emptywheel

One of the major tasks of PCLOB is to regulate the 702 surveillance activities of the NSA. Take away the ability to ask critical technical questions at the member-level, this amounts to taking the NSA’s technical statements at face value with no deeper follow up.

To what extent does 702 oversight turn on technical questions rather than legal ones? Not fair to attribute to “tech” what “security/privacy twitter” thinks about things, but security/privacy twitter has been pretty terrible on FISA.

Which is to say that, without high-level expertise on the committee, they would have been entirely at the mercy of the IC’s representations of how the program worked. It goes without saying that any legal interpretations drawn from that understanding would be GIGO.

At the time you’re talking about, weren’t they entirely at the mercy of NSA’s representations?

They had the ability to ask specific and detailed technical questions and (I presume) receive more complete answers. But without anyone who could do so, they were essentially receiving a PowerPoint presentation.

Right, I’m just saying that by these terms, everything PCLOB has done w/r/t/ 702 to date has been GIGO — unless I’m missing part of your argument.

My assumption is that the IC does not lie to their oversight boards. But that they might not *volunteer* specific details that could fundamentally improve the board’s understanding of, say, the amount of incidental collection — in a way that would cast the IC in a bad light.