital mission," Collins said.

In a 2007 measure implementing 9/11 Commission recommendations, Congress
reconfigured the oversight committee, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberty
Oversight Board. The intent was to make the board more independent of the
White House, require it to be bipartisan and make it more accountable to the
public.

Those changes came after civil-liberties groups blasted the board for a lack
of independence and relevance.

Board chairwoman Carol Dinkins formerly served as a campaign treasurer for
President Bush and was a partner at the same law firm as former Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales. Also appointed to the board was formidable lawyer
Ted Olson, who was named solicitor general after winning the Bush v. Gore
case that settled the 2000 election dispute, and whose wife died in the 9/11
attacks.

Lanny Davis -- the board's sole Democrat -- resigned in May 2007 to protest
edits the White House made to the board's 2007 annual report to Congress.

The board's findings about issues such as warrantless wiretapping by the
National Security Agency were by-and-large administration-friendly, though
the board did issue one informative but overlooked report on redress for
erroneous inclusion on terrorist watch lists (.pdf).

Terms for the board's original members expired on Jan. 30, but no
nominations have been sent to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which
must approve appointees for the five vacancies.

Civil-liberties advocates like Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center
for National Security Studies, considered the board to be apologists for the
government's anti-terrorism policies, rather than independent
civil-liberties watchdogs.

"This board failed miserably in its mission of helping to protect Americans'
privacy and instead acted mainly to help the White House whitewash programs
like warrantless NSA wiretapping that violate Americans' civil liberties,"
Graves said. "Now that Congress has changed the board's rules to make it a
little more independent, the White House appears to have no interest in
appointing anyone to it."

But even the newly configured board doesn't have enough power and what is
really needed is a totally independent body with the ability to subpoena
documents, according to Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for
the American Civil Liberties Union.

"We want them to be more than just the privacy version of Congressional
Research Service," Sparapani said. "They need to be able to slap hands and
force people to consider privacy in the initial creation of programs, and
then whack people into line when privacy violations occur."

The board released its second annual report (.pdf) to Congress on Jan. 30,
its last day of operation. Its documents are being shipped to the National
Archives for storage.

The privacy board ignored repeated requests for comment for this story, and
a White House press staffer did not provide information by late Friday about
the status of nominees to the board.