Intelligence insiders to review US spying: Report

A group of Washington insiders with close ties to the US security establishment are reportedly set to review US spying programs despite President Obama’s pledge that the assessment would be conducted by an “independent group” of “outside experts.”

The recent acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, former White House officials Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein, and Peter Swire will be on the assessing panel, ABC News has learned.

Obama has pledged the review would be carried out by an “independent” and “outside” panel of experts.

During an announcement two weeks ago, Obama said a “high-level group of outside experts” would be created to assess all of the government’s “intelligence and communication technologies” after leaked documents blew the lid on the US National Security Agency’s spying practices.

The group will “consider how we can maintain the trust of the people [and] how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse,” Obama said, without identifying who would be on the panel.

Now with questions being raised over whether the panel would truly act independently in its review, Washington is insisting that the group has full independence.

Over a period of 60 days, the panel is supposed to provide the director of national intelligence with an interim report. The director will then brief the president on the findings.

A concluding report and subsequent suggestions will then be ready by the end of the year “so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy and our foreign policy,” said Obama two weeks ago.

On Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed that errors by the NSA meant that tens of thousands of emails from US citizens, who had no ties with terrorism, were gathered and kept for years.

The NSA collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans every year from 2008 until 2011 while it was trying to collect emails of foreign “terrorism suspects”.