President Obama's NSA review panel isn't the change we need

[Commentary] President Barack Obama officially announced the five men in charge of reviewing the secretive and powerful US intelligence apparatus: Richard A. Clarke, Michael Morell, Cass Sunstein, Geoffrey Stone, and Peter Swire. The group — which includes three former White House advisors and one former CIA deputy director — will be given the task of restoring public trust in a much-maligned program, using what President Obama has called "new thinking for a new era."

President Obama said that the panel would "review our entire intelligence and communications technologies," a wording that could mean anything from examining precisely how the NSA stores phone and e-mail records to taking a high-level look at virtually every agency that deals in surveillance. Almost all of the members raise red flags to people who want a rigorous review of privacy issues. Michael Morell has spent almost his entire career at the CIA; he stepped down as deputy director only a few months ago. But the question isn’t just whether the panel is composed of people who are willing to take a hard look at the NSA’s surveillance programs. It’s what they’ll actually end up reviewing, how seriously the White House will take their proposals, and whether we’ll see both concrete technological changes and a holistic rethinking of how privacy concerns should be weighed against national security ones. President Obama has said that the panel will let his Administration "move forward with a better understanding" of privacy and security concerns, and he’s promised other changes that will prioritize civil liberties, but there’s no guarantee that this committee has any real teeth.