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02.04.08

Abracadabra! Bush Makes Privacy Board

Vanish
By Ryan Singel

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 public’s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties
as we work to protect the country against terrorism," Lieberman said in a
statement.
"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 statement.
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
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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.