Surveillance & Privacy

DoD Reorganizes its Privacy Office?

Paul Rosenzweig
Thursday, January 30, 2014, 1:46 PM
I've only just now had a chance to take a look at the memorandum from SecDef Hagel reorganizing DoD structures that was issued in December 2013.  He're's a copy.  For those following along, the big news back then was the subordination of the Office of Net Assessment to the Undersecretary for Policy. But now that I'm reading it, I have another issue that is worth highlighting (especially in the current post-Snowden environment).  As the memorandum says, the office of the

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I've only just now had a chance to take a look at the memorandum from SecDef Hagel reorganizing DoD structures that was issued in December 2013.  He're's a copy.  For those following along, the big news back then was the subordination of the Office of Net Assessment to the Undersecretary for Policy. But now that I'm reading it, I have another issue that is worth highlighting (especially in the current post-Snowden environment).  As the memorandum says, the office of the Assistant Secretary for Intelligence Oversight will be combined with the Defense Privacy and Civil Liberties Office and both will be under the Director of Administration and Management. That's an odd way of treating the organizational issue.  First, it seems to suggest that the privacy and civil liberties issues are exclusively or predominantly related to intelligence collection when, of course, they might derive from any number of other DoD activities.  More to the point, the decision seems to diminish the significance of the question of intelligence oversight AND privacy but subsuming both within the anodyne office of administration and management -- as if those questions were mostly ministerial in nature.  To be sure, some of privacy and oversight is, in fact, just ministerial (think "updating SORNs") -- but in today's world, most of the trend is in the opposite direction, with privacy officers increasingly being direct reports to senior leadership.  This is, a bit perplexingly, the opposite trend.  If "organization is policy" this decision speaks volumes ....

Paul Rosenzweig is the founder of Red Branch Consulting PLLC, a homeland security consulting company and a Senior Advisor to The Chertoff Group. Mr. Rosenzweig formerly served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security. He is a Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University, a Senior Fellow in the Tech, Law & Security program at American University, and a Board Member of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.

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