Abracadabra! Bush Makes Privacy Board Vanish

ABRACADABRA! BUSH MAKES PRIVACY BOARD VANISH
[SOURCE: Wired, AUTHOR: 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. 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.
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/02/privacy_board