Updated, 10 p.m.
President Obama pledged last week that he would take "specific steps" to reform U.S. surveillance policy. This week, he proved unable to keep his word for any longer than a weekend.
What was the latest Barack-and-switch? Here's what Obama said Friday to reassure Americans about the NSA, with my emphasis:
... We're forming a high level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies. We need new thinking for a new era. We now have to unravel terrorist plots by finding a needle in a haystack of global telecommunications, and meanwhile technology has given governments, including our own, unprecedented capability to monitor communications.
So I'm tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities, particularly our surveillance technologies, and they'll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy, particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public. And they will provide an interim report in 60 days and a final report by the end of this year, so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy and our foreign policy.
Got that?
An independent group of outside experts, whose tasks include ensuring that there is no abuse and assessing the impact of surveillance on privacy. That's what he promised the American people.
Yet here's the order he released Monday to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, again with my emphasis
Recent years have brought unprecedented and rapid advancements in communications technologies, particularly with respect to global telecommunications. These technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community: opportunity in the form of enhanced technical capabilities that can more precisely and readily identify threats to our security, and risks in the form of insider and cyber threats. I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission. To this end, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies (Review Group).
The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.
As Marcy Wheeler notes, "In the memo Obama just released ordering James Clapper to form such a committee, those words 'outside' and 'independent' disappear entirely." Indeed, putting the director of national intelligence in charge all but guarantees that the effort will be neither of those things -- especially since the Clapper has already lied to Congress about NSA spying. This "Review Group" won't even report its findings directly to the public or Congressional oversight committees. It'll report to Obama ... but indirectly, through Clapper.
"If this was about 'restoring the trust' of the American people that the government isn't pulling a fast one over on them, President Obama sure has a funny way of trying to rebuild that trust," Techdirt comments. "This seems a lot more like giving the concerns of the American public a giant middle finger."