There’s a little-known federal agency whose job is to ensure U.S. spy agencies protect privacy and other civil liberties even as they work to defeat terrorists and criminals, and to blow the whistle when that doesn’t happen. But the agency, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is down to just a single voting member — which means it has been stripped of nearly all its powers, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.
The board was created by Congress in 2004, at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, to help the executive branch balance national security priorities with individual rights. After Bush administration officials heavily edited PCLOB’s first report, one member resigned, and Congress in 2007 turned it into an independent agency and expanded its writ to include oversight of congressional action. Still, the board remained obscure; some members of Congress seemed unaware of its existence even as documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden produced more privacy scandals.
PCLOB is supposed to have five members, no more than three of whom come from the same political party; to employ a full-time chairperson; to have regular access to the 17 intelligence agencies; and to publish unclassified versions of its evaluations of U.S. espionage powers.
But with just one part-time board member left, after another member’s term ended last week, the agency has very few formal powers to police the so-called “deep state” until President Trump nominates a new board, the emails reveal. Without the statutory quorum of three members, PCLOB “may not initiate new advice or oversight projects” or offer advice to the intelligence community, according to a list drawn up by Jen Burita, PCLOB’s public affairs and legislative officer, and shared by email with several congressional staffers who had raised questions about the impact of the attrition among board members.
In addition, the agency cannot submit to Congress either its semi-annual reports, which detail the conclusions of its investigations, or its plans for declassifying information it has uncovered. The board can’t hold public meetings, which have offered the chance for public input in the past, or give formal recommendations to the intelligence community.
The board can proceed with ongoing investigations, and individual members — or member, as the case may be — may make public appearances, issue statements, testify before Congress and give advice to intelligence agencies without purporting to speak for PCLOB as an agency or board.
Nominations to bring PCLOB to quorum seem unlikely to happen any time soon, if they happen at all. One hurdle is that Trump has to work with Democrats to name at least two of the board’s members, and lack of bipartisan cooperation stymied PCLOB appointments under Presidents Bush and Obama. The bigger issue is that Trump may not be interested in naming any members at all. On Fox News on Tuesday, the president claimed he hasn’t filled upwards of 600 administration slots because “they’re unnecessary to have.”
The board’s eight or so staff workers are ready for a doomsday situation.
“The board has anticipated a sub quorum scenario and has been preparing for that already,” Burita wrote in an email to a staff member of the House intelligence committee in early December. (The email and other documents cited in this story were obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.)
One key item on PCLOB’s agenda for the near future was helping ensure that privacy rights were protected in the course of implementing a pact called Privacy Shield, which would allow corporate information transfers to the U.S. from within the European Union. The U.S. government reassured Europeans, fearful of American surveillance programs, that PCLOB would be involved in overseeing such transfers. But with only one member, that’s unlikely, says Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the legal think tank The Constitution Project. “PCLOB falling away may be another nail in the coffin for the US-EU Privacy Shield unless Congress gets serious” about reforming other areas of surveillance policy, he wrote in an email to The Intercept.
One congressional staffer asked Burita in an email if there was “any word from Trump-elect team on names for consideration.” There was no response indicating that was the case.
But this didn’t start with Trump. The board’s been withering away for almost a year.
Its former chair, David Medine, resigned last March to work on global poverty issues and was never replaced. James Dempsey, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, left when his term ended on January 29. Judge Patricia Wald, a former chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, quietly retired on January 7 — requesting no statement be made publicly, according to the emails. And as of February 21, Rachel Brand, who served in the Bush administration Department of Justice, is gone too, after her term ended.
The board’s one remaining board member, Elisabeth Collins, worked in the Justice Department under George W. Bush and, according to the Associated Press, “drafted revised guidelines in 2008 that … gave FBI agents involved in national security probes new authority to conduct physical surveillance without a court order.” Collins also dissented from a 2014 PCLOB finding that the NSA’s bulk phone-record collection program was illegal and should be shut down.
