Title I: Deleting the Surveillance State
Deleting the Surveillance State and creating oversight on the Executive Branch constitutes the 1st title of the MAD Act. Read the fact-sheet about the bill and more about us vs. them on this issue, or read the full bill title below.
Title I of the MAD Act
SURVEILLANCE PROHIBITION, PRIVACY, AND EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY
Table of Contents of Title I
TITLE I — SURVEILLANCE PROHIBITION, PRIVACY, AND EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY
Subtitle A — AMERICAN SURVEILLANCE PROHIBITION AND PRIVACY ENFORCEMENT ACT (ASPPEA)
Sec. 1001. Short title.
Sec. 1002. Congressional findings.
Sec. 1003. Definitions.
Sec. 1004. Operative principle governing data existence and access.
CHAPTER I — PROHIBITION ON PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILES AND BEHAVIORAL PREDICTION
Sec. 1011. Absolute prohibition on psychological profiles.
Sec. 1012. Clinically supervised mental health application exemption.
Sec. 1013. Conversational AI system exemption — user-initiated disclosure.
Sec. 1014. Consumer mental health application exemption.
CHAPTER II — PROHIBITION ON PRECRIME RISK ASSESSMENTS
Sec. 1021. Prohibition on precrime risk assessments.
Sec. 1022. Federal correctional risk assessment transparency and National Institute of Justice study.
CHAPTER III — PROHIBITION ON OPERATIONAL PROFILES AND BEHAVIORAL BASELINES
Sec. 1031. Prohibition on operational profile assembly.
Sec. 1032. Prohibition on coordinated data collection and aggregation arrangements.
Sec. 1033. International transfer prohibition.
Sec. 1034. Sanctions against foreign nations conducting psychological profiling operations.
Sec. 1035. Mandatory carrier forensic location data retention and law enforcement access.
CHAPTER IV — PROHIBITION ON POPULATION COVERAGE DATABASES
Sec. 1041. Prohibition on assembling, maintaining, and making available population coverage databases.
CHAPTER V — DIVESTITURE
Sec. 1051. Divestiture schedule.
CHAPTER VI — GOVERNMENT ACQUISITION PROHIBITION AND CONTRACTOR LAUNDERING
Sec. 1061. Congressional findings — government acquisition of commercial surveillance data.
Sec. 1062. Prohibition on federal agency acquisition of commercial surveillance data.
Sec. 1063. Contractor laundering prohibition.
CHAPTER VII — NARROWLY SCOPED NATIONAL SECURITY EXEMPTION
Sec. 1071. Scope and absolute limits of the national security exemption.
Sec. 1072. Two-stage predicate review via FISA Court.
Sec. 1073. Foreign interference response mechanism — manufactured foreign direction predicates.
Sec. 1074. Criminal offense — pretextual surveillance designation.
CHAPTER VIII — COMMERCIAL SAFE HARBOR FOR FIRST-PARTY DATA
Sec. 1081. Safe harbor.
Sec. 1082. Platform provider responsibility for hosted websites and applications.
Sec. 1083. Content recommendation systems — permitted and prohibited purposes.
Sec. 1084. Explicit user-declared preference — conditions, retention, and platform requirements.
CHAPTER IX — GENERAL PROHIBITION STANDARD FOR ADVERTISING TARGETING DATA
Sec. 1091. General prohibition standard.
Sec. 1091A. Contextual advertising signal — qualifying conditions and permitted use.
Sec. 1092. Illustrative prohibited advertising data categories.
Sec. 1093. Tier 1 — unconditionally permitted advertising data.
Sec. 1094. Tier 2 — conditionally permitted advertising data.
Sec. 1094A. Session termination rules and advertising data retention.
Sec. 1094B. Cohort variable classification standards.
Sec. 1095. Advertising combination prohibition and FTC classification.
Sec. 1096. Search query advertising safe harbor.
CHAPTER X — PROHIBITION ON COVERT COLLECTION
Sec. 1101. Prohibition on covert audio collection.
Sec. 1102. Prohibition on covert video collection.
Sec. 1103. Prohibition on keystroke monitoring and input capture.
Sec. 1104. Prohibition on real-time mass biometric identification in public spaces.
Sec. 1105. Prohibition on platform access to private communications content.
Sec. 1106. Enforcement of Chapter X prohibitions.
CHAPTER XI — BUREAU OF DATA SURVEILLANCE
Sec. 1111. Establishment.
Sec. 1112. Tiered staffing and funding.
Sec. 1113. National data surveillance registry.
Sec. 1113A. Data-monetizing collector — tier classification.
Sec. 1114. Mandatory breach and violation self-reporting.
Sec. 1115. Independent technical audit requirement.
Sec. 1116. Audit methodology standards.
Sec. 1117. Bureau monitoring, audit, and algorithmic testing powers.
Sec. 1118. Annual surveillance ecosystem report.
