Today, Chip Pitts, president of BORDC’s board of directors, participated in a panel discussion called “The Obama Administration Privacy Report Card.” Members of the panel, hosted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Privacy Coalition, graded the Obama administration’s privacy record in four areas: consumer privacy, medical privacy, civil liberties, and cyber security.  Pitts and BORDC addressed civil liberties, giving the Obama administration a D grade overall, explaining,

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee and its constituents share concerns that, despite comforting rhetoric from a president with constitutional law expertise, the Obama administration has continued—and in some respects expanded, worsened, or more deeply entrenched—privacy and civil liberties intrusions begun under the Bush administration.

Read BORDC’s report card and news coverage of the event for more details.

Also this week, OpenTheGovernment.org released their 2009 Secrecy Report Card, which, like BORDC’s privacy and civil liberties report card, points out that Obama has not fully lived up to his campaign promises about transparency and accountability.

The elections of 2008 were viewed by many as a referendum on that secrecy and unaccountability, and the country elected a president who promises the most open, transparent accountable federal government (the executive branch, anyway) in history….The record to date is mixed.

Tags: Barack Obama, civil liberties, privacy, secrecy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under BORDC & PCC News, Opinion & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.