Intellectual Property Law

A newly independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board may soon actually have members again, after sitting empty for nearly a full month.

On Thursday, President Bush took the first step to fill vacancies on the Board as he nominated 3 people, including a chairman, to fill some of the five seats.

Bush allowed the board to be emptied on January 30, even as he pushed Congress to grant him wide powers to install blanket wiretap orders inside the United States.

Bush nominated Daniel Sutherland, the current civil liberties officer at the Department of Homeland Security, to head the commission for the next six years. Ronald Rotunda, a George Mason University law professor known for his bow ties and for work on the Senate Watergate Commission, was nominated to join the board for an initial four-year term, while Francis X. Taylor, who previously served on the board, was re-nominated for a two-year term.

Sutherland's main work at DHS involved convincing Muslims and minorities that DHS does not racially profile. Privacy issues with programs are handled by the chief privacy officer Hugo Teufel.

The nominations will need to get through the Senate Homeland Security committee and confirmed by the full Senate.

In a 2007 measure implementing 9/11 Commission recommendations, Congress reconfigured the oversight committee, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board. The intent was to make the board more independent of the White House, require it to be bipartisan and make it more accountable to the public.

Those changes came after civil-liberties groups blasted the board for a lack of independence and relevance.

Former Board chairwoman Carol Dinkins formerly served as a campaign treasurer for President Bush and was a partner at the same law firm as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Also appointed to the board was formidable lawyer Ted Olson, who was named solicitor general after winning the Bush v. Gore case that settled the 2000 election dispute, and whose wife died in the 9/11 attacks.

Lanny Davis -- the board's sole Democrat -- resigned in May 2007 to protest edits the White House made to the board's 2007 annual report to Congress.