Why aren’t there any technologists on the NSA review panel?

[Commentary] The White House panel to review government surveillance policies includes Michael Morell, Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein, Peter Swire, and Geoffrey Stone. 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 where Swire is a Fellow, argued on Twitter than Swire’s publication history showed he was technically literate, but wrote he would have liked to see someone like Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten on the panel. Having a technologist like Felten on the panel could provide much-needed insight into the broader technical implications of government surveillance practices.