| Candidate | Grade |
| Kamala Harris | C |
| Tim Walz | A |
| Donald Trump | D- |
| J.D. Vance | C- |
| Chase Oliver | A |
| Jill Stein | A |
After internal discussions and the release of Vice President Harris’s official policy platform, Restore The Fourth has revised her grade from a B to a C.
Mass government surveillance is largely shaped by intelligence community officials, tech executives, and legislators on Congressional intelligence committees. However, who sits in the Oval Office can change the course of surveillance reform efforts. We witnessed the influence of the president first hand during the latest FISA reauthorization debate; the Biden administration mobilized its resources against an amendment that would have required intelligence officials to get a warrant prior to accessing Americans’ communications.
And even when not in office, former presidents like Donald Trump can have an impact on government surveillance policy. Toward the end of the latest FISA reauthorization debate, Trump publicly urged legislators to “KILL FISA” on Truth Social. Trump weighing in on this debate surely had some influence on Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s subsequent decisions regarding surveillance reform.
There are meaningful differences between the candidates for president. We do not make endorsements or dis-endorsements, but it is our job to educate the public about those differences. We draw together relevant information so that privacy-oriented voters can cast an informed ballot.
We’ve assessed the candidates platforms, track records, and public statements based on the following factors:
- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform/NSA surveillance;
- FBI surveillance of domestic dissent;
- DHS and sub-agency border surveillance;
- Criminal justice reforms, including police accountability and transparency;
- Attitude toward national security whistleblowers;
- Digital privacy and AI;
- Consumer privacy protection legislation
Our presidential candidate analysis casts a wider net than our Congressional Scorecard. Votes are the clearest indicator of where a candidate stands, but some candidates have never held elected office. When appropriate, we include and contextualize candidate statements and non-legislative actions.
Kamala Harris
Grade: C
To actually support surveillance reform as President means offending entrenched and powerful interests. As the fight over FISA this year showed, the debate over surveillance reform often seems less like a civil, policy-oriented colloquy than a vicious knife fight in a dingy alley over who holds real power in the State. A good candidate, in our terms, must therefore be willing to push for reforms even when it offends entrenched interests or harms their popularity. Kamala Harris’s Fourth Amendment record offers some positives relative to President Biden’s, but also some contradictions.
As DA in California, Harris used the powers of her office to threaten the parents of truants, who themselves had done nothing wrong. In her campaign for state attorney-general, she refused to take sides between Apple and the FBI (her opponent supported Apple). As Attorney-General, she created a new privacy enforcement unit, taking action against a variety of commercial data collection practices, and publishing guidance regarding mobile privacy addressing location data collection/use and ’surprise minimization.’
There are also significant downsides to her record as Attorney-General. She resisted acting to restrict surveillance by state police, and refused to investigate police abuse of minors in Oakland. Most seriously, in 2011, the Supreme Court found in Brown v. Plata that California’s prison system was in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The Court ordered California to decarcerate to reduce its prison population to 137.5% capacity by 2013. As Attorney General, Harris defied the court order, signaled that her office had no intent to do so, filed “obstructionist, bad-faith and nonsensical” motions to prevent compliance and refused to answer why they could not simply release low-risk, nonviolent inmates with no recidivism risk. Harris subverted the authority of the Supreme Court to the point that the Court almost held CA in contempt. Harris’s defiance of the Court’s decarceration mandate calls into question her record as a “progressive prosecutor,” and lends credence to those who question whether she will truly address the excesses and harms of the criminal justice system if elected president.
As Senator, Harris voted clearly and repeatedly in favor of civil liberties and surveillance reform. She built up a strong record on NSA and FBI surveillance reform, from a valuable position as the only non-white member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She voted for a warrant requirement before querying Section 702 data, voted against reporting the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act to the floor, and on the floor, voted against cloture. She joined Senator Warren in expressing concern to DHS about fusion center surveillance of journalists involved in reporting on family separation at the border. She spoke up against Wikileaks being designated as a ‘non-state hostile intelligence service.’ Less favorably, she led efforts to weaken tech firms’ protections against lawsuits relating to user-generated content. In her campaign platform in 2020, she called for unspecified regulations, but not moratoria or bans, on facial recognition use by law enforcement. She also expressed support in 2020 for protest movements and for religious minorities. Her Senate record is a courageous one, and well worth our praise.
Vice-President Harris kept quiet, both publicly and, as far as we know, when out of the public eye, on the appropriate scope of government surveillance. The Biden administration pulled out all the stops to preserve and expand FISA surveillance powers in 2023-4. During this whole debate, Harris, once one of the Senate’s leading reformers, did not once publicly comment on the need to reform the warrantless surveillance of Americans conducted under FISA Section 702. Her complacency with the Administration’s position, which was to pass a clean authorization with no reforms, undermines her pro-reform Senatorial record.
