Growing pains for privacy watchdog PCLOB

As President Barack Obama and members of Congress seek to soothe a frenzy over unchecked government surveillance, they’ve held up an obscure federal watchdog nicknamed PCLOB as a remedy. But if the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is going to emerge as a strong, independent check on the National Security Agency and its much-maligned programs, it first has some growing up to do.

The panel, created after Sept. 11 to stand up for Americans’ constitutional rights, has struggled to find its footing: It has only one full-time board-level member, a staff mostly borrowed from other agencies, a roughly $900,000 annual budget and a troubled political past that dates back to the Bush administration. PCLOB returned to life only in 2013 after it took years for Obama to nominate a full slate of board members — and years for the Senate to confirm them. Yet civil-liberties advocates and regulators already have looked to it for answers on surveillance, and its new review of the NSA has come to double as a test for a board that’s dwarfed in size by the intelligence agencies it oversees.