Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger. On today's show, The Golden Age of Surveillance. Should we be talking about how to limit government collection of our data or is the more important question what they

do with that data after they've collected it? Joining me to discuss this is Jake Lapeirook,

Privacy Fellow at the Constitution Project. Jake, thank you for joining me. Hi, thanks for having me.

So Jake, you've got a new paper out last week titled How a Chain Link Fence can protect privacy

in the age of, quote, collect it all. And we will link to that

paper in the show notes of today's episode. It seems like your premise is that restricting data

collection in the first place is not enough to protect privacy in the golden age of surveillance.

What do you mean by that?

Right. Well, what we say in the papers, you know, there's a lot of really important areas

where we should try to limit surveillance, limit government collection, you know, ECBRA form, location privacy, or a few examples. But the fact is in a lot of ways, there are just areas that we're not going to be able to stem the tide of private data and sense of information that's going to the government. So we think it's important that we start looking at different ways that we can actually respond to what happens after the government gets

that information. How do they use it? How do they access it? What are the rules? What's the

oversight? Where are the limits? And we think that by looking at that realm, not just the collection

realm, but the areas where it's going to be collected, but what do we do next is a really important way that we can protect privacy and civil liberties.

And what would you say the problems are with the use of data after they are collected?

So, you know, setting aside the problems of whether the collection in the first place violates, you know, Fourth Amendment warrant protections or whether, you know, national security agencies misinterpreted the Patriot Act.

Those are all issues about the collection itself. What are the issues with how the data are used

after collection? Well, I think the problems can stem from a few different things. First,

you can have issues of if you collect it in a certain way, then maybe it's a

problem if you use it in other ways. So one big thing that we talk about a lot is these really

intensive military surveillance programs like Section 702 of FISA executive order 12 triple

3, which is a Cold War era surveillance executive order. These are really expansive programs that were designed to basically fight the Cold War and

fight Al Qaeda and be a tool for military and intelligence surveillance.

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