Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Safeguarding Americans’ Digital Privacy
Washington, D.C. (June 5, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance hearing on protecting Americans’ digital privacy, upholding civil liberties, and securing our national cybersecurity and infrastructure.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s subcommittee hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance
Hearing on “Foreign Influence on Americans’ Data Through the CLOUD Act”
June 5, 2025
Thank you, Chairman Biggs, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us here today.
Living in the “digital age” in America means that much of human connection occurs over the internet. We message with friends, family, and coworkers over our cell phone apps, we store documents in the cloud, and we share materials over e-mail. End-to-end encrypted services promise that no one—not Apple, not Google, not the government—can access the messages we send, and these platforms are increasingly sought by users wishing for the privacy of a face-to-face conversation yet faced with the reality of the modern era.
Imagine pulling out your phone, opening an app you’ve been told is secure, and sending a message to a friend. Now imagine learning that the app is not end-to-end encrypted like the company said. Imagine the government ordered the service provider to make its security weaker so that said government could demand access to your message. Imagine the government told the platform they couldn’t tell a soul.
That’s exactly what the United Kingdom secretly ordered Apple to do, and the reason we are here today.
Requiring Apple secretly build a so-called “backdoor” into its Advanced Data Protection Service would make users’ end-to-end encrypted documents no longer secure. Law enforcement officers, not just in the UK but also the United States, could demand Apple produce users’ content and metadata from the cloud. And cyber criminals would be able to exploit the system weakness introduced by the backdoor to target Americans for espionage, consumer fraud, and ransomware.
Backdoors to encrypted technologies cannot only let “good” guys in while keeping out “bad” guys. Backdoors are intentional weaknesses in an encrypted technology’s mathematical formula. Weaknesses that can be exploited by foreign governments seeking to compromise our national security, steal intellectual property, or surveil American citizens.
Congress passed the CLOUD Act in 2018 to allow for data sharing agreements between the United States and countries that met the necessary standards. Through its negotiated agreement with the US, UK law enforcement can access non-encrypted data transmitted by US providers that is relevant to their law enforcement recommendations. While secret orders, like the Technical Capability Notice the home office placed on Apple, have nothing to do with the data sharing agreement or the CLOUD Act, they are only worthwhile to the UK because of the data made available through the agreement.
I for one believe that the CLOUD Act and the US-UK data sharing agreement thus far have been beneficial both to US companies and to the United States. But I also believe that forcing companies to circumvent their own encrypted services in the name of security is the beginning of a slippery slope, and I look forward to hearing from the witnesses as to what, if anything, needs to change to prevent future, similar, orders against other companies.
Some argue that privacy is yesterday’s news. Cookies monitor which websites we click on. Our devices track every step we take. And data brokers take anonymized data and reidentify it in portfolios available to the highest bidder. But I disagree with the idea that privacy is no longer valuable to the citizenry. In a country where visa holders are being detained for opinions they’ve expressed, where criticism of the administration could result in a visit from the Secret Service, and where staff of Members of Congress can be arrested just for doing their jobs, Americans’ security from government intrusion has never been more important.
The deluge of ways new technology enables the governments to spy on their citizens makes it even more important that Americans stand up to increases in surveillance. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788 that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Gaining ground is exactly what Donald Trump is seeking to do.
A week ago, the Trump administration announced it would hire Palantir to consolidate Americans’ data into dossiers on US citizens. The plan to use Palantir’s Foundry product to organize and analyze data across agencies isn’t just terrifying—it is the beginning of an effort to create a national citizen database. From bank account numbers and student debt totals to medical claims and disability status, the Trump administration is taking information previously siloed, as required under the law and using it to create a surveillance apparatus that can be used to crush resistance and silence dissenters.
We are here today to discuss the CLOUD Act, I recognize this. But we should also recognize that these issues don’t exist in a vacuum. All government surveillance curtails citizens’ liberties. It is not always immediate. It is often a slow decay. But every chip in our civil liberties foundation brings us that much closer to a government that no longer has its foundational and necessary ideological checks against total control of its citizens. Surveillance databases like the one contemplated by the Trump Administration should remain the stuff of science fiction and fascist governments, not a reality for a country founded on the principles of civil liberty and freedom from tyranny.
In the case of the UK order, we can start with an easy first step. We don’t need legislation to pass in the divided House and frozen Senate. The Trump DOJ can just do its job. The US should not sit idly by and watch the home office issue perhaps more secret orders against US companies. But thus far, that is exactly what the Trump DOJ has done so far. I sincerely hope that changes soon.
I thank Chairman Biggs and Chairman Jordan for holding a second bipartisan surveillance hearing, and I look forward to working across the aisle with you as we prepare for the expiration of FISA Section 702 next year.
I yield back.