Reinvention Blueprint No. 3: To Unmake the Surveillance State, Rethink the Privacy Act
A policy analysis from Just Security argues that the Privacy Act, the main federal law governing how agencies handle personal data, is structurally outdated and insufficient to stop the executive branch from repurposing government-held data in ways the law never anticipated.
Why this matters: The Privacy Act was written in 1974. The federal government now holds far more data on far more people, and the law has not kept pace. When an administration decides to use that data for new purposes, the Act offers little real resistance. That is not a technical legal problem. It is a practical one: your tax records, benefit files, immigration status, and health data sit in federal systems with weaker guardrails than most people assume. Reforming the Privacy Act is not a niche issue. It is the foundation of any serious check on government surveillance.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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