The board served a vital oversight role in recent years. After examining how the NSA was vacuuming up massive amounts of information about Americans’ phone calls in 2014, it eviscerated the program in an extensive public report. That input helped Congress decide to nix the program and replace it with one where companies held onto the data instead of the government in 2015.
The panel’s nearly 200-page 2014 study on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will undoubtedly play a role in lawmakers’ decisions about how to reform foreign surveillance programs this year. The board had also intended to publish a report by the end of 2016 on its investigation into Executive Order 12333, a major expansion of the intelligence community’s surveillance powers by President Ronald Reagan, but that never happened.
Medine, in an email to the The Intercept, called on Trump to take action. “With only one member remaining, the board can no longer conduct business until new appointments are made by the president and confirmed by the Senate,” he wrote.
While PCLOB might be hobbled for the time being, it appears the board members did scramble to complete several classified reports before losing quorum.
According to the emails obtained by The Intercept, PCLOB managed to complete and submit a “deep dive” report on the CIA as well as an assessment of an Obama presidential policy directive on privacy prior to Dempsey and Wald’s departure.
The emails don’t describe the CIA report in detail, but do give a general sense of the directive behind the investigation into the presidential policy directive, known as PPD-28, which required intelligence agencies to draw up plans to protect personal information collected in the course of their work. Burita wrote that Obama “encouraged the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to prepare a report that assesses the implementation of any matters contained within this directive that fall under the agency’s mandate … as it relates to counterterrorism efforts and the protection of privacy and civil liberties.”
Top image: An email obtained through Freedom of Information Act by The Intercept sent by PCLOB public affairs and legislative officer Jen Burita.
Given the impact this might have on privacy shield, and by proxy thr access American Technology companies have to the European Market, why aren’t companies like Google pressing Congress on this? They need Europe, so I’d imagine they’d be fighting against anything that might result in European regulators banning them from the market.
Great question!
Being an American, and having a “special way of seeing words”…I’m afraid I read PCLOB as placebo all the way through! Even at that, I’m not off the mark!
in the name of protecting FREEDOM.
sure – the freedom of wallstreet thieves to rob Americans and continue to rob Americans. The freedom to falisfy evidence to create a war. The freedom to murder someone like Seth Rich. It’s much worse than you think.
what’s that great flushing sound?
January 10, 2014 *500* Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent
*It’s Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys* No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they’re doing it.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/500-years-of-history-shows-that-mass-spying-is-always-aimed-at-crushing-dissent/5364462
Jun 7, 2013 William Binney – The Government is Profiling You
https://youtu.be/qB3KR8fWNh0
“The board had also intended to publish a report by the end of 2016 on its investigation into Executive Order 12333, a major expansion of the intelligence community’s surveillance powers by President Ronald Reagan, but that never happened.”
A little late dont you think? The horses have not only left the barn, they have died of old age in the pasture.
So the government protects its serfs from…itself? That’s the sort of deranged fairy tale that ‘progressives’ believe eh. Well, like all fairy tales it’s a lie.
As noticed below, this is a sacm. And people who promote scams, like the article’s author, are scammers.
The privacy board was nothing more than a scam to make people feel better.
It makes more sense to just assume the US government spies on everyone everywhere, especially commenters on non-jingoistic sites like this.
Let’s all raise a middle finger to the spooks!
Norquist’s policy prescription has been successfully applied for quite some time now. The irony is that the same people who say this out of one side of their mouth, then turn around and opine out of the other about how incompetent government is, never once acknowledging that the latter is exactly what they are trying to achieve in their application of the former.
Not the irony, but the goal.
They opine on government’s (right-wing-imposed) incompetence to get people to hate (competent, non-authoritarian) government, so that they can vote for right-wing whackadoodle government-drowners instead.
