February 29, 2024
Experts react: What Biden’s new executive order about Americans’ sensitive data really does
It’s a personal matter. On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order restricting the large-scale transfer of personal data to “countries of concern.” The order is intended to prevent genomic, health, and geolocation data, among other types of sensitive information, from being sold in bulk to countries such as China, which could use it to track or blackmail individuals. Can Biden’s directive stop sensitive data from slipping into the wrong hands? And what are the implications for privacy and cybersecurity more broadly? Below, Atlantic Council experts share their personal insights.
Click to jump to an expert analysis:
Rose Jackson: The absence of a federal US data protection law threatens national security
Graham Brookie: An essential, baseline step for shoring up US data security
Justin Sherman: Congress must get involved to tame data brokerage over the long term
Maia Hamin: A welcome step, but beware of data brokers exploiting backdoors and work-arounds
The absence of a federal US data protection law threatens national security
The United States desperately needs a federal privacy or data protection law; the absence of one threatens our national interest and national security. While we wait for Congress to take the issue seriously, the Biden administration seems to be looking to leverage its executive authorities to take action where it can. Wednesday’s executive order should be understood in that context. The order takes particular aim at what are called data brokers—a lucrative market most Americans have likely never heard of. These companies quietly buy up troves of information collected through social media and credit card companies, consumer loyalty programs, mobile phone providers, health tech services, and more, then sell the combined files to whoever wants it. That means that currently, the Chinese intelligence service doesn’t need an app like TikTok to collect data on US citizens; they can just buy it from a US company. So while this executive order won’t address all of the issues related to this unregulated and highly extractive market, it will close an obvious and glaring national security gap by barring the sale of such data to foreign adversaries.
Another significant piece of the executive order is its focus on genomic data as a particularly risky category. Genomic data are all but banned from provision to adversarial nations in any form. While this is a good step, the administration does not have the authority to ban the sale of genomic data to non-adversarial nations or domestically. This means there is a high likelihood that absent congressional or other action, the market for US genomic data will only grow. This underscores an uncomfortable reality when it comes to tech policy; there is no separating the foreign and domestic. Markets grow where there is incentive, and our continued failure in the United States to meaningfully grapple with how we want tech to be governed means we are choosing not to have input on the direction our own world-changing innovations will take.
—Rose Jackson is the director of the Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. She previously served as the chief of staff to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the US State Department.
The focus on data brokers targets a key vulnerability in the US information ecosystem
While further details are still being developed (including rightsizing thresholds for what constitutes “bulk data”), the executive order is a welcome development for those concerned about data security. The focus on data brokers—as opposed to targeting a single app, like TikTok—targets a key vulnerability in the US information ecosystem. Data brokers compile detailed profiles of individuals—including real-time location data—from various sources, including social media, credit card companies, and public records. This creates vulnerabilities for espionage and exploitation by foreign adversaries. That means while the national security community has raised concerns over the Chinese government’s ability to use TikTok to access data on Americans, it pales in comparison to what China already accesses through hacking and legal purchases via US data brokers.
Data security threats extend beyond individual apps to include data brokers and the broader lack of regulation in the tech industry. To protect privacy and national security, stronger regulations and transparency measures are needed, and the United States should pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation. However, in the interim, the administration has done what it can with this executive order to help stem the tide of Americans’ sensitive personal data flowing abroad.
—Kenton Thibaut is a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).
An essential, baseline step for shoring up US data security
The executive order preventing the sale of bulk data to adversarial countries may sound technical, bureaucratic, and even opaque. However, it is one of the most essential baseline steps the United States needs to take in shoring up security in an era in which technology is at the forefront of geopolitical competition. Enormous amounts of information about Americans is bought and sold on the open market every single day. This measure is intended to make it harder for specific adversarial countries to buy billions of data points about citizens legally.
As many other more challenging technical issues arise—such as how to govern the rapid development of artificial intelligence—a standard for data privacy for every single person in the United States is sorely needed. Data privacy is the foundation for establishing a rights-respecting and rights-protecting approach in an era of both rapid technological change and geopolitical competition. The executive order is an important step that can be built on. The policy is a threat-based approach to securing citizens’ data and information from the worst foreign actors. Congress can strengthen this approach and address the limitations of an executive order by passing legislation for a strong federal data privacy standard that not only protects Americans’ data from foreign adversaries, but also provides Americans protection in general.
—Graham Brookie is the vice president for technology programs and strategy, as well as senior director, of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. He previously served in various roles over four years at the White House National Security Council.
