Congress Must Pass Judicial Redress Act, Say Lawmakers, Industry

Congress should pass the Judicial Redress Act as soon as possible to ensure that European citizens have access to core privacy benefits that Americans have been granted on European soil, and that safe harbor and trade agreements are successfully agreed to, lawmakers and industry officials said Thursday during a Computer and Communications Industry Association luncheon at the U.S. Capitol. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said passage of the legislation he introduced with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is key for EU officials to ratify the "umbrella agreement" announced earlier this week (see 1509080053). The companion legislation was introduced in the House by Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and John Conyers, D-Mich.

After former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed documents detailing that agency’s mass surveillance efforts, Murphy led a bipartisan bicameral delegation in Europe to “make it clear there was a path forward in the U.S. Congress to satisfy the legitimate concerns that emerged,” Murphy said. EU officials asked that EU citizens be given basic access to the U.S. court system, Murphy said, and that request has now been formalized as part of the umbrella agreement.

The Judicial Redress Act was filed as an amendment to a cybersecurity bill in the hopes it would pass more quickly through Congress, Murphy said. The bill doesn’t automatically provide non-U.S. persons with rights, said Hogan Lovells’ Jared Bomberg. It would apply only to citizens from designated countries or regional economic organizations that have been approved by the U.S. attorney general, Bomberg said.

According to guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies can apply privacy rights to non-U.S. citizens when data is held in mixed systems, but that doesn’t include judicial redress. The Judicial Redress Act bill itself is quite short and simple and applies only to covered countries, said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka. The bill is smart geopolitics and helps rebrand the U.S. as a country that cares about privacy, Szoka said.

Tech companies care about the bill because privacy rights are increasingly becoming obsolete, said Google Privacy Counsel David Lieber. Privacy laws largely were written before the Internet, so now there's a dissonance between what the law says and what it ought to say, Lieber said. Some countries like Russia have begun to localize data and require that data stored on its citizens be stored in that country, Bomberg said. Passage of the bill would give countries a sense of confidence the U.S. is properly handling data, he said.

Lieber said he hoped the bill could pass the House and Senate without a need for markups and hearings.