When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color. The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.
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Intelligence Community
Cover in the Digital Age. Even in the public domain, it is becoming increasingly clear that protecting the identities of undercover intelligence officers is difficult in the digital age.” The truth is that as our daily activities are conducted predominantly in the digital domain, our antiquated system for providing cover to undercover officers has lagged woefully behind the threat from foreign adversaries.
The DIA, CIA, and FBI are increasingly aware of this threat and are devoting resources to the problem. Their back-office infrastructure, however, is such that they are still using methods for providing cover from decades past that put valuable intelligence officers at unnecessary risk. How intelligence officers and their families are taught to use smartphones and social media, travel, conduct banking, and take and share pictures—even how and when they are paid—can make it difficult to protect identities.** Legends, fake backstories, and identities are often weak, incomplete, and unable to stand up to a basic Google search.*® Officers operating under nonofficial cover are offered even less protection and training to help them succeed.
In addition, ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS) techniques being refined by technologies emanating from the regimes in China and Russia will continue to be highly challenging for intelligence officers. An incoming Administration will need to double down on resourcing and training so that members of the IC will have the expertise they need to operate clandestinely (and successfully) against hard targets.
Privacy Shield. For many years, the European Union (EV) has tried to force U.S. companies operating in Europe to follow its data privacy regulations. Misleading claims in the 2013 Snowden leaks destroyed the initial Safe Harbor Framework** that allowed American companies to transfer data across the Atlantic; its successor, the Privacy Shield Framework, was struck down by European courts on the grounds that it provides insufficient protections for EU citizens against hypothetical U.S. government surveillance. Those same European courts exempted the intelligence services of EU member states from the standards applied to the U.S., suggesting that trade protectionism may be the real motive behind data privacy regulations.
In 2022, the Biden Administration negotiated a new agreement, the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework,* intended to withstand European legal challenges. Given the fate of its predecessors, it is not certain that it will survive. Executive Order 14086, “Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activi
”47 implements this new framework by attempting to align signals intelligence
ties, collection practices with European privacy regulations. At most, the executive order’s changes will be helpful support for the framework in future European litigation; at worst, they could throw sand in the gears of important intelligence programs.
An incoming conservative President should reset Europe’s expectations. Brus
sels has always arbitraged the difference between being a military ally against, for
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example, Russia and conducting a full-blown trade conflict with the United States. Restrictions on data exports have been part of the trade conflict, but now they could seriously harm our military and intelligence capabilities. Moreover, restrictions on U.S. intelligence collection hurt the Europeans themselves, especially as the United States shares unprecedented amounts of intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with Europeans.**
Europe is telling the United States to meet intelligence oversight standards that no European country meets. At the same time, exports of data to China are unexamined and (so far) free from legal challenges. That violates World Trade Organization agreements as an arbitrary and discriminatory data protection standard. It is a betrayal by a nominally allied jurisdiction. European court rulings that struck down prior data privacy frameworks were grounded not in constitutional law but in a treaty among European nations. If the EU accepted an international agreement that data may flow to the United States under a more reasonable standard than the one adopted by the court, that interpretation would be binding, at least as a gloss on the earlier treaty.
The United States has never seriously pushed back against the EU; now is the time. An incoming President should ask for an immediate study of the implementation of Executive Order 14086 and suspend any provisions that unduly burden intelligence collection. At the same time, in negotiations with the Europeans, the United States should make clear that the continued sharing of intelligence with EU member states depends on successful resolution of this issue within the first two years of a President’s term. It is time for a real solution, not the 30 years of stopgaps imposed by Brussels.
President’s Daily Brief (PDB). An incoming conservative President should make clear what the President’s Daily Brief is and is not. The PDB should be for the President specifically, with a much narrower distribution and addressing areas of strategic concern. During the transition, the future National Security Advisor, along with the DNI, should conduct a review of current PDB recipients and determine which should remain recipients when the President’s term begins.
Instead of being used as the statement of record for the agencies, the PDB often misses the areas of interest for Presidents and their senior advisers. The President should want the PDB to focus on providing the information needed for the often imperfect and complex decisions that a President needs to make, which should always be based on the best intelligence that can be gathered. Where consensus and agreement are possible, an IC-coordinated product is excellent, but insights provided by properly channeled dissent can lead a President to ask relevant questions of his DNI and IC.
A future DNI determines the PDB briefer based on recommendations made by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration (MI). Historically, briefers have come from the CIA, but a future President and DNI should