The federal government’s rapid adoption of AI without strong oversight or regulation is an issue a future Harris administration would have to address. National security and law enforcement agencies are working to integrate AI into their most consequential decision making processes, including who to target for surveillance, who poses a risk or threat, who belongs on a government watchlist, and who is stopped and searched at borders. As Vice-President Harris acknowledged, “We have a moral, ethical and societal duty to make sure AI is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm and ensures that everyone is able to enjoy its benefits.” The Biden-Harris administration released an executive order in 2023 that laid the groundwork for AI safety and security. This is a fine start, but legislation that clearly limits government use of AI with proper enforcement and consequences is still needed, and we hope that a future Harris administration would support these efforts.
As an unexpected 2024 Presidential nominee, as of September 2024 all that Harris has offered on the whole topic of surveillance and privacy is a passing reference to safeguarding privacy of patients seeking reproductive healthcare. As with Trump, we must go beyond her platform, and consult the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform. This talks, worryingly, about “bolstering the capacity of our intelligence services” – as if their capacity were not already vastly beyond what is necessary to protect national security, or appropriate under our Constitution.
On policing, the platform offers good language on reining in qualified immunity, pursuing “pattern-or-practice” DOJ investigations of police departments, avoiding overpolicing, eliminating cash bail, and reforming no-knock warrants. However, the platform remains mired in the misconception that more money for training and equipment, will reduce police violence. Police departments are awash with funding, much of it repurposed from funds intended for COVID relief. They need deep systemic reform, and less money rather than more. There have been new federal regulations on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and Vice-President Harris has expressed support for those. But part of the anxiety over her candidacy is that she could have led on the highly topical issue of policing reform as Vice-President, and would have been a natural fit for the role, but did not do so. She has been cagey on how, if at all, her views have evolved since her 2009 book on the topic, “Smart on Crime,” which showed her as a “true believer in the power and value of [government] coercion.”
We very much hope that if elected, Harris will differentiate herself from Biden and channel her Senate record, by making surveillance reform one of the issues she chooses to fight on. If she does, she should not make the mistake of underestimating how hard the intelligence agencies, and their allies in Congress in both parties, will fight to hold onto their freshly expanded surveillance powers. But overall, she is more likely to support weak commercial privacy regulations, and some investigations of individual police departments, while shying away from a showdown with the agencies, or reforms that are hard or confrontational.
Tim Walz
Grade: A
Tim Walz is the current governor of Minnesota and the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate. Walz served as a Congressman for the 1st district of MN from 2007-2018, so he has a robust voting record on surveillance and privacy for us to evaluate. His tenure as governor of MN is also valuable for us to evaluate his approach to police reform.
Walz voted against the passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which created the notoriously abused Section 702 surveillance we urgently must reform. He voted against reauthorizing Section 702 in 2012 and 2018. He voted for an amendment proposed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY, 4th) that would stop backdoor searches of 702 data in 2015 and 2016. Lastly, he voted for the USA Rights Act in 2018, which at the time was the most comprehensive reform proposal under consideration by Congress. The bill proposed a warrant requirement for accessing U.S. persons’ communications, banning “reverse targeting” of U.S. persons communicating with foreign targets, codifying the ban on “abouts” collections, and strengthening the oversight powers of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Walz’s voting record indicates that he never voted to reauthorize Section 702. His long career in Congress demonstrates that Walz has made it a legislative priority to reform government surveillance practices and protect civil liberties.
Walz was governor of MN when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, an epicenter of both peaceful protest and rioting. Therefore, police reform was a major issue that defined his tenure as governor. Walz signed the Minnesota Police Accountability Act into law in 2020, a package of reforms that aimed to reduce police violence. The Act heavily restricted justifications for deadly force, banned certain chokeholds, barred “warrior-style” police training, required more de-escalation training, and mandated transparency measures from all MN police departments. Local newspapers called these reforms “some of the most substantial changes to law enforcement and police accountability in a generation.”
Walz signed H.F. 4757 into law, enacting the Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act (MNCDPA). MN became the 18th U.S. state to pass their own consumer privacy law. The Democratic VP candidate has a solid and well-rounded record on surveillance and privacy, and we hope this continues were he to assume office.
Donald Trump
Grade: D-
Our predictions about a Trump presidency were largely, though not entirely, borne out. With respect to surveillance and privacy issues, President Trump’s consistent position was to express opposition to surveillance when conducted on him, his family, his campaign workers or his political allies; but to support and expand surveillance at the level of policy, when conducted on protesters, immigrants or foreign nationals.
