Trump's picks for AG Jeff Sessions and CIA director Mike Pompeo are leading domestic surveillance advocates, may reverse curbs imposed after Snowden revelations
Chris Strohm / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
The post-Snowden restraint era was already fraying before this announcement: Obama signed the USA Freedom Act in 2015, ending the Patriot Act's bulk-collection provisions while letting other surveillance measures resume. Now Trump has named Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Mike Pompeo as CIA director — two of the most vocal domestic-surveillance advocates in Congress — putting both the Justice Department's litigation posture and the agency's collection programs under leadership inclined to unwind the remaining curbs.
Pompeo's record is more nuanced than a straight hawk line: he backs mass surveillance but has opposed mandating encryption backdoors, per earlier coverage of his stance on surveillance and encryption. That split matters for how any reversal actually lands on the tech industry.
First-order effects
- Pompeo taking over the CIA puts an opponent of the post-Snowden reforms in charge of the agency whose bulk-collection practices those reforms targeted, giving him direct authority over what gets collected and disclosed.
- Sessions at the Justice Department would control the government's position in surveillance litigation — the same lever law experts flagged when they warned the government is seeking to loosen Constitutional protections against practices like bulk Yahoo email scanning.
Second-order effects
- Because Pompeo opposes encryption backdoors, the pressure on Apple, Google, and other device makers shifts from mandated technical access toward expanded legal collection around encryption — a trade Silicon Valley may find easier to live with than forced weakening.
- Civil-liberties groups and privacy-focused lawmakers lose their friendliest audience in the two offices that set surveillance enforcement priorities, pushing the fight toward Congress and the courts instead.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the post-Snowden settlement becomes what it always threatened to be — an executive-branch preference rather than settled law — with each administration resetting collection policy and leaving only statutory limits or SCOTUS doctrine as durable checks.
- The transatlantic dimension compounds over time: weaker US safeguards make data-transfer frameworks harder to defend, echoing later fights like the court ruling that undercut Privacy Shield negotiations.
The trend: US surveillance policy is reverting from post-Snowden restraint to expansion under new leadership, with the durability of reform increasingly decided by statutes and courts rather than White House preferences.