CHAPTER XII — CONSENT, PENALTIES, AND ENFORCEMENT
Sec. 1121. Consent standards.
Sec. 1122. Tiered civil penalties.
Sec. 1123. Criminal offenses.
Sec. 1123A. Statute of limitations for criminal offenses.
Sec. 1123B. Conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and accessory liability.
Sec. 1124. Mandatory deregistration.
Sec. 1125. Disgorgement.
Sec. 1126. Injunctive relief.
CHAPTER XIII — CONCURRENT STATE ENFORCEMENT AND PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION
Sec. 1131. Concurrent state attorney general enforcement.
Sec. 1132. Private right of action.
Sec. 1133. General rulemaking.
CHAPTER XIV — GOVERNMENT AGENCY CARVE-OUTS AND RELATIONSHIP TO EXISTING FEDERAL LAW
Sec. 1141. General framework for government program carve-outs.
Sec. 1142. Healthcare and benefits administration carve-outs.
Sec. 1143. Financial, tax, and economic carve-outs.
Sec. 1144. Statistical, research, and educational carve-outs.
Sec. 1145. Public health, emergency management, and healthcare workforce carve-outs.
Sec. 1146. Transportation and border enforcement carve-outs.
Sec. 1147. Law enforcement and criminal justice carve-outs.
Sec. 1148. Housing, agriculture, and other program carve-outs.
Sec. 1149. Voluntarily provided public participation data.
CHAPTER XV — RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER LAW AND IMPLEMENTATION
Sec. 1151. JEOS archive exemption.
Sec. 1152. ASPPEA implementation milestones.
Sec. 1153. Amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Sec. 1154. CFAA immunity for authorized auditors and investigators.
Sec. 1155. Relationship to other federal privacy and consumer protection law.
Sec. 1156. Relationship to Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act.
Sec. 1157. Findings regarding less restrictive alternatives to advertising data prohibitions.
Sec. 1158. Rule of construction.
Sec. 1159. Effective date.
CHAPTER XVI — EXEMPTIONS FOR SPECIFIC ENTITY TYPES
Sec. 1161. Small business exemption.
Sec. 1162. Employee and applicant data carve-out.
Sec. 1163. Journalism and press exemption.
Sec. 1164. Nonprofit and civil society organization exemption.
Sec. 1165. Good-faith reliance on Bureau guidance.
Sec. 1166. Severability.
Subtitle B — EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY AND JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT ACT (EAJOA)
CHAPTER I — GENERAL PROVISIONS
Sec. 1201. Short title.
Sec. 1202. Congressional findings.
Sec. 1203. Definitions.
CHAPTER II — ESTABLISHMENT AND ORGANIZATION OF JEOS
Sec. 1211. Establishment.
Sec. 1211A. Covered officials roster, notification, agency reporting, and enrollment.
Sec. 1212. Composition, appointment, succession, and adversarial challenge mechanism.
CHAPTER III — APPROVED COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS AND PROHIBITED PLATFORMS
Sec. 1221. Mandatory use of approved communications systems.
Sec. 1222. Approved communications system standards.
Sec. 1223. Prohibited platform list.
Sec. 1224. Scope of communications subject to JEOS monitoring.
Sec. 1225. JEOS monitoring application — comprehensive device-layer collection.
CHAPTER IV — MONITORING AND REVIEW
Sec. 1231. Automated monitoring, tiered review, and judicial flagging.
Sec. 1232. JEOS investigative orders, final disposition, and classified judicial archive.
Sec. 1233. Notification to covered officials.
CHAPTER V — MINIMIZATION AND OVERSIGHT OF JEOS
Sec. 1241. Review surfacing procedures.
Sec. 1242. Annual reporting and oversight of JEOS.
Sec. 1243. JEOS archive disclosure procedures, congressional subpoena processing, and inspector general coordination.
CHAPTER VI — PENALTIES FOR COMMUNICATIONS VIOLATIONS
Sec. 1251. Penalties for use of prohibited devices or platforms.
CHAPTER VII — CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION AND SEVERABILITY
Sec. 1261. Constitutional construction.
Sec. 1262. Severability.
Sec. 1263. JEOS effective date, phase-in, and implementation schedule.
Sec. 1264. Title-wide severability.
TITLE I — SURVEILLANCE PROHIBITION, PRIVACY, AND EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY
Subtitle A — AMERICAN SURVEILLANCE PROHIBITION AND PRIVACY ENFORCEMENT ACT (ASPPEA)
SEC. 1001. SHORT TITLE.
This subtitle may be cited as the "American Surveillance Prohibition and Privacy Enforcement Act" or "ASPPEA."
SEC. 1002. CONGRESSIONAL FINDINGS.
The Congress finds the following:
(1) Commercial data brokers, platform operators, and intelligence-aggregation contractors have assembled databases of unprecedented scale covering hundreds of millions of American citizens, in some cases the majority of the adult population of the United States and billions of individuals worldwide, without those citizens' meaningful knowledge or consent.