Problem is, the parts they don’t want to drown attack foreigners with drones, protesters with police, women’s abortions with defunding and criminal penalties, and expertise with Trump and Palin…
Despite what Norquist said, Republicans don’t actually want to reduce the size of government at all – and they lavishly expand it (militaristically, for example) even as they take away some of its other functions.
Both Democrats and Republicans want the government to be absolutely enormous so that it embodies the corporatist, militarist, imperialist and oppressive-policing goals of the elite and Deep State. The GOP does this unapologetically, hilariously while lying claiming they want less Statism – while the Democrats play the ‘good cop’ by obliging corporatist warmongering and dominance, while also promoting extra spending on frankly inefficient ‘public service’ additions that provide a pittance of help but fail to mitigate corruption.
Republicans don’t actually want to reduce the size of government at all – and they lavishly expand it (militaristically, for example) even as they take away some of its other functions.
Yes. As someone whose professional salary was paid by NIH grants for HIV research I am very aware of this nuance. I didn’t go there because the topic was basically how they have destroyed an agency that did some (small measure) of good.
The GOP does this unapologetically, hilariously while lying claiming they want less Statism
That was what I was getting at with my further comment on irony. It is sort of amazing that neither party wants to call this what it is, a “jobs program” for the wealthy. Or maybe it would be better to just call it what it is, UBI for the wealthy.
No one is watching the watchers. The only upside is that few of us are interesting enough to get their “attention.” If they come for you your crimes can be disclosed or “manufactured.” More likely you will just have the worst run of bad luck you have seen in your life and never know the source of it. Even the wrath of a middle level servant of the state could get you on the nondisclosure black list and destroy your chance to confront injustice or even get a good job. Our only hope is if left and right spy on and leak all over each other and exposes this sedition.
All true.
Secrecy is totalitarianism with a little lipstick. We in Canada had a security Bill passed into law by the previous Conservative government just prior to their defeat over a year ago. It defined terrorism as being any threat to the national or economic security of Canada. Further, it authorized the security service (CSIS) which operates in secret to investigate domestic threats and carry out disruption actions as they see fit. Our new Liberal government has not yet dealt with this as promised prior to the last election.
The back story to this is that the former Conservative government was quite antagonistic to public protest to big ticket issues such as economic and environmental policies. However, the police were reluctant to move against protesters with the force that the government wanted and the courts were likewise, usually not supportive of the government position. And most important, the government regularly lost control of the message in the face of extensive media coverage of these interactions. Their fix was to redefine terrorism to include public protest, at least of anything that could be construed to threaten economic or national security. It’s now completely a subjective call done in secret, beyond the courts and beyond public influence through the democratic process, for the public has no knowledge. CSIS and those operating on their behalf are judge, jury, and executioner as your post describes so well.
Canada is now being flushed down the same toilet of the “dictater network” of pimped out whores that the US is currently swirling in, turds and all.
BBC reporting Obama wiretapped Trump campaign….. No privacy whatsoever. Is this legal ?
What’s legal matters not anymore. There’s no rule of law for the elites, which means the breakdown of society is nigh.
Privacy? A recent item in Harper’s Index, Harper’s Magazine, stated that the chances that local police departments throughout the country can identify any citizen from facial scans made by their surveillance cameras at 1 in 2. Big brother has a little brother watching all of us everyday.
And they’re doing a lot more than just watching.
No need for “The Board”, we have David!
David Brock is considered one of the masters of agitprop (agitation and propaganda) of the 21st century. An unscrupulous personality, he can defend or destroy a thing according to the needs of his employer. He is at the forefront of a global mass manipulation company.
The campaign against the new American president, which has been sponsored by Barack Obama’s sponsors, Hillary Clinton and the destruction of the Middle East, continues. According to the women’s March of 22 January, a demonstration for science, not only in the United States but on the whole Western world, will take place on April 22nd. It is to clarify that Donald Trump is not only anti-women but also obscurantist. (will bee continued)
“The board served a vital oversight role in recent years.”
