Josh Gerstein and Mike Allen report:
A panel President Barack Obama set up in August to assess the government’s use of surveillance technologies hit some turbulence related to the government shutdown last week and found itself effectively frozen on Friday after its staff was furloughed, according to a person briefed on the panel’s operations.
The five-member Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies was set to meet last Tuesday with the top leaders of Congress’s intelligence committees, the source said. However, Review Group member Michael Morell—who stepped down in August as director of the Central Intelligence Agency—declined to take part, arguing that the panel shouldn’t be pressing on while much of the intelligence community’s workforce was staying home.
Read more on Politico.
In other shutdown-related news, the Department of Justice has filed motions for stay of proceedings in two matters before the FISC court: Yahoo!’s case and the ACLU’s lawsuit.