Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

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Because the review panel is a joke.

First, they wanted Clapper to do the independent review. [1] This is the man that openly lied to congress and remains scott-free to this day.

Next they picked Michael Morell. [2] This dude was the acting director for the CIA until March of this very year. Clearly he has the capacity to conduct an independent review of his NSA buddies.

Joining this luminary will be Cass Sunstein [3], author of such classics like "Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech", and the person who proposed the government should infiltrate what he deems "conspiracy theory groups":

However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories [4, page 14]

Supporting these brains is Richard Clarke, who built his personal career on pushing the "war on terror" after 9/11. He also recently added "cyberwar" to his extensive portfolio of things he has absolutely no clue of. His views on privacy protections and large scale surveillance are well known:

If given the proper authorization, the United States government could stop files in the process of being stolen from getting to the Chinese hackers. If government agencies were authorized to create a major program to grab stolen data leaving the country, they could drastically reduce today’s wholesale theft of American corporate secrets. [5]

(It doesn't take a genius to realize this is the proposal of a person that probably doesn't even have internet access.)

Of course, all of these people work in some capacity for the Obama administration. It didn't even occur to the government morons running this show that maybe, just maybe, they should not pick people with an obvious and direct conflict of interest. They don't even bother to give the impression of caring.

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130812/13512624147/presi...

[2]: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/white-house-pic...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein

[4]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

[5]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-o...

> Because the review panel is a joke.

This is exactly right. This is a case of the government reviewing itself by packing the review board with insiders and sympathizers. Nobody who disagrees with the NSA's behavior has been selected for this panel.

Blogger Emptywheel has been following this much more closely than the general media:

Advocate of Secret Infiltration, Cass Sunstein, on Obama’s “Committee To Make Us Trust the Dragnet” [1]

The No-Technologist Technology Review Panel [2]

3 Tech Issues the Non-Technologist NSA Technical Committee Needs to Address [3]

[1] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/22/advocate-of-secret-infi...

[2] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/27/the-no-technologist-tec...

[3] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/28/3-tech-issues-the-non-t...

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

Richard Clarke built his post-government career (after being the most senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration) as a critic of the way the "war on terror" had been prosecuted, and has been working on "cyberwar" subjects for over a decade.

I don't like Clarke much and I don't agree with everything Cass Sunstein proposes but your dismissive tone harms your argument.

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

Obama himself graduated magna cum laude with a masters degree in law from Harvard and then lectured on constitutional law for 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Expertise in constitutional law doesn't necessarily translate to skepticism here. The constitution is not a moral authority on privacy.

Richard Clarke

He wrote an interesting op-ed before he was named to this committee. It appears to be critical of the NSA's operation, but a closer reading suggests his problem is about the degree, he's fine with massive record keeping, he just wants it in the hands of the telcos.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/worry-nsa-article-1.13697...

Sunstein is a much more highly regarded legal scholar. Obama was a lecturer at UChicago. Sunstein was a professor. They're not in the same league. Sunstein is up there with Tribe.

I'm not sure where "moral authority on privacy" enters the picture. The question is how the program comports with the Constitution and the American system of governance.

Then why didn't they pick Tribe? The problem isn't that Sunstein doesn't have the legal chops. The problem is that Sunstein has gone on record (and written a book) supporting governmental overreach. You're hiring yes-men to do your "independent review".

This is the "purity test" theory of public policy. It's easy to be the kind of scholar that Obama (or Bush) can put on any panel; just shut up. Don't write anything ambitious or controversial.

The idea that Cass Sunstein is a "yes man" for Obama is laughable. If anything, it's the other way around.

You will also find in the work of most constitutional scholars something to upset any message board anarcho-libertarian, because very few of them believe in the black-letter absolutism that anarcho-libertarians choose to evaluate the Constitution in. You think there's nothing in Tribe's record to argue with? He's a gun control supporter, for one. You think pundits wouldn't be calling him an "Obama yes-man"?

You're right. I concede that Cass Sunstein is not the problem on the panel. And acknowledge the very troubling "shut up and say nothing" outcomes that my viewpoint has on anyone with any sort of ambition of public office.

But I'm still not convinced that the panel is anywhere near independent given the rest of the crew such as Morell and Richard Clarke.

I don't think the panel is ideologically independent at all, and rather doubt such independence was a goal of the panel to begin with. I don't think the panel is being run for "your" benefit.

(I appreciate how gracious your comment was. Thank you.)

