Why Should Americans Care About Foreign Privacy?

[Commentary] Congress must decide by the end of 2017 whether to renew the National Security Agency’s power to engage in surveillance of communications that transit switches and servers inside the United States using a secret court order. The intelligence community has revealed that over 100,000 targets were under such surveillance in 2016, for reasons well beyond terrorism. While the government may not single out Americans as targets, it may search the database for information about Americans who may be communication with foreigners. It did so more than 30,000 times in 2016.

While Congress should reform this “backdoor search” practice, it should not make the same mistake I made by focusing only on protecting the privacy of Americans. If it does, businesses may face a rude awakening when European courts again strike down transfers of personal data to the United States, threatening a half-trillion dollar transatlantic trading relationship. Reforming the NSA’s mass surveillance programs to focus more narrowly on terrorism and other security threats would do much to address these concerns. Protecting the privacy of foreign users of American internet services is not just good for business, it is good for everyone’s privacy – including Americans. The digital data, communications, and personal lives of Americans now transcend national boundaries. It turns out we are all in this together. In the digital age, the only way to protect the privacy of Americans is to protect the privacy of everyone.

[Tim Edgar was the first privacy officer for the White House, former ACLU attorney and current Professor at Brown University.]