(2) These databases constitute three distinct and serious threats to constitutional order, individual civil liberties, and democratic self-governance:
(A) Inference-Based Manipulation: The derivation of psychological profiles, emotional vulnerability assessments, personality models, and political susceptibility scores from behavioral data enables the targeting of individuals with persuasive messaging calibrated to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities. This capability has been assembled and deployed at scale, including in connection with at least one major United States electoral cycle and multiple foreign electoral contexts, and creates the capacity for private and foreign actors to attempt to influence democratic processes, political beliefs, and electoral behavior without the knowledge of those targeted. The structural threat addressed by this subtitle arises from the existence and availability of this capability and does not depend on the contested degree to which any particular operation has succeeded in changing political behavior.
(B) Operational Targeting: Comprehensive behavioral baselines documenting individuals' locations, routines, relationships, and daily patterns across multiple unrelated contexts constitute operational targeting packages which may be used to physically surveil, locate, monitor, harass, detain, or harm specific individuals or groups. The harm may be inherent in the raw data itself, independent of any derived inference. A record documenting where a person is, when they are there, and who they associate with may be used as a tool of persecution regardless of whether a psychological model has been applied to it.
(C) Totalizing Coverage: Commercial databases with near-complete coverage of the United States population constitute private surveillance infrastructure. The availability of such databases to governments, foreign intelligence services, criminal organizations, and other powerful actors poses a structural threat to democratic governance. The threat is the existence of the database at population scale, independent of current use or stated purpose.
(3) The documented history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program (exposed in 1971 and comprehensively investigated by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities in 1975 and 1976) demonstrates that domestic intelligence agencies will, absent categorical legal constraints, use surveillance capabilities to target, disrupt, and suppress constitutionally protected political activity including civil rights organizations, labor movements, antiwar groups, and political parties across the political spectrum. Congressional investigations and subsequent Inspector General reports have documented recurring patterns of domestic intelligence collection extending beyond lawful investigative activity to the surveillance of constitutionally protected political conduct. Congress finds that categorical statutory constraints, rather than internal agency policy, executive order, or case-by-case judicial oversight, are necessary to prevent the recurrence of this structural pattern. Congress further finds that such constraints must reach the supply side of sensitive-data collection — the assembly, retention, and availability of the underlying data and profiling infrastructure — and not exclusively the demand side of government acquisition and use.
(4) Federal agencies have systematically purchased access to commercial data compilations to acquire information they could not constitutionally compel through warrant, subpoena, or other lawful process. The Supreme Court's holding in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), confirmed that the government may not use the third-party doctrine to evade the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement for comprehensive records revealing the privacies of life; consistent with that principle and with Congress's own constitutional judgment, this subtitle extends and codifies it concretely.
(5) The use of commercial data infrastructure by foreign intelligence services to conduct influence operations against American citizens — including, as documented by United States intelligence assessments and congressional investigations, the use of data-driven targeting to design and direct campaigns intended to polarize the American electorate — constitutes a direct national security threat requiring the elimination of the commercial data infrastructure on which such operations depend.
(6) Congress finds that a private database covering ten million or more United States persons constitutes a surveillance infrastructure whose scale is incompatible with democratic governance and individual liberty regardless of the purpose for which it was assembled. Congress selects ten million as the threshold because it approximates the population of a large United States state, exceeds three percent of the total adult population, and constitutes a scale sufficient to enable population-level statistical inference, behavioral pattern analysis, and targeted identification of individuals within any demographic, geographic, or political subgroup: capabilities that are qualitatively distinct from those available at smaller scales and that create the structural risks documented in this subtitle's findings. Once assembled, such a database creates an irreversible capability for population-scale surveillance, targeting, and social control. This finding, grounded in the empirical record of database misuse, foreign intelligence exploitation, and government circumvention of constitutional protections documented throughout this subtitle's findings, supports the structural prohibition of Sec. 1041. No commercial justification is proportionate to this structural risk.
(7) Congress finds that ordinary commercial data collection for the purpose of providing relevant goods and services to consumers (including first-party transactional data, contextual advertising, and explicitly declared consumer preferences) serves legitimate purposes and is not the target of this subtitle. The target is the transformation of consumer behavioral data into instruments of psychological manipulation, operational persecution, and population-scale surveillance or to enable the risk thereof.
(8) Congress exercises its authority under Article I of the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, the enforcement clause (Section 5) of the Fourteenth Amendment, and its plenary authority over interstate commerce.
