Oops... 'Why Aren’t There Any Technologists On The NSA Review Panel?' - WaPo [View all]

[WillyT]

Why aren’t there any technologists on the NSA review panel?
By Andrea Peterson - WaPo
Published: August 28 at 1:07 pm

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The White House released the official list of members for the panel to review government surveillance policies. It included the four former White House and intelligence community staffers previously reported by ABC—Michael Morell, Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire—and one additional academic, Geoffrey Stone.

Stone hired Obama for his job at the University of Chicago law school. After Ed Snowden’s leaks, he described Obama as a “rational civil libertarian,” and suggested that liberals who expected Obama to be a strong advocate of civil liberties were engaging in “wishful thinking.” ABC news describes him as a “longtime Obama supporter and self-described informal adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign.”

Stone previously criticized the president’s approach to government transparency in a New York Times editorial, but recently gave an interview to the Democracy Now! in which he defended the legality of NSA surveillance programs:

So far as I can tell from everything that’s been revealed [by Edward Snowden], absolutely nothing illegal or criminal about these programs. They may be terrible public policy—I’m not sure I approve of it at all—but the fact is the claim that they’re unconstitutional and illegal is wildly premature.

Some in the tech and privacy communities expressed dismay at the lack of tech expertise on the panel. Chris Soghoian, principal technologist and a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, for example, asked on Twitter, “Is it too much to ask that the NSA surveillance review panel include at least one person who knows how to actually run a packet sniffer?”

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the senior staff technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology...

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More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/28/why-arent-there-any-technologists-on-the-nsa-review-panel/