A National Strategy on Privacy and Civil Liberties
Summary
In the 20th century, the costly nature of surveillance made it easier to maintain constitutional guarantees protecting U.S. persons from mass surveillance. In the 21st century, digitization of our everyday lives and communications has sharply reduced surveillance costs—and indeed, changed the nature of surveillance itself. The core responsibility of any President is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” but recently unsealed federal court rulings show that intelligence agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) are routinely accessing the digital communications of U.S. persons and otherwise using digital surveillance in ways that violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” To fulfill their oath of office, the next president should take concrete steps to reform federal operations with respect to digital surveillance. This is important not only for protecting basic American rights, but also for diplomatic relations with key foreign allies. Instituting meaningful protections against government surveillance in the United States would have the significant diplomatic benefit of helping reestablish the credibility of American calls for other countries to adhere to high human-rights standards.
Soft law was never meant to be a permanent solution. Treating it as one, and letting the sandcastle stand in for the skyscraper indefinitely, is how we end up with a decade of voluntary commitments and no enforceable accountability to show for it.
Jobseekers, employees at smaller organizations, and local public workers need more than a weekend crash course in AI. They need practice choosing useful tasks, protecting data, testing outputs, and explaining where human judgment remains necessary.
“What excites me is that it’s very tempting to be very discouraged, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these archaic institutions that are calcified and you could never change them.’ But I think we’re in the middle of a technological revolution that will upend lots of things, and does provide a window.”
As Congress considers broader packages to advance critical minerals production and supply chain resilience, science diplomacy vehicles must be part of that conversation, not as an afterthought, but as an intentional and foundational pillar of any strategy.