Obama names spy liar head of "independent" review of spying

Global Research - Friday, Obama promised an independent group or experts would investigate spying:

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 the haystack of global telecommunications. And meanwhile, technology has given governments — including our own — unprecedented capability to monitor communications.
So I am 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.

Today, Obama appointed James Clapper to head the “independent group” of “outside experts”.

Clapper is the same guy who lied to Congress about spying … falsely claiming that the government wasn’t spying on the American people. He subsequently apologized to Congress for lying.

And – as the Director of National Intelligence – Clapper is the U.S. spy-in-chief.

TechDirt notes:

[Obama] asking Clapper to first create and set up this “outside” and “independent” review group… and then to have the group report its findings back to Clapper. The same strong defender of the program who flat out lied to Congress about it. 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. This seems a lot more like giving the concerns of the American public a giant middle finger.

Paul D. Shinkman, US News  - "Right now it looks like a secret evaluation of a secret interpretation of the law," says Alan Butler, advocacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "We've taken a process that everyone agrees is supposed to be more transparent and we've put it in the hands of the ODNI, someone who has historically been very bad about doing this transparently." ....