Despite President Trump’s occasional rebukes of the surveillance state when it applies to him or his administration, his White House is withholding a crucial report about the extent of the federal government’s collection of citizens’ private information.
This week the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in the hopes of forcing him to release documentation from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a bipartisan five-member independent board within the executive branch created by Congress to monitor government spying in the post-9/11 world. According to the PCLOB’s website, its job is to “oversee the government’s adherence to the protection of civil liberties in its efforts to prevent terrorism.”
The report the board issued was concluded and sent to the White House and congressional intelligence committees in December 2016, and Senator Ron Wyden, an outspoken opponent of mass surveillance, requested it be released to the public shortly after Trump took office. The president has refused to release the, even with redactions, despite the fact that it continues significant portions of unclassified information. He has cited executive privilege.
The board itself is in a relative state of disarray. After its establishment, it was disbanded and was not reassembled until 2012, when the Senate confirmed four board members. However, the board is currently nearly empty. As the ACLU noted:
“Since February 2017, four of the board’s five positions have been vacant, preventing it from doing much of its work to investigate government overreach. Three new members have been nominated but are still awaiting Senate confirmation after many months. Even if all three were confirmed, that would leave the board imbalanced, with three Republicans and only one Democrat. In this scenario, the board’s rules require that the next member not be a Republican, but Trump has made no nomination.”
One of Trump’s nominees a Adam I. Klein, is a staunch proponent of the highly controversial FISA court system, which sweeps up Americans’ data in a program intended to monitor foreign communications. That policy was reauthorized last year.
As the ACLU also noted:
“Given the vacancies — and the fact that the current nominee for chair of the board is on the record supporting unconstitutional surveillance programs — there are now serious questions regarding whether the board will act as an independent check on surveillance abuses by the executive branch in the future. “
Regardless, the board’s December 2016 report contains information regarding the government’s current surveillance activities following the implementation of President Obama’s 2014 directive to enact modest privacy protections following the 2013 revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden. As the ACLU put it, while the changes “left much to be desired, they did include improvements, including some very modest protections for the handling of personal information of non-American citizens abroad.”
The ACLU is not the only organization concerned about Trump’s refusal to release the report. The European Union has also requested it, asserting the information is relevant to its “Privacy Shield” data-sharing agreement with the U.S., which allows European tech firms to transfer information to the United States. The E.U. Parliament has gone so far as to call for a repeal of the Privacy Shield agreement because of the United States’ refusal to comply with European law.
The Trump administration’s withholding of the report is particularly troubling in light of the NSA’s continued data collection. In May, it was reported that the agency has tripled its collection of phone records since 2016, and just last month, an investigative report from the Intercept revealed AT&T’s extensive collaboration with the federal organization via spy hubs in major cities around the country.
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