Total BS. The PCLOB was a failure.
The Putinization of Amerika.
No need to be casting aspersions on Putin. Americans should credit themselves for their own achievements.
thank you very much Jenna.
the US gov is now so complicated and convoluted that we regular working citizens have no idea what is going on. It seems the constitution is slowly and regularly being “trumped” by private and power interests. I have heard of PCLOB before on TI but dont recall much because these agencies are not really for people participation.
The elected D&D’s always talk about pretecting “the country” but never talk about protect the people and individual rights.
If it is lifeless then why exist and waste our tax money? Micah Lee is doing his job pretty well.
I see a lot of very excellent work by TI. It is the direction of their skills that is a question. Why has the “target rich” environment of the Clinton Foundation never been explored?
Why has the fact that 0Bama had ALL his school records sealed, when there was a a significant question of his Oxidental College applications (as a foreign student) not been investigated?
Why has TI, not looked into the Israel interference in US elections?
Sigh. This gets dreary so, so quickly…
I dragged my mouse across your claim that “0Bama had ALL his school records sealed”, right-clicked and selected “Search Google for 0Bama h…”
“http://www.factcheck.org/2012/07/obamas-sealed-records/
Because those are stupid, crazy conspiracy theories which are unhinged from reality. You are feeding your mind rot chasing bogus claims you read on silly online blogs. TI is reporting on actual substance. What’s terrifying is they’re almost exclusive in their original reporting. No other news outlet will talk about this story.
No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’!
But he’s nailed to his perch!
Yes! But why do I feel that line should read,
“Democracy” Is Basically Dead.. E-mails Reveal
“The People” have to fight to protect America’s Aggression abroad,
Now I am certain that “the people” WILL have to fight America at home, and this could bring casualties as well. I understand one of my favorite television characters better every day I read the real news (TI) Misanthropy just seems like good medicine.
I hear a rumor that they’re going to change the name from Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to something more appropriate.
Currently, the name “Ole Yeller” is name gaining traction.
US Government privacy watchdog
“The board was created by Congress in 2004, at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, to help the executive branch balance national security priorities with individual rights.”
Ah, the 9/11 commission … the NIST report …
Does anyone really believe an ‘oversight board’ would be able to accomplish anything?
[[[ Does anyone really believe an ‘oversight board’ would be able to accomplish anything?]]]
“Oversight” means they will only “watch” it happen until the slaves arm themselves with pitchforks and march against the “watchtower.”
THEN… the “watchers” will rattle the fake news outlets cages to save them from the angry mob… and if that doesn’t work… the “watchers” will call out the Natl Guard to kill the angry slaves.
If they leaked their reports to the press first, they could accomplish something.
You mean that thing they used to call “privacy” has become the Santa of adulthood? … again?
In the middleages they had a hard time trying to figure out how many angels can dance in the pin of a needle. We already know how many times theIntercept will publish articles about losing your “privacy” cherry. The first prime number past the countable infinite. The only important thing seems to be for it to be a prime number:
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/19/trump-dhs-surveillance/?comments=1#comment-340186
RCL
O/T:
Eeeww! Gross! Turns out Chucky Schumer too is a Russian Intelligence Operative!
Maybe Trump should name a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” regarding the sorest spots of our foreign policy?
Why does Iran “hate” us? Go back to the CIA overthrow of their democratically elected president, Mossedegh.
What is the back story on why North Korea hates the United States? Go back to WW I and work up to today.
What is the TRUTH about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election? Which country interferes MOST in the political affairs of the U.S.? Probably Israel/AIPAC, not “Russia”. Just finding out if the DNC was “hacked” or if the emails were “leaked” would be a good start.
The “truth” about Israel’s attack of the USS Liberty during The Six Day War would be a doozie!
Why not release ALL the documents on the assassination of JFK?
Who murdered Seth Rich and why? Why the demands to force Sessions to resign when Lynch refused to even recuse herself from the Hillary Clinton server matter AFTER meeting with Bill Clinton privately for 40 minutes?