Trump vocally opposed himself to the “deep state,” and publicly voiced distrust of the FBI and CIA, to an extent unusual for presidents. In turn, officials deeply implicated in illegal mass surveillance, such as Jim Clapper, vocally opposed him during his Presidency for his lack of trust in the intelligence community. This climate of distrust created political space in Congress for Republicans, such as Devin Nunes, Andy Biggs, Warren Davidson and Matt Gaetz, to advocate for reforms to FISA, among which were reforms to prevent surveillance of political campaigns without the approval of the Attorney-General. The report on “Crossfire Hurricane” revealed substantial mishandling of applications to surveil US citizens under FISA. That scandal, in part, led to the expiration of controversial PATRIOT Act statutory authorities during 2020; these authorities had been used unlawfully to enable mass surveillance.
However, much PATRIOT Act Section 215 surveillance was grandfathered in, and is still going on. There are indications that President Trump’s administration continued the same surveillance anyway, under executive rather than statutory authority. FISA court opinions that cover the Trump administration show a continued willingness on the part of the court to sign off on continuing surveillance, at the urging of executive agencies, despite documented and massive illegality.
Despite his verbal suspicions, President Trump’s overall effect on governmental surveillance powers was to broaden them. FBI and DHS surveillance of domestic dissent expanded. DHS, under his presidency, became a federal security force that routinely violated the rights of protesters. Trump remains eager to reify a new, public enemy in the form of “antifa,” to replace the fading public enemy of “the terrorists.” He tried hard to divert resources and attention from surveillance of white supremacist groups, and partnered with surveillance-oriented firms like Palantir to ramp up surveillance and mistreatment of immigrants, both internally and at the border.
Under his administration, the police state tightened its grip. Trump ardently and consistently opposed police accountability for racist killings, terming it a “left-wing war on cops.” He spoke up in favor of police brutality, and tried to deny federal funds to cities that dare to reduce police funding, describing them as “anarchist jurisdictions.” He continued prior administrations’ efforts to undermine encryption, and pursued the exact kind of Espionage Act prosecution against Julian Assange that the Obama administration had rejected because it would criminalize journalistic reporting. He consistently showered contempt on whistleblowers, and undermined the anti-corruption work of inspectors-general.
In 2018, President Trump signed the FIRST STEP Act into law – the first criminal justice reform passed in over a decade. He has repeatedly taken credit for its provisions on federal sentencing and prison reform. However, his 2020 budget priorities severely underfunded the Act’s programs, and his Justice Department fought against prisoners eligible for sentence reductions or early release. Under Trump’s guidance, the DOJ reinstated contracts with private prisons, prevented prisoners from entering transitional housing services, and granted clemency only to those that have shown loyalty to him. These actions undercut the rehabilitative model the FIRST STEP Act’s reforms ushered in. In a similar vein, after Election Day 2020, President Trump toyed with the notion of pardoning Edward Snowden, as a finger in the eye to the Deep State, but ultimately decided against it, focusing instead on pardon requests from donors.
Most controversially of all, having lost the election, President Trump orchestrated a conspiracy to remain in power, that culminated with efforts by his supporters to take over the Capitol and prevent by force the certification of the election he had lost. Throughout this shameful episode, his FBI remained focused on threats from “antifa.” Alerts from DHS components that there was a significant risk of violence were ignored, as not fitting in with his administration’s narrative of where the threat to the Republic truly lay.
After leaving office, Trump weighed in personally during the next fight over renewing FISA powers, exclaiming on April 10, 2024 on Truth Social, ““KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!! DJT.” His declaration no doubt contributed to a temporary procedural blocking of the FISA renewal and expansion bill from reaching the floor later that day; 19 House Republicans joined all Democrats in opposing it. As happened in the 2019 FISA fight, though, he quickly backed off, and the renewal became law ten days after his post.
As a candidate in 2023-4, Trump has often talked on the stump about deep state conspiracies, now including in response to his attempted assassination in July. Once again, insofar as he is concerned about the power and reach of the intelligence community, it’s in terms of its effect on him, not in terms of its effect on the civil liberties of Americans or of others around the world. He has continued to propose “absolute immunity” for police brutality.
Though Trump has denied that “Project 2025” can fairly be attributed to him, the lack of an updated policy platform coming out of the Republican convention requires us to briefly address it. The part of Project 2025 that deals with the intelligence community, if implemented, would do nothing whatsoever to reform intelligence authorities. It is mainly focused on establishing that ODNI should have the ability to hire and fire among, and set the budgets of, individual intelligence community components like FBI and CIA. The section on DHS, like DHS itself, is an incoherent melange of the useful and the harmful. It makes the sensible observations that DHS was probably a bad idea in the first place and that it could be more rationally organized. It also suggests that the I&A unit within DHS, which has little grasp of Americans’ constitutional rights, should be abolished. We agree with that specific proposal. But this component of Project 2025 also articulates a vision of a hostile environment for immigrants and aspiring immigrants to America, that takes no notice of their own rights or protections under the Constitution, and that even talks about reviving efforts to “denaturalize” immigrants who have achieved U. S. citizenship in some individual cases. Overall, therefore, Project 2025 does not improve Trump’s standing on surveillance or privacy.
