Free Republic

At an undetermined date, in an undisclosed location, the Biden administration began operating a secretive new court to protect Europeans’ privacy rights under U.S. law. Officially known as the Data Protection Review Court, it was authorized in an October 2022 executive order to fix a collision of European and American law that had been blocking the lucrative flow of consumer data between American and European companies for three years. The court’s eight judges were named last November, including former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Its existence has allowed companies to resume the lucrative transatlantic data trade with the blessing of...

WASHINGTON — Rachel L. Brand, the No. 3 official at the Justice Department, plans to step down after nine months on the job as the country’s top law enforcement agency has been under attack by President Trump, according to two people briefed on her decision. Ms. Brand’s profile had risen in part because she is next in the line of succession behind the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who is overseeing the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian influence in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump, who has called the investigation a witch hunt, has considered firing Mr. Rosenstein. Such a...

The White House on Thursday disputed the findings of an independent review board that said the National Security Agency’s mass data collection program is illegal and should be ended, indicating the administration would not be taking that advice. “We simply disagree with the board’s analysis on the legality of the program,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said. He was responding to a scathing report from The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), which said the program ran afoul of the law on several fronts. “The … bulk telephone records program lacks a viable legal foundation,” the board’s report...

President Obama’s Friday meeting with a newly reformed privacy watchdog panel will take place behind the closed doors of the White House Situation Room, according to administration officials. It’s the president’s first sit-down with the recently constituted and little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created nearly a decade ago but dormant for the entirety of the Obama presidency. The White House released few details on the meeting agenda other than to say it will be held at 3 p.m. and will include the discussion of classified information such as the National Security Agency’s data and telephone record collection efforts,...

The body charged by President Obama with protecting the civil liberties and privacy of the American people exists in shadows almost as dark as the intelligence agencies it is designed to oversee. The Privacy & Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) was due to meet Obama at the White House on Friday afternoon at 3pm in the situation room to discuss growing concerns over US surveillance of phone and internet records – or, at least, that´s what unnamed "senior administration officials" said would happen. The meeting did not appear on the president´s official diary issued to journalists, nor has