Because Obama doesn't see this as a technology issue. It's a security versus legal rights issue. Technology is involved merely incidentally. Hence a panel that involves two intelligence people (Morell and Clarke), and three law professors (Sunstein, Swire, and Stone).
The professors aren't ideologically diverse, but they're hardly intelligence community insiders like the article is trying to make them out to be. Swire was Chief Counselor for Privacy in the OMB under Clinton. Stone writes a lot on subjects like preserving free speech rights during wartime. None of these guys are anarcho-libertarians, but they're not John Woo "security first" guys either. They pretty much represent the views of the "mainstream left."
Hypothesis: what people want is not someone who knows "how to run a packet sniffer." There is nothing complicated about the underlying technology that can't be explained adequately to a bunch of intelligent people. What people are really mad about is the lack of any representation of the political views of technologists: people who put a very high ideological priority on free information and protecting communications online. Because that is the thing you can't explain in a whitepaper.
The professors aren't ideologically diverse, but they're hardly intelligence community insiders like the article is trying to make them out to be. Swire was Chief Counselor for Privacy in the OMB under Clinton. Stone writes a lot on subjects like preserving free speech rights during wartime. None of these guys are anarcho-libertarians, but they're not John Woo "security first" guys either. They pretty much represent the views of the "mainstream left."
Hypothesis: what people want is not someone who knows "how to run a packet sniffer." There is nothing complicated about the underlying technology that can't be explained adequately to a bunch of intelligent people. What people are really mad about is the lack of any representation of the political views of technologists: people who put a very high ideological priority on free information and protecting communications online. Because that is the thing you can't explain in a whitepaper.