(9) The Federal Trade Commission, in its Final Report "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: Recommendations for Businesses and Policymakers" (March 2012), formally found that the notice-and-choice model (the framework under which commercial data collection purports to rest on consumer consent) produced long, incomprehensible privacy policies that consumers typically do not read, let alone understand, and that industry self-regulation under this framework had failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection. The FTC called on Congress to enact targeted legislation addressing data broker practices and documented that take-it-or-leave-it consent raises fundamental concerns about the absence of genuine consumer choice for services that have become essential to modern life. Peer-reviewed research published through 2023 confirms that the situation has materially worsened since the FTC's findings: privacy policies are now significantly longer and less comprehensible than they were when the FTC issued its report, average a reading level significantly above the United States adult average, and privacy regulations intended to improve transparency have paradoxically produced longer and less comprehensible policies rather than clearer ones. Congress finds that purported consent obtained through these mechanisms does not constitute meaningful, informed, or voluntary consent, and that databases assembled through such purported consent do not rest on a legitimate property foundation entitling their holders to full compensation upon the divestiture required by this subtitle.
(10) The prohibitions of this subtitle on assembling, maintaining, selling, and providing third-party access to operational profiles and population-scale databases (Secs. 1031 and 1041) regulate the conduct of data aggregation and the derivation of inferences about specific individuals — the business of building and operating surveillance infrastructure — and rest on the substantial governmental interests in personal privacy, the prevention of psychological manipulation, the protection of elections from foreign exploitation, and the prevention of government circumvention of the Fourth Amendment. In Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552 (2011), the Court applied heightened scrutiny to a restriction that singled out particular speakers and a disfavored marketing purpose while leaving the same data widely available for many other uses, observing that the State might instead have pursued "a more coherent policy" of confidentiality. The prohibitions of this subtitle do not share that defect of underinclusiveness: they apply comprehensively and evenhandedly, regardless of the identity of the data holder or buyer, and target the assembly and existence of the profiling infrastructure itself rather than the content of any message.
SEC. 1003. DEFINITIONS.
As used in this subtitle:
(1) "Covered Personal Data" means any information, alone or in combination, that identifies or is reasonably linkable to a specific individual or a device associated with that individual, including: precise or coarse geolocation data; financial transaction records; communications metadata; biometric data; health or medical data; political affiliation or activity; religious belief or practice; social or associational graph data; device identifiers; audio, video, or visual data from a user's device; keystroke or input data; and inferred or derived characteristics generated by algorithmic processing of any of the foregoing.
(2) "Psychological Profile" means any data compilation, model, score, index, or derived output that assesses, estimates, or predicts any of the following concerning a specific individual: personality characteristics, traits, dispositions, or psychological tendencies, including any model, score, classification, or derived output that purports to characterize who an individual is at a stable trait level, regardless of the specific taxonomy, dimensional framework, or analytical method used (the Bureau may by rule under Sec. 1095(c) identify specific frameworks or methods that fall within the scope of this clause; such identifications are illustrative and non-exhaustive, and a framework not so identified is not thereby permitted); emotional state, mood, or affective condition; cognitive vulnerabilities or susceptibility to persuasion; political beliefs, affiliations, or likely responses to political messaging; religious belief or spiritual orientation; or behavioral responses to persuasive, emotional, or ideological stimuli. A Psychological Profile is prohibited regardless of the accuracy of its assessments and regardless of whether it is derived from individually innocuous inputs.
(3) "Operational Profile" means assembly of behavioral data concerning a specific individual derived from two or more independent contextual sources, where any of the four conditions of Sec. 1004(a) fails to be satisfied with respect to that assembly. For purposes of this paragraph, "independent contextual sources" means data from unrelated commercial, clinical, or operational contexts as distinguished from multiple data points arising from a single direct service relationship with the individual. The substantive conditions, exceptions, and operative provisions governing the four-condition framework are set forth in Sec. 1031.
(4) "Population Coverage Database" means any database, data system, or combination of linked data assets containing Covered Personal Data, Psychological Profiles, or Operational Profiles concerning United States persons, assembled or maintained for the purpose of selling, licensing, or providing third-party access to behavioral information about specific individuals, where the entity provides such access to parties other than the individual data subjects themselves.
(5) "Precrime Risk Assessment" means any score, index, classification, or predictive output concerning a specific individual that:
(A) predicts the likelihood that the individual will engage in criminal, violent, politically disruptive, or socially deviant conduct, based on behavioral, demographic, associational, or predictive data rather than evidence of a specific past act; and
(B) is used, transferred, sold, licensed, or made available in a manner that allocates or is reasonably likely to allocate a Coercive Consequence as defined in subparagraph (C) against the individual.
(C) For purposes of this paragraph:
(i) "Coercive Consequence" means any of the following directed at a specific individual: enforcement action by any government entity or by any private entity acting on behalf of a government; surveillance; investigative targeting; detention; arrest; deprivation of liberty; denial of public benefits, public employment, or government services; immigration enforcement action; involuntary commitment; removal of children from the home; tax audit selection or other enforcement triggering by a tax authority; welfare fraud investigation triggering; federal, state, or local employment background check adjudication; customs entry secondary screening or border enforcement secondary action; or any other coercive action by a government or by a private entity acting on behalf of a government.
