Stone, the one member who’d never had contacts with the intelligence world, expected to find an agency gone rogue. He was aware of court rulings that let the NSA invoke its foreign-intelligence authorities to monitor domestic phone calls, but Snowden’s documents, suggesting that it was using its powers as an excuse to collect all calls, startled him. Swire had dealt with some agency officials while working in the White House, considered them competent, but that was long ago. Clarke and Morell were the only ones who had been in the building before. On their first day of work, they were driven to NSA headquarters in Ft. Through the next four months, the group met at least two days a week, sometimes as many as four, often for twelve hours or longer, interviewing officials, attending briefings, examining documents, and discussing the implications. Assume, he said, that we can do this sort of surveillance your job is to tell me if we should be doing it as policy and, if not, to come up with something better. He made it clear that he didn’t want a legal analysis. Obama gave the group a deadline of December 15 and assured them access to everything they needed. On August 27, the five-christened as the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies-met in the White House Situation Room with Obama and his top advisers.
Bush.Ĭlarke had resigned in protest over the 2003 Iraq invasion and, soon after, gained fame and notoriety during the 9/11 Commission’s hearings, testifying that Bush had ignored warnings of an impending attack by al-Qaeda. Peter Swire, a law professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a White House aide to Bill Clinton, had written a landmark essay on surveillance law.įinally, there was Richard Clarke, the White House chief of counterterrorism and cyber security policy under Clinton and (briefly) George W. Geoffrey Stone, a law professor and member of the ACLU’s advisory council, had been dean of the University of Chicago’s Law School when Obama taught there in the 1990s. Michael Morellwas the establishment pick among the five, a 33-year veteran of the CIA, who had just retired two months earlier as the agency’s deputy director and who’d been the point of contact between Langley and the White House during the secret raid on Osama bin Laden.Ĭass Sunstein, a constitutional lawyer, had worked on Obama’s presidential campaign, served for three years as the head of his regulatory office, and was married to his United Nations ambassador, Samantha Power. So President Obama announced that he was doing what many of his predecessors had done in the face of crisis-he was appointing a blue-ribbon commission.Īlready, he and his advisers had chosen five candidates and asked the FBI to vet them for security clearances. Something had to be done the stench had to be contained, the trust restored. Citizens were outraged, embassies were fuming, Silicon Valley executives were worried that they’d lose foreign customers who suspected their products had “back doors” that the NSA could enter. Two months earlier, Edward Snowden, a contractor with the National Security Agency, had leaked tens of thousands of highly classified documents, revealing that the NSA was intercepting phone calls and emails of millions of Americans, in apparent violation of the law-and tapping the phones of allied leaders abroad as well. On August 9, 2013, a hot, humid Friday, shortly after three in the afternoon, the laziest hour in the dreariest month for news in the nation’s capital, President Obama held a press conference in the East Room of the White House.
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