I don't think the critique is whether they are a "Yes Man for Obama," but what their body of work shows about their inclinations regarding the topic at hand, that they and Obama are both pointers to the addresses of these activities and the goal is to prevent the activities from being garbage-collected. In a manner of speaking, and metaphors are lossy.

Ok, just to be clear, the comment I actually replied to ends with You're hiring yes-men to do your "independent review".

Right, and your rhetorical leap was in applying the concept of a yes-man to Obama himself. The quote:

The problem is that Sunstein has gone on record (and written a book) supporting governmental overreach. You're hiring yes-men to do your "independent review".

An issue at hand is whether the group will merely be researching means by which the ends can be maintained, that they are yes-men for the activities, the same way Obama appears to be. It's reasonable to question whether they have the same master, that they aren't truly independent.

Academic credentials are great and all, but don't they need to be applied to the real world before we can say that they know how to use any of it? The simple saying "the proof is in the pudding" comes to mind.

The panel isn't a referendum on the morality of the NSA surveillance. It's an investigation into the legality of the NSA surveillance.

Its a good thing that we can trust people to never let their clear policy preferences and similar biases impact their judgements of legality when the facts that they are investigating are not publicly reviewable in a way which would let their analysis be questioned.

No, wait, that's angels -- people can't really be trusted that way. If they could, we wouldn't need this panel in the first place.

> Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

He is a person who has expressed views supportive of an extremely active role of government in covertly surveilling and infiltrating with the intent of moderating domestic political groups whose views are unwelcome to the government.

This clearly makes him a extremely problematic pick for a review board whose role (as overtly stated by the President) is to instill confidence that the NSA is not taking an actions that are excessive, unconstitutional, and illegal under statute law in terms of covert domestic surveillance, no matter how "famous" he is.

It makes him problematic if you think the charter of the panel is an adversarial interrogation of NSA. But maybe the point of the panel isn't to reassure the public, but rather to reassure Obama, who after all is the person whose opinion counts most here, that NSA's actions aren't setting him up for 2 years of constant legal headaches.

> It makes him problematic if you think the charter of the panel is an adversarial interrogation of NSA.

It makes him problematic if you think that the panel has any purpose suitable to a public panel at all.

* If it is a PR effort, its problematic because Sunstein's known biases make it easy to discount his opinion when the underlying facts aren't reviewable.

* If it is a serious effort to get to the bottom of what is going on at the NSA, it is problematic because Sunstein's known biases make it unlikely that he will be interested in probing to deeply.

* If it is a private effort to reassure Obama about legality, that doesn't make sense for a public panel of this type at all, no matter what the composition is.

My guess is that it's the third bullet, but that someone in the administration thought it might serve some PR purpose, or that the administration felt like convening such a panel without announcing it would indicate doubts about the program that don't really exist.

The reality, of course, is that hardly anyone knows who any of these people are.

Have you read much of Sunstein's stuff? What's the thing you found most problematic? Surely it isn't Nudge (a great book! but not particularly indicative of Sunstein's legal philosophy.)

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

Way to go! Replying to the grand parent's (revelation's) solid argument by using vague statements. Just what does the most famous living constitutional law scholar even mean? Besides being meaningless statement like the most beautiful woman in the world it is also almost irrelevant - almost nonsensical - to the current discussion. Just because a person has had a successful career - particularly in politics, bureaucracy and fields like that - doesn't mean the person doesn't have an agenda and vested interest. In fact some would argue it is quite the opposite as - unlike some tech/hard science luminaries, for example - their success is likely correlated with their other - rather nefarious - traits than pure merit alone.

Your next paragraph about Richard Clarke is in similar vein.

Deleted comment

It looks like you're a throwaway, but I'll bite. If you follow the conversation, you see that 'tptacek isn't using appeal to authority to defend an argument. Rather, he was responding to an abrupt dismissal of two people. He also clarified that he doesn't necessarily like or agree with either of them.

There's no appeal to authority here. If the parent had actually made a strong argument, Thomas might have responded with an actual argument as well.

It's also an appeal to authority to think because he is an expert at infosec, he's also some sort of expert on presidential review groups :) I agree with tptacek on crypto and as it turns out very little else.

There is no such thing as an "appeal to authority defense fallacy".

Of course the panel is a joke but how many technologist put themselves in situations where they'd be in politics?

Corporate secrets being stolen digitally is obviously a big problem, but saying that the government should fix it is obviously yet more corporate socialism.

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