Why President Trump should keep Obama’s digital privacy protections

[Commentary] As the new administration takes office, we will start to see just how literally to take Donald Trump’s pronouncements and the promised targeting of his predecessor’s executive orders for immediate destruction. Trade policy appointments signal that statements about being aggressive against barriers to trade should be taken very literally. Below we make the case that the Obama executive order extending certain privacy protections to ordinary foreign citizens should not be on the chopping block because it is vital to transatlantic digital trade and ecommerce.

A keystone underlying support for the Privacy Shield is President Obama’s 2014 Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28) declaring that “all persons should be treated with dignity and respect regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside, and all persons have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information.” This order extended to citizens of foreign countries safeguards that require that surveillance of Americans be targeted carefully for defined and legitimate purposes. These safeguards essentially protect the privacy interests of innocent foreigners whose electronic communications are scooped up by the NSA merely as incidental collections to the agency’s actual targeting of malicious individuals. The President-elect, his transition team, and his incoming national security and economic teams would be wise to heed these bipartisan recommendations by keeping PPD-28 and upholding the Privacy Shield.

[Cameron Kerry is Senior Counsel at Sidley Austin, LLP in Boston and Washington, DC, and a Visiting Scholar the MIT Media Lab.
Alan Raul is a partner at Sidley Austin LLP]