(ii) "Coercive Consequence" does not include determinations of eligibility for voluntary opt-in expedited-service programs that do not affect an individual's access to baseline government services, including expedited security screening enrollment, expedited customs processing enrollment, and similar programs.
A predictive score is not a Precrime Risk Assessment solely by reason of being predictive. The prohibition turns on the Coercive Consequence the score is used to allocate, not on the existence of prediction. A score used exclusively within a direct commercial, clinical, or contractual relationship between the entity producing the score and the individual to whom the score relates — and not transferred to any government entity, private entity acting on behalf of a government, or used to allocate any Coercive Consequence as defined in subparagraph (C) — is not a Precrime Risk Assessment regardless of the behavior it predicts.
An entity that produces a predictive score and transfers it to a government entity, or to any party the entity knew or had reason to know would use the score to allocate a Coercive Consequence, has produced a Precrime Risk Assessment regardless of how the entity characterized the score at the time of production.
(6) "Data Broker" means any person or entity engaged in the business of collecting, compiling, aggregating, inferring, licensing, selling, or otherwise providing access to Covered Personal Data concerning individuals with whom the entity has no direct commercial relationship, for monetary or other valuable consideration, regardless of commercial designation.
(7) "Data-Monetizing Collector" means any entity with a direct commercial relationship with consumers that also derives revenue from the sale, licensing, or transfer of Covered Personal Data to third parties, for monetary or other valuable consideration. Entities are classified into Tier DM-1, Tier DM-2, and Tier DM-3 based on the percentage of relevant gross revenues derived from such third-party transfers, as specified in Sec. 1113A of this subtitle. Entities deriving less than five percent (5%) of relevant gross revenues from third-party data transfers are eligible for the safe harbor of Sec. 1081 provided all other safe harbor conditions are met. The tiered structure governs registration, audit, and enforcement tier classification only, not the scope of the substantive prohibitions.
(8) "Targeting Infrastructure Contractor" means any person or entity that builds, operates, maintains, or provides analytical, technical, or platform services used to produce Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or Population Coverage Databases, whether on behalf of a government entity, political organization, commercial advertiser, or any other principal.
(9) "Federal Agency" means any executive department, independent agency, military department, government corporation, or other establishment in the executive branch, including any office within the Executive Office of the President, and any independent regulatory agency.
(10) "Government Contractor" means any person or entity acting under contract, grant, cooperative agreement, or any other arrangement with or on behalf of a Federal Agency, to the extent such person or entity collects, processes, accesses, or transfers Covered Personal Data in connection with such arrangement.
(11) "Constitutionally Equivalent Collection" means collection a Federal Agency could lawfully accomplish through direct legal process supported by probable cause and authorized by a court of competent jurisdiction, or through the explicit, revocable, and informed consent of the data subject.
(12) "Foreign Direction" means operational direction, material funding, or strategic coordination received by an organization or individual from a foreign government, foreign intelligence service, or their knowing agents. "Material funding" means financial support that:
(A) constitutes more than ten percent (10%) of the recipient organization's total annual operating budget in any twelve-month period; or
(B) is conditioned, expressly or impliedly, on specific organizational conduct, the adoption of specific positions, the targeting of specific individuals or groups, or the achievement of specific outcomes; or
(C) is structured in whole or in part to conceal its foreign government origin through intermediary entities, shell organizations, or nominee transactions.
The following do not constitute Foreign Direction: expressions of public support by a foreign government for a domestic organization's positions; receipt of funding not meeting the materiality criteria above; participation in international civil society networks or transnational advocacy coalitions; solidarity relationships with foreign organizations engaged in parallel domestic activities; or acceptance of grants from foreign-based philanthropic foundations acting independently of any government. Arm's-length commercial transactions at fair market value — including retail sales of merchandise, publications, event tickets, and advertising — do not constitute "funding" regardless of the identity of the purchaser, and shall not be counted toward the materiality threshold of subparagraph (A). A pattern of commercial transactions that appears designed to manufacture a Foreign Direction predicate triggers the foreign interference response mechanism of Sec. 1073 and may not be used as a Stage One predicate under Sec. 1072.
(13) "First Amendment Organization" means any organization whose stated mission and primary operational conduct consists of constitutionally protected activity under the First Amendment, including political organizing, electoral advocacy, public interest litigation, journalism, labor organizing, environmental or social justice activism, religious practice and community organization, and academic research and publication. The commercial revenue, commercial activities, or commercial organizational structures of an organization are irrelevant to this determination. An organization qualifies regardless of whether it also engages in revenue generating activities, provided those activities are incidental to and in service of its primary First Amendment mission.