The “truth” about the U.S.’s relationship with Saddam and the Iran/Iraq War? The truth about the first Persian Gulf war. The truth about the Iraq War after 9/11 when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
And of course, an “investigation” of the events of 9/11 has never been done. One with subpoena power and the power to demand ALL relevant evidence to the event. The fact that this investigation won’t be allowed and pertinent evidence would NEVER be allowed to be released to the public (like all the video footage of what hit the Pentagon) makes it clear that something stinks to high Heaven regarding the truth about what happened on that day in 2001. Soon for newer generations it will all be lost down the memory hole as history books perpetrate the “official” story even though no credible investigation was ever done.
Just getting to the “truth” regarding the Deep State and the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of various governments since the 1950’s would be the most enlightening to the world and especially to the American people (who after all paid for all the CIA’s illegal operations).
Yep. A “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” could go a long way toward helping Americans right our ship of state.
It would not be pleasant. But it is absolutely necessary.
I doubt that very much. Confimation biases on the issues you mention run very deep among most Americans.
A “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” could go a long way toward helping Americans right our ship of state.
It could but there are some major obstacles we’d have to overcome before something like this will ever, if ever, happen in the United States.
As long as you have a political class that has every motivation for keeping the truth hidden and reconciliation a remote dream – because both threaten its access to and wielding of power – you will never see anything resembling the truth or reconciliation permitted to emerge.
How quickly we’ve gone from the sanctity of the mail and requiring actual search warrants, to an age were people just accept that everything they say/do/go online, is recorded. No one has yet proven how much safer we are in such a state.
What do you mean “lowlife terroristic potential”? I will have to report you …
Oh, no wait! I don’t even have to report you. That NSA thing is so good! That communistic stasi thing was so antiquated!
RCL
The issue is that the entire USA governance and NSA system/apparatus and modus operandi are spying(stalking) anyone -non-suspect or even without probable cause and making up gestapo like mediocre suspicions based on usurping people’s privacy in order to spy all their entire private(classified) life perpetrated by the criminals under the color of law to infiltrate or harrased the via gang stalking in the outdoors or virtually via electronic devices and internet as it happened to Laura Poitras for many years perpetrated by the criminal infiltrators and operatives in the land of worst than gestapo regimes while cloaked in the land of the free and at every turn subverting it along with my inalienable Privacy(classified) privacy.
-Alejandro Grace Ararat
Please don’t write run on sentences. Idk if you did this on purpose but there’s like 5 separate sentences in one long run on sentence. Second as long as it is it’s an incomplete sentence. There’s about 5 different thoughts going on. It’s starts off the issue… OK what issue ?
It would be helpful to know how much is spent by our national security apparatus to spy on no-suspect law-abiding people and organizations.
Aside form the fact that it’s wrong, there are two big problems with the misdirection of resources. First it takes away form resources that could be properly directed against threats or needs. Second, it encourages easy-money graft by setting the stage for zero accountability.
Just think what we could do with the resources being misdirected against us…
Well whether the Trump administration thinks it is unnecessary or not, as is whether there can be prospective bipartisan approval of committee nominees. Unless and until Trump can convince Congress to repeal the law that creates the PCLOB, and Trump signs it, seems to me an enterprising attorney on behalf of a member of Congress could bring a mandamus suit to force the Trump administration to at least go through the “ministerial” task of making nominees.
WaPo, 6-10-2013:
Never heard of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board?
Maybe I should have been precise. I think the real issue is that the PCLOB is an example of Congress passing legislation to look like it is doing something, but “bipartisanly” makes sure that it never actually has the capacity to do anything.
Alternatively, partisanship with regard to the PCLOB could be so entrenched that neither side trusts the other to nominate potential committee members who would conduct themselves independently consistent with their legal mandate.