It will be essential to sort out how new rules fit in with the current regulatory structure
With its latest executive order and related advance notice of proposed rulemaking, the Biden administration is trying to find transparent, clearly defined legal channels to address a specific set of national security challenges. These are the challenges that arise from the unmitigated and largely untracked commercial world of bulk data transfer to entities owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of potential adversaries. The administration’s proposed rules demonstrate its seriousness of purpose in attempting to craft rules that are narrow in scope and application, while also anticipating and countering potential circumvention techniques of untrusted actors. They are also complicated. For example, they seek to stand up a new licensing line of effort with financial sanctions and export licenses based on a model from the Department of Justice and on the experiences of the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Bureau of Industry and Security. This complexity raises questions about the feasibility and costs of compliance and enforcement.
Some parts of the proposed rules overlap significantly with existing regulatory structure, and especially with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). In particular, the regulation will cover investments by covered persons and entities in US businesses that collect covered data, a class of transactions typically handled by the CFIUS. It will be important for the government to clearly articulate how the new rules and the different government entities involved will relate to each other, with a goal toward reducing rather than exacerbating regulatory complexity that leads to higher compliance costs and confusion. The proposed rules suggest that the CFIUS might take precedence, but the CFIUS is a costly and time-intensive case-by-case review that is supposed to be a tool of last resort. It would be more efficient and probably more effective to first apply investment restrictions based on these new rules and preserve case-by-case CFIUS review only in situations in which the new data security prohibitions and restrictions do not adequately address national security risks associated with a particular transaction. Doing so would reduce pressure on the CFIUS’s ever-growing caseload and would provide businesses with bright lines rather than black boxes.
—Sarah Bauerle Danzman is a resident senior fellow with the GeoEconomics Center’s Economic Statecraft Initiative. She is also an associate professor of international studies at Indiana University Bloomington where she specializes in the political economy of international investment and finance.
Congress must get involved to tame data brokerage over the long term
Data brokerage is a multi-billion-dollar industry comprising thousands of companies. Foreign governments such as China and Russia obviously have many ways to get sensitive data on Americans, from hacking to tapping into advertising networks—and one of those vulnerabilities lies in the data brokerage industry.
Data brokers collect and sell data on virtually every single person in the United States, and that includes data related to government employees, security clearance-holding contractors, and active-duty military personnel. My team at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy published a detailed study in November 2023, where we purchased sensitive, individually identified, and nonpublic information such as health conditions, financial information, and data on religion and children about active-duty US military servicemembers from US data brokers—with little to no vetting, and for as cheap as twelve cents per servicemember. It would be easy for the Chinese or Russian governments to set up a website and purchase data on select Americans to blackmail individuals or run intelligence operations. With some datasets available for cents on the dollar per person, or incredibly granular datasets available for much more, it may be considerably cheaper than the cost of espionage for foreign governments to simply tap into the unregulated data brokerage ecosystem and buy data.
Of course, an executive order isn’t going to fix everything. At the end of the day, the fact that data brokers gather and sell Americans’ data at scale, without their knowledge, often without controls, is a congressional problem—and has signified a major congressional failure to act. Federal and state legislation is what will ultimately best tackle the privacy, safety, civil rights, and national security risks from the data brokerage industry. But that doesn’t mean the executive branch shouldn’t act in the meantime. If the executive branch can introduce even a few additional regulations for data brokers to better vet their customers or to stop selling certain kinds of data to certain foreign actors, that’s an important improvement from the status quo.
Over the coming months, important challenges for the executive branch will be defining terms such as “data broker,” ensuring that covered data brokers are required to properly implement “know your customer” requirements, and figuring out ways to manage regulatory compliance in light of the size and operating speed of the data brokerage industry.
—Justin Sherman is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies.
A welcome step, but beware of data brokers exploiting backdoors and work-arounds
The commercial data broker ecosystem monetizes and sells Americans’ most sensitive data, often piggybacking off of invasive ad-tracking infrastructure to vacuum up and auction off specific information about Americans, such as their location history or mental health conditions. This executive order is a useful step toward making it more difficult for specific adversary countries to purchase that data, and it makes clear sense from a national security perspective.
However, while this market remains (otherwise) largely unregulated and flourishing in the United States, in the absence of a comprehensive privacy law or other restrictions on data brokering, Americans’ privacy will continue to suffer. Leaving this market intact domestically runs the risk of opening up potential backdoors and work-arounds to the limitations in the executive order. It also—perhaps not coincidentally—leaves the door open for the US government itself to continue purchasing and using commercial data in its own intelligence programs.
That’s all to say, cracking down on data brokers is always welcome, so it’s great to see this order (and recent action from the Federal Trade Commission as well). Next, let’s challenge Congress and the executive to push it further.
—Maia Hamin is an associate director with the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative under the Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Further reading
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Image: US President Joe Biden delivers remarks to US governors attending the National Governors Association winter meeting, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, US, February 23, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz