As US gov’t surveillance watchdog group opens for business, questions linger

[Commentary] This week, the United States’ Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) held its first-ever public hearing with all five of its members present. That hearing, which was open to the public and was carried on C-SPAN, took hours of testimony from various government and intelligence officials. But PCLOB’s existence seems to raise more questions than answers.

First off, what if its conclusions and the President’s Review Group were to come to different conclusions about whether the government has overreached in its surveillance? Which group’s conclusion would take precedence? Worse still, if members of Congress can barely get straight answers from government officials, how can yet another government panel do so? “We know that when even Congress speaks to the NSA, they’re forced to play something of a guessing game,” Brian Pascal, a legal fellow at the University of California, Hastings Privacy and Technology Project, said in an e-mail to Ars. “How much worse must it be for PCLOB? There’s no such thing as ‘Contempt of Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.’ And for the public, it’s not transparency if you have to guess at the existence of a thing.” Plus, if PCLOB suggested broad changes to the government’s surveillance programs, what are the chances that they would actually be implemented? After all, there’s one ultimate problem with PCLOB: it has no actual power to change American policy, nor does it have the authority to sanction government officials who do not comply. “That’s the downside of being an independent body—they will have to rely on their power of persuasion,” Michelle Richardson, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, told Ars.