February 28, 2024 at 03:56PM
President Biden signed an executive order to ban bulk sale and transfer of Americans’ private data to countries such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. The Justice Department will block countries posing threats from accessing sensitive personal data, and new regulations aim to restrict risky data transactions. This measure addresses national security risks and privacy concerns.
From the provided meeting notes, the key points are as follows:
1. U.S. President Joe Biden has signed an executive order aiming to ban the bulk sale and transfer of Americans’ private data to “countries of concern,” citing national security threats posed by the exploitation of sensitive personal data.
2. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland emphasized that the executive order grants the Justice Department the authority to block countries deemed as threats to national security from accessing Americans’ sensitive personal data, including genomic, biometric, personal health, geolocation, and financial data.
3. The directive requires the U.S. Department of Justice to establish and oversee a new national security initiative to address the threat posed by the sale of Americans’ most sensitive data. It also mandates the creation of regulations to restrict specific types of data transactions that pose unacceptable national security risks.
4. The focus of the executive order is on protecting Americans’ most sensitive information, as it can be exploited by threat actors for surveillance, scams, blackmail, and privacy violations. The sale of Americans’ data raises significant privacy, counterintelligence, and national security risks.
5. The White House fact sheet warns that countries of concern could use Americans’ sensitive personal data to collect information on activists, academics, journalists, dissidents, political figures, and members of non-governmental organizations and marginalized communities, with the potential to intimidate opponents, curb dissent, and limit freedom of expression and civil liberties.
6. Notably, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently banned two data brokers from selling Americans’ precise location data in response to concerns regarding the exposure of sensitive information and the violation of privacy, including religious affiliations and medical visits.
7. The FTC’s orders were issued in response to an August 2022 Biden executive order aimed at protecting patients’ privacy and safeguarding access to reproductive health care services, following the use of mobile location data to target visitors of Planned Parenthood clinics with ads by an anti-abortion group.
These takeaways encapsulate the main points and implications of the executive order and related actions outlined in the meeting notes.