PPSA 2025 Year in Review

​Privacy is a bedrock of American democracy. The fight to preserve it never ends, and the struggle ever been more fierce.

PPSA stood in the gap throughout 2025 alongside our coalition allies. On this news blog we published more than 200 articles calling attention to surveillance threats to Americans’ privacy. But we did more than raise awareness and offer our perspective. We took action. Here’s a list of the concrete ways we engaged in the privacy fight throughout 2025:

On the public record:

• PPSA’s senior policy advisor and former House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte supported congressional efforts to repeal the Corporate Transparency Act, whose database provisions and disclosure requirements represent an unprecedented threat to Americans’ financial privacy. Two months later, Treasury announced it would no longer enforce the CTA’s penalties. Secretary Scott Bessent called it a “victory for common sense.”
  
• Bob Goodlatte also dispatched a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi warning of the UK’s abuse of technical capabilities notices (TCNs) under the CLOUD Act agreement. “I am deeply troubled by how the United Kingdom has taken advantage of our goodwill,” he wrote, urging the Department of Justice to suspend the Agreement unless and until the UK withdraws its use of TCNs. These secret orders, issued under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, can compel U.S. technology companies to weaken, delay, or suspend the deployment of essential security features.
  
• Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel, praised a district court ruling in United States v. Hasbajrami. This ruling found that warrantless searches of U.S. citizens’ communications are an abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and violate the Fourth Amendment. “We can have aggressive protection of the American people while standing up for the Constitution,” Schaerr said. “This court recognized that those two principles can go hand in hand.”
  
• PPSA President Erik Jaffe called on the U.S. government to push back against the British government’s “internet imperialism” when it demanded that Apple provide Whitehall with access to all encrypted communications. He said: “Efforts to give the government back-door access to encryption is no different than the government pressuring every locksmith and lock maker to give it an extra key to every home and apartment.”

In the legal and legislative arenas:

• In two separate appearances, Schaerr testified before Congress that Section 702 is symptomatic of the larger anti-privacy, pro-surveillance arc the U.S. government has increasingly embraced. “Elements of an emerging American surveillance state are being knitted together before our eyes,” he warned. In April 2026, Congress will have the opportunity to reform FISA Section 702. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Schaerr anticipated that moment by outlining four critical reforms advanced by PPSA and our allies.

In court:

• In Case v. Montana, PPSA filed a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve the privacy standard previously established in Caniglia v. Strom. The Caniglia ruling greatly restricted the use of warrantless home entry under the “community caretaking” exception. Our message? Ignoring that standard is a slippery slope. “Lowering the burden for warrantless home invasion would lower the burdens for warrantless invasion of all other repositories of private information.” PPSA’s amicus brief was the only one filed in the case, and the Supreme Court granted the petitioner’s request a few months later.
  
• Lowering privacy standards is inextricably linked to diminishing expectations of a right to privacy. Preventing this destructive codependence was at the heart of the brief we filed with the Supreme Court on behalf of James Harper. In Harper's case, the First Circuit’s interpretation of the third-party doctrine would have limited the notion of privacy to something belonging to the bygone era of paper and ink. Our data deserves the same privacy the Founders granted its physical analogs in the 19th century, especially as “third-party storage becomes ubiquitous” in the digital age.
  
• Such sweeping interpretations of the third-party doctrine bedeviled privacy rights at every turn in 2025. In a Wisconsin case, we reminded the state’s high court that searches of personal data were subject to the Fourth Amendment regardless of how that data is stored: “The ransacking of our cloud-based data is much like the ‘general warrants’ of the colonial era, when agents of the Crown could rifle through anyone’s documents at will.”

PPSA also filed briefs in 2025 before the Supreme Court on the nature of geofence warrants, before a federal appellate court on the expansive practice of border searches of phones, and before a state court on sweeping searches of data in a phone unrelated to a probable cause warrant.

Near the end of the year, we applauded the Judiciary Committee’s bipartisan – and unanimous – decision to put the Non-Disclosure Order (NDO) Fairness Act before the full House for a vote. Earlier in the year, PPSA congratulated House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) for his tireless work to pass the Anti-CBDC bill, forbidding the Federal Reserve from establishing a government-issued digital currency. As we noted at the time, a central bank digital currency “would enable mass surveillance of American consumers, and the debanking of any targeted group.”

Finally, we were encouraged when the Department of Justice showed a more responsive spirit in reply to one of our FOIA requests. In the past, when we asked about internal policies regarding the use of cell-site simulators (“stingrays”), we were met with non-reply responses, often redacted to the point of absurdity. This time, however, the department suggested it intends to comply with its 2015 memo requiring probable cause warrants before stingrays could be used.
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We are glad to see a change of heart, but we won’t stop issuing FOIAs. Trust, but verify.

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