(14) "Minimization Procedures" means documented policies and technical controls limiting acquisition, retention, use, and dissemination of Covered Personal Data to the minimum necessary to accomplish the specific authorized purpose, with mandatory purging of nonqualifying data within ninety (90) days.
(15) "Sensitive Nation-State Actor" means any foreign government, state-owned enterprise, or entity in which a foreign government holds a controlling interest, incorporated under the laws of a country designated as a Foreign Adversary under 15 C.F.R. § 791.4.
(16) "United States-Directed Entity" means any person or entity incorporated or domiciled outside the United States that: directs its data collection, platform services, or data brokerage activities at United States persons; processes data of United States persons on systems accessible from or managed from within the United States; or derives more than twenty percent (20%) of its gross revenues from activities involving the data of United States persons. A United States-Directed Entity is subject to this subtitle with respect to its activities involving the data of United States persons to the same extent as an entity incorporated within the United States.
(17) "Commission" means the Federal Trade Commission.
(18) "Bureau" means the Bureau of Data Surveillance established under Sec. 1111.
(19) "Data Cooperative" means any arrangement, agreement, or platform through which two or more entities pool, exchange, contribute, or provide reciprocal access to Covered Personal Data concerning individuals with whom at least one participating entity has no direct commercial relationship, regardless of whether consideration is exchanged in the form of money, data reciprocity, platform access, or any other benefit. The term includes any arrangement in which an entity receives data about individuals it did not directly collect in exchange for providing data about individuals it did collect, regardless of how the arrangement is commercially designated.
(20) "Audience-Segment Licensing Arrangement" means any arrangement through which an entity makes available to a third party — whether through direct license, platform access, API, programmatic advertising infrastructure, or any other mechanism — a defined group or cohort of individuals selected on the basis of Covered Personal Data, inferred characteristics, behavioral attributes, or any combination thereof, for the purpose of enabling the third party to direct communications, advertising, or messaging at those individuals, regardless of whether individual-level data is formally transferred or only targeting access is provided. The functional test is whether the arrangement enables a third party to reach a defined population selected on the basis of Covered Personal Data — not whether data physically moves between parties.
(21) "Contextual Advertising Signal" means Covered Personal Data processed in real time from the specific content a user is currently viewing or the specific query a user has currently submitted — including the subject matter, category, keywords, or semantic content of the webpage, article, video, application, or search query currently being consumed or submitted — that is used solely to select advertising relevant to that specific content or query. A Contextual Advertising Signal is Covered Personal Data within the meaning of Sec. 1003(1). The qualifying conditions, permitted uses, and clean-inputs rule applicable to Contextual Advertising Signals are specified in Sec. 1091A of this subtitle.
(22) "Session" means, for purposes of advertising data retention under this subtitle, the period beginning when a user initiates an interaction with a platform, application, or service and ending upon the earliest of: explicit user logout; application or browser tab close; thirty (30) minutes of continuous user inactivity; or twenty-four (24) hours from initiation. The detailed rules governing Session termination, active service delivery, multi-device sessions, the implementation safe harbor, and the relationship of Sessions to stored user content are specified in Sec. 1094A of this subtitle.
(23) "Small Business" means any person or entity that satisfies all three of the following criteria as of the most recent calendar year preceding the date on which qualification is assessed:
(A) Global annual revenues — meaning revenues from all sources and all geographic markets, including the global annual revenues of all affiliated entities as determined under the affiliation rules of this paragraph — of less than forty million dollars ($40,000,000);
(B) Collection, processing, or transfer of Covered Personal Data concerning no more than two hundred thousand (200,000) United States persons, counting each individual once regardless of how many times their data was processed, aggregated across the entity and all affiliated entities; and
(C) No more than twenty-five percent (25%) of global annual revenues, calculated across the entity and all affiliated entities, derived from the transfer of Covered Personal Data to third parties who do not have a direct commercial relationship with the individuals whose data is transferred. Where the Commission has published final rules defining "relevant gross revenues" under Sec. 1003(7), the percentage in this criterion shall be calculated using the same revenue base as those rules specify.
An entity satisfying all three criteria is a Small Business regardless of its legal form.
Affiliation: For purposes of criteria (A), (B), and (C), all revenues, data holdings, and data transfer activities of the following entities are aggregated with those of the entity being assessed: (i) any entity in which the assessed entity holds a direct or indirect ownership interest of ten percent (10%) or more; (ii) any entity that holds a direct or indirect ownership interest of ten percent (10%) or more in the assessed entity; (iii) any entity under common ownership or common operational control with the assessed entity, where operational control means the practical ability to direct, limit, set terms for, or access the data practices of the other entity through contract, platform architecture, board representation, management overlap, or shared technical infrastructure regardless of formal legal separation; (iv) any entity with which the assessed entity participates in a Data Cooperative as defined in Sec. 1003(19) or an Audience-Segment Licensing Arrangement as defined in Sec. 1003(20), to the extent of the Covered Personal Data accessible through that arrangement; and (v) any entity to which the assessed entity has transferred Covered Personal Data within the preceding twenty-four (24) months where that transfer was structured in whole or in part to reduce the assessed entity's record count below a threshold of this subtitle. The Bureau shall promulgate rules specifying the methodology for aggregating records and revenues across affiliated entities within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service.
