CNN
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President Joe Biden will issue an executive order on Wednesday aimed at restricting the ability of foreign governments to purchase Americans’ sensitive personal information such as health and geolocation data, according to senior U.S. officials.
The move marks a rare policy effort to address a long-standing U.S. national security concern: the ease with which anyone, including foreign intelligence services, can legally purchase Americans’ data and then use them for espionage, hacking and blackmail. The problem, a senior Justice Department official told reporters this week, poses a “growing threat to our national security.”
The executive order will give the Justice Department authority to regulate commercial transactions that “pose an unacceptable risk” to national security, such as giving a foreign power large-scale access to Americans’ personal data, the official said. of the Ministry of Justice. The department will also issue regulations requiring better protection of sensitive government information, including the geolocation data of U.S. military personnel, according to U.S. officials.
Much of the online trading of personal information occurs through so-called data brokers, who purchase information on social security numbers, names, addresses, income, employment history and backgrounds. criminals of people, as well as other elements.
“Countries of concern, such as China and Russia, are purchasing Americans’ sensitive personal data from data brokers,” another senior administration official told reporters.
In addition to health and location data, the decree is expected to cover other sensitive information such as genomic and financial data. Administration officials told reporters that the new order would be strictly enforced so as not to harm commercial transactions that do not pose a national security risk.
The executive order will also direct the Departments of Defense, Health, Human Services and Veterans Affairs to ensure that federal grants are not used to facilitate foreign powers’ access to sensitive health data, they said. American officials.
In recent years, an increase in the amount of personal information about U.S. citizens that can be bought and sold online has alarmed U.S. lawmakers and senior officials focused on national security. The problem is that America’s adversaries are augmenting traditional intelligence sources like decryption and human sources by simply going online to buy them.
An American intelligence report declassified Last year, personal data sold online was described as an “increasingly powerful” tool for intelligence gathering by U.S. and foreign spy agencies, which also poses a risk to the privacy of ordinary people .
