Tuesday, February 05, 2008

The Privacy And Civil Rights Commission



The government has one of these. Did you know that? But it has no members (or had none last Friday, at least):

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States.

The failure rankles Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), respectively chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee.

"I urge the president to move swiftly to nominate members to the new board to preserve the public's faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties as we work to protect the country against terrorism," Lieberman said.

"The White House's failure to move forward with appointing the new board is unacceptable, and I call on the administration to do so as quickly as possible to prevent a gap in this vital mission," Collins said.

An interesting mathematics problem, that one. The set of members is an empty set, and that empty set is keeping a careful nonexistent eye on our privacy and civil rights. What is the total number of eyes protecting us?

Of course on some level this gives us total privacy, from that particular board. Heh.