Director Tulsi Gabbard Stands Up to UK “Snoopers’ Charter” to Defend “the Constitutional Rights of U.S. Citizens”

​A letter from Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence, in response to a recent letter from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), is a good sign that the new boss is not the same as the old boss.
 
What is most remarkable about Director Gabbard’s letter is that it exists and is a prompt response. Many letters from Members of Congress in the past seemed to disappear into interstellar space. Or, when the government did deign to answer them, it was often with the overcautious double-speak that avoids avoid promises and commitments or even judgment.
 
Gabbard’s reply to Sen. Wyden and Rep. Biggs is prompt, direct, and actually responsive to the concerns of these two critics of surveillance abuse. She speaks directly about the secret order issued by the UK Home Secretary instructing Apple to create a back door capability in its iCloud feature that would allow the British government to access the personal data of any customer in the world.
 
Gabbard writes that the UK government did not inform her office of this order, which seems like an astonishing breach of protocol for a “Five Eyes” ally with which the United States shares mutual intelligence. Gabbard refers to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, also known as the “Snoopers’ Charter,” which allowed London to gag Apple from voicing its concerns, even secretly with the U.S. government.
 
As a result of the UK’s pressure on Apple, Gabbard says she has:

• Assigned a senior intelligence community officer to work with the director’s Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency, as well as the office that deals with external partners, to discover all the implications of the UK’s secret surveillance order.

 

• Dispatched government lawyers to investigate the secret order in light of the bilateral CLOUD Act agreement. That agreement, Gabbard writes, forbids the United Kingdom from issuing “demands for data of any U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents (‘U.S. persons’), nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States.”

Gabbard further writes:
 
“Any information sharing between a government – any government – and private companies must be done in a manner that respects and protects the U.S. law and the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.”
 
She closes her letter by referring to obligations to protect “both the security of our country and the God-given rights of the American people enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.”
 
Missing from Director Gabbard’s letter is the oblique and lawyerly tone of past administrations. We applaud Gabbard for her responsiveness and encourage her to continue to break with her predecessors in a new spirit of openness and a real concern for Americans’ constitutional rights.

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