Promoting Legal Protections for Privacy Rights in the United States
By Camille Fischer, Mozilla Tech Policy Fellow, Former White House National Economic Council advisor on technology and the economy.
The privacy rights of U.S. citizens and people all over the world are under quiet siege because of actions taken by current U.S. government leadership. From minor provisions in Executive Orders to statements condemning consumer security technologies, the Trump Administration has signaled that it will abandon the efforts taken by the Obama Administration to find harmony between civil rights and liberties and law enforcement and national security.
This assault on privacy rights will have repercussions for everyone living in or connected to the United States. Activists may lose the freedom of peaceful and anonymous protest if they can be identified and have their activities cataloged through government-deployed facial recognition systems. Foreign-born college students may quit their programs if law enforcement begins tracking their location and activities through the cell phones they have registered on immigration and visa applications. And every person who connects to the Internet may lose the ability to search health, employment, and other personal questions online if Internet service providers can track their customers in order to serve advertisements.
Privacy — the right to be let alone, the right to create and curate one’s public presence, the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusions — is the cornerstone of free speech, civic engagement, and many of the freedoms that have separated U.S. democracy from other world governments. Congress must act to affirmatively protect these rights by updating outdated surveillance legislation and holding executive agencies accountable for their data collection and usage.
This fight to protect privacy and individual rights of people in the United States and all over the world has led me from the U.S. government to Mozilla’s Tech Policy Fellowship. For years, Mozilla has built privacy tools into its products, limiting corporate and government surveillance through technology and software to curb collection and build anonymity. Now, I hope to carry forward President Obama’s strategy to promote consumer welfare online and advocate for reforms to surveillance policies I had once hoped to change from within the U.S. government. Focusing on law enforcement access to personal information, I will be working with experts in encryption technologies and other security tools, foreign intelligence and surveillance, and Constitutional and international law to help build scholarship and advocate for protections for privacy and civil rights in our increasingly digital world.
The limitation of law enforcement powers and government intervention has long been a priority for privacy and consumer rights activists even before the recent U.S. election. When I joined the Obama Administration in 2015, my friends in the advocacy community jokingly called me traitor, in a large part because of the distrust created between civil society and government after Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Administration’s bulk surveillance program.
However, working in the White House National Economic Council, I was able to help build consumer privacy protections online through programs to increase consumer financial security, to promote privacy practices in drones and other emerging technologies, to ensure protections for U.S. and EU data as it crosses the Atlantic, and to increase the accountability of federal data collection by expanding privacy offices in executive agencies. I witnessed an Administration that strived for stronger protections for people online — even if we had not yet found the best solution to concurrently preserve public safety and civil liberties.
Much of the work the Obama Administration accomplished in furthering privacy protections and sowing the seeds of surveillance reform was accomplished as a matter of practice rather than law. President Obama built a spirit of collaboration between agencies and with outside experts that encouraged every policy and action to be thoroughly researched and vetted. That is quite simply not the case with the Trump Administration so far.
Since the inauguration on January 20, the Trump Administration has:
- called for the suspension of privacy protections for persons based outside the U.S. without first consulting the agencies that collect that information;
- requested sensitive data, including Social Security numbers, from every registered voter in the United States without first conducting a privacy impact assessment;
- signed legislation to revoke FCC rules to protect broadband customers’ privacy without issuing guidance or requesting new rules on how to protect the information Internet service providers can collect from millions of U.S. Internet consumers;
- requested the IP addresses of 1.3 million visitors to an anti-Trump website without the particularity required by a warrant;
- began deploying facial recognition systems in airports to track the identities of every person leaving the country without distinction between U.S. and non-U.S. persons as required by law;
- ended an anti-deportation policy for millions of children and young adults without any protections for the personal information they used to sign up for the program, which now may serve as a deportation database; and
- proposed expansions to Department of Homeland Security databases to include social media profiles and online search results for all immigrants, including naturalized citizens.
We can no longer assume that government agencies will “make the right call” and advocate for the privacy rights of people. The expansive growth of big data and Internet-enabled technologies, which have the potential to vastly benefit our everyday lives, is now set on a collision course with U.S. agencies that are requesting broader legal powers to collect and analyze that data. Instead, Congress must create privacy protections for consumers in the digital economy as matter of law — not just practice — through reforms to law enforcement access and surveillance powers as well as through increased accountability and transparency for federal programs collecting and using personal information.
People must take back privacy as their own right — deserving of legal protections and not dependent on the ideologies of the President in power.
