Biden’s Executive Order to Protect Data from China

(TheConservativeTimes.org) – The United States President, Joe Biden will announce an executive order that will protect America’s personal data from countries deemed as hostile or as a threat.

The order has been brought up mostly to combat the business of selling other people’s data to “countries of concern” and the Biden Administration is worried about this issue as it’s a common sale to make. The countries of concern include China as well as Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Hong Kong, and Macau.

There have been previous concerns that a vast swath of U.S. data was held by the Chinese Communist Party, which could pose a national security concern. Their focus is mainly on information related to health, geographic, genomic, biometric, financial, and personal identification-related data.

Attorney General Merrick B Garland said, “Our adversaries are exploiting Americans’ sensitive personal data to threaten our national security.” He continued, “They are purchasing this data to use to blackmail and surveil individuals, target those they view as dissidents here in the United States, and engage in other malicious activities.”

The Department of Justice has said that they will seek “civil and criminal remedies” for those that go against the data regulations once they’ve been put in place. However, the document did say that the severity and type of penalties would “depend on the facts and circumstances of the violation, including the adequacy of any compliance program.”

As the United States looks into potential data breaches, they’ve found concerns from even cargo cranes that have been programmed and manufactured using China’s assets, which means even those could be compromised and used to collect data. With this said, a group of lawmakers reached out to different companies such as Equifax, asking about data collection and distribution methods that they use. Their letter read, “American privacy concerns in the data broker industry are not new, and existing laws do not sufficiently protect Americans’ data from misuse.”