By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:39pm
(Updated below)
The Senate Judiciary Committee today approved president Obama’s nominee, David Medine, as chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. With this step, we are on the cusp of finally seeing this important oversight body brought into full existence.
As new technologies emerge faster than ever, it’s vital to have a genuinely independent oversight body helping to make sure our liberties are protected (see here and here for prior posts on the PCLOB, and a 2009 report on privacy oversight). The PCLOB is a significant and much needed addition to the highly inadequate oversight structures currently overseeing our out-of-control national security establishment.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:10am
My colleague Ben Wizner and I are in Brussels this week, partly to meet with European lawmakers and others about the new privacy regime that the EU is in the process of putting into place. Unlike the United States, Europe has a set of basic rules and institutions in place to protect individuals’ privacy, and is trying to update its existing rules and institutions for the digital age.
The United States needs similar protections—a basic, overarching privacy law, and institutions with the teeth to enforce it. We are an outlier in the world in lacking those things. However, some U.S. companies seem to be terrified at the prospect of basic, fair privacy rules being put into place in Europe. Not only are companies such as Facebook and Google furiously lobbying against those rules, but the U.S. government has “shocked” Europeans by also lobbying hard against many elements of this update.
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:32am
(Update below)
Today, the nominees to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) were voted from the Senate Judiciary Committee for full consideration in the Senate. It looks like the Senate is finally going to act to nominate five people to fill this vital oversight board. While this is an important step, it’s also something of a good government scandal and certainly a cautionary tale about the limits of oversight.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project & Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:44pm
The Patriot Act has been surrounded by a cloud of fear-mongering since it was reintroduced almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks and rushed through Congress, without any finding that the sweeping new powers granted by the act had anything to do with the problems and failures that contributed to that attack.
At the heart of the issue has been confusion between giving the authorities surveillance powers, and giving them unchecked surveillance powers. Much of what the Patriot Act did was to remove independent judges from oversight over invasions of privacy conducted in the name of law enforcement and national security.
Never before in history has the United States had such a huge, and increasingly powerful security establishment. This behemoth has tens of thousands of employees and a budget of at least $60 billion, and though first established to protect our country from outside threats, it is increasingly turning its eye inward upon the people of America. It is vital that we have strong checks and balances in place to counterbalance this growing, secretive center of government power. Unfortunately, in many ways Congress has been weakening, rather than strengthening, those checks and balances in recent years.
