Old hands picked for CIA oversight

The appointment of former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden to the Public Interest Declassification Board(PIDB) and former Sen. Warren Rudman to the CIA's External Advisory Board (EAB) will ensure less openness in the intelligence community and more obduracy in the CIA. The late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan created the PIDB in the 1990s to reduce the "torment of secrecy," which denied important information on national security to the American people. The EAB was designed to deal with the complexities of managing the CIA and to improve the access of intelligence information to the Congress and the American people. Hayden and Rudman have a Cold War preoccupation with secrecy and have never been known for improving access. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, is responsible for the Hayden appointment; CIA Director Leon Panetta appointed Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican. As Steven Aftergood, editor of Secrecy News, noted, Hayden is "not well known as a classification critic or a proponent of declassification." As director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Hayden instituted the warrantless eavesdropping program that violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful seizures and searches.