 “We are open for business,” declared Beth Williams, the only board member currently serving on the five-seat Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). “Our work conducting important oversight of the intelligence community has not ended just because we are currently sub-quorum.” A more accurate description for the board would be “solum unum.” One of the first acts of the Trump Administration was to fire the Democratic PCLOB members, leaving Republican Williams by herself. Perhaps anticipating this, PCLOB’s board members shortly before the election adopted new rules that would allow any remaining board members – aided by the body’s professional staff of lawyers, policy analysts, and technologists – to continue to publish its recommendations to the intelligence community, and to share those with Congress and the public. In a recent speech, Beth Williams spelled out commendable goals for ongoing efforts for her PCLOB of one. Censorship: “Tying disfavored speech to counter-terrorism paves the way for censorship under the guise of national security,” Williams said. She complained that the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had been slow in responding to her requests for detailed information about the activities of the department’s Orwellian-sounding “Disinformation Governance Board.” Williams added: “I am hopeful that our renewed efforts with the current Administration will yield more transparency.” Facial Recognition in Airports: Williams promises to weigh the operational benefits of this technology with concerns about privacy and civil liberty concerns. Debanking: As with censorship, Williams says she is concerned about the government conflating “disfavored persons” with terrorism, leading to the “debanking” of people and organizations. The Consolidated Audit Trail: Without any statutory basis, the Securities and Exchange Commission under former Chairman Gary Gensler assembled a database that monitors the identity, transactions, and investment portfolios of everyone who invests in the stock market. “Government surveillance of Americans’ financial activities – especially in the name of counter-terrorism – is ripe for oversight,” Williams said. Section 702: PPSA has long worked to make sure that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies to Americans whose communications are incidentally caught up in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But Williams and her former colleague Richard DiZinno dissented from PCLOB’s Democratic majority support for a warrant requirement in 2023. Williams has previously called for “structural and cultural reforms” to the way in which the FBI accesses Americans’ information. The FBI has since tightened Section 702 querying procedures, and Congress has enacted reforms increasing the FBI’s reporting requirements to Congress. Williams appears content that these changes are enough to rest easy on Section 702. We disagree. The FBI reviewed Americans’ communications 3.4 million times a few years ago, and more than 200,000 times in the most recent report. The bureau has accessed the personal information of Members of Congress, political donors, and journalists without a warrant. “Is 200,000 warrantless queries better than 3.4 million warrantless queries?” Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program said to The Washington Post in 2023. “When you ask the question, you get a sense of how warped the universe we’re in is – that somehow 200,000 warrantless searches a year are an acceptable number.” At the very least, we hope Williams will see that this is a valid perspective. PPSA hopes that that Beth Williams – lacking peers as sounding boards – will reach out to the civil liberties community to hear the perspectives and the questions that would have come from her departed peers. Board Member Williams, can we meet? Comments are closed.
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