J.D. Vance
Grade: C-
Senator Vance began his term in January of 2023, so his voting record on surveillance reform, as on any other issue, is slim. He has been slow to tip his hand, refraining from cosponsoring any of the bills renewing FISA authorities, whether they were reform-oriented or not. On April 11, 2024, at the height of the battle over surveillance reform, he declared on X/Twitter that, “it is absurd to reauthorize the program without significant changes given the ways domestic surveillance has been abused. I will vote accordingly.” This signals that he may have personal opinions that are favorable to reform. However, on April 19, when the Senate actually voted on the issue, he was absent, meaning that he has no scoreable votes or cosponsorships in our scorecard – one of only three Senators (the others being Schmitt and Warnock) for whom this is true.
When the Dept. of HHS was finalizing a rule that would have prevented law enforcement from accessing women’s medical records relating to reproductive health, Vance was one of only 28 members of Congress to oppose the rule. He therefore may support surveillance when it comes to people engaging in behavior that is not criminal under federal law.
Chase Oliver
Grade: A
Chase Oliver is the Libertarian Party’s candidate. Rolling Stone called him “the most influential libertarian” after he forced a runoff in Georgia’s last U.S. Senate election. His platform considers privacy and civil liberties a priority: “With warrantless wiretaps, FISA court abuses, and the overreaching Patriot Act, our freedoms are under threat.” Oliver both pays the most attention to and has the best proposals for surveillance reform. If elected, he would support abolishing the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act of 2008, as well as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Oliver advocates for requiring Federal agencies that collect citizen’s information to review why and how that information is collected, and how it is used. He is very much in favor of a broad array of civil liberties reforms, and it is highly unlikely that intelligence committee members would be able to make him act otherwise.
Oliver is a self-described “police accountability activist.” He peacefully protested during the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. He spoke at the 2023 Atlanta City Council meeting to oppose the construction of Cop City. His platform calls for ending the War on Drugs by repealing the Controlled Substances Act, and he wants to end qualified immunity on a federal level. Ending qualified immunity is an important step toward police accountability because it would allow victims of police misconduct to sue officers for novel situations in which their rights were violated. With federal guidance, states could more easily follow suit in ending qualified immunity defenses. Part of Oliver’s campaign is focused on ending the prosecution of victimless crimes; this includes pardons for whistleblowers like Snowden, journalists like Assange, and Ross Ulbricht, creator of the “Pirate Bay” darkweb marketplace.
Jill Stein
Grade: A
Dr. Jill Stein is the 2024 presidential candidate for the Green Party. She was also their candidate in 2012 and 2016. She is a physician and activist who was active in Massachusetts politics at the local and state level as a member of the Green-Rainbow party. Her multiple presidential campaigns over the years provides insight on her prospective approach to government surveillance and civil liberties were she to hold office.
Her official platform advocates for a set of reforms to policing and surveillance, including; increased community oversight of police, end qualified immunity, end the 1033 program, end civil asset forfeiture, end warrantless mass surveillance, and pardon whistleblowers. Given her lack of experience in office, we know little about how she would implement these important policy stances. However, her public output reveals some of her policy approach. In 2016, Stein publicly called for the repeal of the Patriot Act, citing the importance of our constitutional right to privacy and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. During Stein’s 2016 acceptance speech for the Green Party’s presidential nominee, she called for ending the war on whistleblowers and freeing political prisoners like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning. In this op-ed for The Hill, Stein positions herself squarely against the “security state” and espouses her support for Wikileaks.
In her 2012 People’s State of the Union, Stein criticized the FBI and DHS for “conspiring with local police forces to suppress our freedoms of assembly and of speech.” In a 2011 interview with OnTheIssues, Stein referred to the Patriot Act as a “flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment,” and lambasted provisions in the NDAA that supplied police with military equipment. Overall, Stein is aligned with reformers on government surveillance. Her harsh critiques of the surveillance state have remained consistent over the 10+ years she’s been in the national political spotlight, indicating that she would not easily acquiesce to intelligence committee lawmakers were she to be in the Oval Office.
*As of August 23rd, 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his campaign. If you’re curious about how we evaluated his policies, read our separate article below.