Government privacy

Feb 24 2017

Analysis & Report | Redress Revisited: Has the Privacy Shield Agreement Between the U.S. and the EU Been Fatally Undermined by President Trump’s Executive Order 13768?

This analysis is an in-depth look at the January 2017 Executive Order 13768, Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, and its interaction with two laws, the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Judicial Redress Act of 2015. Regardless of the reasons underlying why the order was written, a key question this analysis considers is if the order damages the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement, and what that means.

Dec 26 2014

Privacy News: A decade-plus of compliance reports from the NSA Intelligence Oversight Board

On Christmas Eve, the US National Security Agency (NSA) declassified and released 12 years of reports outlining compliance violations that were submitted to the NSA Intelligence Oversight Committee. The reports, which are required by law, had previously been classified and were the subject of a legal battle between the ACLU and the government. Although heavily redacted, the reports the NSA released of are vital interest to the public because they reveal a pattern of significant privacy violations and in some cases serious abuses in granular detail.

Jul 02 2014

Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board Report on PRISM publishes; reveals split

An important report came out today from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the board that was appointed to be a privacy watchdog for the US government surveillance programs. The newly released report covers PRISM and other Section 702 surveillance programs conducted under the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The report is complex, and provides important benchmarking on how PRISM and “upstream” surveillance programs work. The report’s recommendations, however, are what have proven to be more controversial.

Sep 26 2012

WPF files a FOIA to obtain the DOJ’s annual report of their uses of protected health information

This request is for a copy of every annual report made by the Department of Justice under this provision of Executive Order 13181. We prefer to have the copies in a widely available electronic format, such as a PDF file or a Word document. Having an electronic format will facilitate the posting of the reports on the World Privacy Forum’s website at www.worldprivacyforum.org. We note this is our second request for this report. Our first request was made November 29, 2007. The DOJ responded to our 2007 FOIA by saying the annual report could not be located.

Oct 14 2011

Report: Many Failures: A Brief History of Privacy Self-Regulation | Section: Government Privacy Self-Regulatory Activities

This section reviews several other privacy self-regulatory activities that share some characteristics with the industry self-regulatory programs discussed above, but these activities differ in various ways. The most noticeable differences are the role of the government in the programs. The Department of Commerce is involved in the Safe Harbor Framework, and the Federal Trade Commission is involved in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
National IDs Around the World — Interactive map

About this Data Visualization: This interactive map displays the presence...
Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.