(24) "Explicit User-Declared Preference" means a preference for a content category, topic, product type, brand, service category, or specific content source that a user has affirmatively expressed through deliberate, conscious action, including: structured preference declarations through a dedicated preference interface; follows and subscriptions to specific accounts, creators, channels, communities, or content sources; saves and bookmarks of specific content; category-level like patterns accumulated within an identifiable content category; and deliberate content initiation by clicking, tapping, or navigating to specific content. Passive behavioral engagement signals — including scroll behavior, hover time, view duration of autoplayed content, near-clicks, and autoplay continuations — are not Explicit User-Declared Preferences. The conditions governing use, retention, platform-specificity, recalibration, and intra-category diversity applicable to Explicit User-Declared Preferences are specified in Sec. 1084 of this subtitle.
(25) "Bureau-approved independent technical auditor" means, following the establishment of the Bureau's auditor certification program under Sec. 1116(c), an independent technical auditor holding current certification under that program. Prior to the establishment of that program, "Bureau-approved independent technical auditor" means an independent technical auditor that:
(A) has no financial interest in and has not been employed by the entity being audited within the preceding five (5) years;
(B) possesses demonstrated expertise in data systems architecture, privacy compliance, and the specific technical subject matter of the audit being conducted; and
(C) has been approved by the Bureau of Consumer Protection acting as interim enforcement authority under Sec. 1152(1), or, where the Bureau of Consumer Protection has published interim auditor qualification standards within sixty (60) days of enactment, meets those published standards without requiring individual approval. The Bureau of Consumer Protection shall publish interim auditor qualification standards within sixty (60) days of enactment.
An auditor meeting these requirements is deemed a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor for all purposes of this subtitle until the Bureau's formal certification program under Sec. 1116(c) is operational, at which point auditors not certified within one (1) year of the program's establishment are no longer deemed approved under this transitional provision.
(26) "United States person" means a natural person who is a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence as defined in 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(20). The term does not include any corporation, partnership, association, or other entity, whether or not organized under the laws of the United States.
SEC. 1004. OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE GOVERNING DATA EXISTENCE AND ACCESS.
(a) Statement of Principle.—This subtitle is grounded in and shall be applied according to the following operative principle, which has binding force in all proceedings, enforcement actions, rulemakings, and judicial constructions arising under this subtitle:
Data concerning a United States person may exist consistent with this subtitle only where all of the following conditions are continuously satisfied:
(1) the existence of the data is operationally necessary to provide a service the individual has chosen to receive from the holding entity;
(2) the retention of the data is bounded to that operational necessity;
(3) the data is not combined across independent contextual sources without independent justification meeting the standards of this subtitle; and
(4) the access regime around the data is robust enough to prevent suppression-end government use, including commercial acquisition by government, compelled disclosure outside Constitutionally Equivalent Collection, and acquisition through fusion centers, contractors, intermediaries, or laundering arrangements.
(b) Operative Force.—This principle is operative, not merely interpretive. It controls the application of Sec. 1003(2) (Psychological Profile), Sec. 1003(3) (Operational Profile), Sec. 1003(4) (Population Coverage Database), Sec. 1003(5) (Precrime Risk Assessment), and all substantive prohibitions of this subtitle that depend on them. The definitions and prohibitions of this subtitle shall be applied to give maximum effect to this principle, and shall not be construed narrowly in a manner that would permit the existence, retention, combination, or access of data inconsistent with the four conditions of subsection (a). Where the application of any specific provision of this subtitle would produce a result inconsistent with this principle, the application most consistent with the principle controls.
(c) Anti-Narrowing Rule for Safe Harbors, Exceptions, and Carve-Outs.—No safe harbor, exception, or carve-out under this subtitle — including but not limited to Sections 1011(c), 1012, 1013, 1014, 1021(c), 1031, 1033(b)(1), and 1035 — shall be construed to authorize data existence, retention, combination, or access that fails the four conditions of subsection (a), except where Congress has by specific finding in this subtitle established that the failure is justified by a compelling public purpose meeting the standards of Sec. 1031(b)(1). The carve-out structure of this subtitle is calibrated within the four conditions, not against them.
(d) Bureau Application.—The Bureau shall apply this principle as binding authority in enforcement and rulemaking, and shall publish interpretive guidance within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service identifying applications of the principle in concrete fact patterns. The Bureau shall update such guidance not less than annually.
