Latest in Privacy
President Biden’s June 15 summit meeting in Brussels with EU leadership put cooperation on technology and trade at the forefront of the transatlantic relationship, but it did not yield a breakthrough in the ongoing negotiations to restore data transfers from Europe to the United States to a stable and durable footing.
The Privacy Act of 1974 is an orphan. At a time when privacy is a hot legislative topic just about everywhere, almost no one has examined the Privacy Act, one of the oldest information privacy laws in the world. The act reflects the technologies of the 1970s, like ancient mainframe computers (that had less computer power than your smartphone) and filing cabinets filled with paper records—it’s that old.
The digital apps can be effective in curbing coronavirus spread—but not everyone will benefit from them.
In the U.S. legal framework, there is ample precedent for using an executive order or presidential directive to limit intelligence activities and establish safeguards to protect privacy and civil liberties.
The United States now finds itself forced to consider changes to its foreign surveillance law and practices in order to reestablish a stable basis for transatlantic transfers of personal data.
Our interview in this episode is with Michael Daniel, formerly the top cybersecurity adviser in the Obama administration’s National Security Council and currently the CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA). Michael lays out CTA’s mission. Along the way he also offers advice to the Biden cyber team—drawing in part on the wisdom of Henry Kissinger.
This is my favorite story of the episode. David Kris covers a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on the enormous value that European governments get in fighting terrorism from the same American surveillance programs that European institutions have been fighting for twenty years to shut down. It’s a delightful takedown of European virtue-signaling, and I hope the Biden Administration gives the PCLOB a new name and mission in honor of the report.
Schrems II will certainly affect the U.K.’s future data protection landscape. But the decision’s effects on Britain are not as catastrophic as some observers may have feared.
The judgment by the Court of Justice for the European Union has provoked a hostile reaction from U.S. national security and privacy experts. But it’s a wake-up call for how Americans should understand national security and surveillance in a world of global information networks.
The CJEU invalidated one principal legal method for the transfer of personal data from EU territory to the United States and cast substantial doubt on the validity of the other. What are the consequences of the ruling?