But I think it is probably a little of both, but more a function of the first. Congress doesn’t really want to give up its “committee ability” and the power that comes with being on certain committees who nominally oversee the intelligence agencies. In other words, in this instance, they require control, but a “public face” that attempts to demonstrate they actually care about domestic civil liberties abuses by the intelligence agencies. And I’ve never actually seen anything in my lifetime to suggest Congress actual gives two shits about mass violations of American citizens’ civil liberties, so long as those citizens don’t have their fat asses glued to a chair in Congress.
They simply don’t care about your, mine or anyone else’s civil liberties. They care about their own and the perception that they care about yours. Nothing more, nothing less.
It’s not like this happened in just the last 45 days. BO and his transparent administration strikes again.
Indeed, I was glad to see this in the article:
As Obama did with Bush’s template before him, Trump is continuing and intensifying surveillance trends in many ways, conveniently taking attention away from the bipartisan corruption endemic to the system itself that has made ever-increasing oppression possible. As long as we blame one Party or the other instead of both, we will never dismantle the oligarchy’s tightening grip.
Amen.
And this is why to vote for someone who actually will try and change things. (See Sanders, Bernie; Paul, Rand; Stein, Jill; Johnson, Gary; etc. etc.)
I agree, but personally I still don’t trust voting machines, as the Deep State can evidently rig them freely -something even Trump supporters admitted before he ‘won.’
Here is an article that looks at the most recent attempts by the FBI to further spy on Americans:
http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2016/12/how-fbi-is-monitoring-your-tweets.html
Washington uses any excuse to further pry into what little remains of our privacy.
CORRECTION (I hate the some of the html markups, here)
Well… so what’s the cure?
ANSWER: Easy… dump your [gmail] or whatever [third party email] you have.
Set up your own. Quit your whining. You get what you pay for.
If anyone wants help, let me know.
The NSA continues to monitor all communications. Meanwhile, Trump and his cronies continue to hustle for money and power. Every weekend, Trump goes to his Florida country club. He says his kids run his businesses, so there’s no conflict. Yet, ALL of these people are staying there and taxpayer dollars are going to his kids. That’s NOT a conflict of interest?
How come the Attorney General isn’t investigating this? Oh fuck, I forgot. He lies under oath.
Criminal enterprises that operate on the edge of the law generally go on for awhile before the gravity of the criminal acts become apparent. That how those Feds investigate things. They watch and watch and the evidence builds up until its lights out. Just give it time.
[[[ Criminal enterprises that operate on the edge of the law generally go on for awhile before the gravity of the criminal acts become apparent. ]]]
The problem is: They never do that to the “insiders” … hence the Billary State Dept and the Clinton Foundation.
It’s like “welfare”… the biggest welfare recipient in the world is probably the Queen of England who gets a free house and 10 vacation homes like Buckingham Palace.
But, the minions, point their fingers at the poor person who steals a loaf of bread because he made the Queen’s monthly ‘mortgage’ payment for her.
Case in point.
[[[ Every weekend, Trump goes to his Florida country club. ]]]
What’s wrong with that?
With Trump in office, maybe the Democrats can propose bill to sell Camp David to pay off the ~20 Trillion Dollar debt.
When the buyer buys…. We’ll know who the real owner of this country is.
At least they’d get the debt paid off that way, unlike Reagan, Bush I and II who borrowed and spent, then socked taxpayers with the interest on top of it.
Che… Obama DOUBLED the National Debt in 8 years. Not 200 years.
Less than 10 Trillion before Obama… to 20 Trillion.
Obama even mortgaged YOUR HOUSE and gave the proceeds to the Insurance Companies — without Congressional Authority. Do you know what that means?
Can you spell Felony? Conversion? Embezzlement?
[[[ At least they’d get the debt paid off that way, unlike Reagan, Bush I and II who borrowed and spent, then socked taxpayers with the interest on top of it. ]]
FYI… I’ll bet you did NOT know that Trump bought Mar-a-lago from the US Government.