White House looks to curb foreign powers’ ability to buy Americans’ sensitive personal data with executive order

The move marks a rare policy effort to address a longstanding US national security concern: the ease with which anyone, including a foreign intelligence services, can legally buy Americans’ data and then use the information for espionage, hacking and blackmail. The issue, a senior Justice Department official told reporters this week, is a “growing threat to our national security.”

The executive order will give the Justice Department the authority to regulate commercial transactions that “pose an unacceptable risk” to national security by, for example, giving a foreign power large-scale access to Americans’ personal data, the Justice Department official said. The department will also issue regulations that require better protection of sensitive government information, including geolocation data on US military members, according to US officials.

A lot of the online trade in personal information runs through so-called data brokers, which buy information on people’s Social Security numbers, names, addresses, income, employment history and criminal background, as well as other items.

“Countries of concern, such as China and Russia, are buying Americans’ sensitive personal data from data brokers,” a separate senior administration official told reporters.

In addition to health and location data, the executive order is expected to cover other sensitive information like genomic and financial data. Administration officials told reporters the new executive order would be applied narrowly so as not to hurt business transactions that do not pose a national security risk.

The executive order will also task the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services and Veteran Affairs with making sure federal grants aren’t being used to facilitate foreign powers’ access to sensitive health data, US officials said.

A surge in recent years in the amount of personal information on US citizens that can be bought and sold online has alarmed lawmakers and senior US officials focused on national security. The concern is that US adversaries are augmenting traditional sources of intelligence like codebreaking and human sources by simply going online to shop for it.

A US intelligence report declassified last year described personal data for sale online as an “increasingly powerful” tool for intelligence gathering by US and foreign spying agencies that also represents a privacy risk to ordinary people.

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