(e) Judicial Application.—In any civil, criminal, or administrative proceeding arising under this subtitle, courts shall apply this principle as a substantive rule of decision, not as a canon of construction subject to overcoming by ordinary statutory interpretation. The four conditions of subsection (a) are not a balancing test; each condition must be independently satisfied for data existence to be consistent with this subtitle.
CHAPTER I — PROHIBITION ON PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILES AND BEHAVIORAL PREDICTION
SEC. 1011. ABSOLUTE PROHIBITION ON PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILES.
(a) General Prohibition.—Except as provided in subsection (c), Sec. 1012, Sec. 1013, Sec. 1014, and Sec. 1071, no entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall compile, derive, produce, sell, license, transfer, or use a Psychological Profile concerning any United States person for any purpose. Without limiting the foregoing categorical prohibition, this prohibition expressly covers: the use of a Psychological Profile to target, select, or tailor advertising, political messaging, electoral communications, voter targeting, influence operations, or any other commercial, political, or persuasive communication directed at a specific individual; the construction or operation of services designed to produce Psychological Profiles on behalf of any third party, including any government entity, political organization, commercial advertiser, foreign government, or influence operation; and the sale, license, transfer, or provision of any Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment to any political campaign, political action committee, super PAC, political party, electoral organization, ballot initiative committee, or any entity primarily engaged in electoral or political advocacy, regardless of whether such Profile is used for voter targeting, opposition research, persuasion messaging, or any other electoral purpose.
(b) Clean-Inputs Rule.—A Psychological Profile is prohibited regardless of whether its component data inputs are individually drawn from otherwise permitted categories. The test is the nature and purpose of the output, not the permissibility of the inputs. An entity that feeds only permitted first-party data into a model producing a personality score, emotional vulnerability index, or political susceptibility score has produced a prohibited Psychological Profile.
(c) Academic Research Carve-Out.
(1) Eligibility.—The compilation or analysis of Psychological Profiles is exempt from the prohibition of subsection (a) where conducted exclusively for bona fide academic research and all conditions of paragraphs (2) through (7) are continuously satisfied.
(2) IRB and Data Requirements.—The research is approved by an Institutional Review Board constituted under 45 C.F.R. Part 46 or an equivalent accredited ethics review body, and is conducted exclusively on synthetic data — data generated algorithmically to replicate statistical properties of real data without corresponding to any actual individual — or on fully anonymized data that has been processed through a technically verified de-identification procedure such that re-identification of any specific individual is not reasonably possible. De-identification verification shall be certified by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor as defined in Sec. 1003(25). Until the Bureau publishes final de-identification standards under Sec. 1152, de-identification under this carve-out shall satisfy the requirements of NIST Special Publication 800-188 (De-Identifying Government Datasets: Techniques and Governance) or a successor standard designated by the Bureau, as the minimum applicable baseline.
(3) Transfer and Destruction.—No Psychological Profile, model weights, trained parameters, scoring algorithm, or other artifact capable of producing Psychological Profile outputs, nor any underlying behavioral data constituting an Operational Profile, may be sold, licensed, transferred, shared, or disclosed to any commercial entity, government entity, political organization, or any third party other than through peer-reviewed academic publication of aggregate statistical findings that do not enable reconstruction of any individual profile or scoring model. All Psychological Profiles, model weights, trained parameters, scoring algorithms, underlying behavioral data, and any other artifacts capable of producing Psychological Profile outputs shall be permanently and irreversibly destroyed upon completion of the research project and no later than three (3) years from the date of IRB approval.
(4) Disclosure.—The existence and general subject matter of the research is disclosed to the Bureau annually, together with the auditor's de-identification certification.
(5) Scope Limitation.—The carve-out of this subsection extends to cross-context behavioral data constituting an Operational Profile assembled incidentally in the course of permitted psychological profiling research, provided such data meets all conditions of this subsection including the destruction requirement. The carve-out does not extend to datasets meeting the Population Coverage Database threshold of Sec. 1003(4).
(6) Forfeiture.—A researcher who violates any condition of this carve-out forfeits the exemption and is subject to the full prohibition of subsection (a) and the civil and criminal penalties of this subtitle as if the carve-out did not apply.
(7) Government and Political Entity Firewall.—The academic research carve-out of this subsection is available only where all of the following conditions are continuously satisfied throughout the research period and for the firewall period defined in subparagraph (F):
(A) Permitted and Prohibited Government Funding.—The research project may receive funding, in-kind contribution, data access, or thing of value from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, Department of Veterans Affairs research programs, and other federal civilian research agencies whose missions do not include law enforcement, intelligence, immigration enforcement, or military operations. Neither the research project nor any successor or derivative project shall receive funding, in-kind contribution, data access, or thing of value from any law enforcement agency, intelligence agency, immigration enforcement agency, Department of Defense element whose primary mission includes signals intelligence or cyber operations, or any state, local, or tribal law enforcement agency.
(B) No Political Entity Funding or Involvement.—Neither the research project nor any successor or derivative project shall receive funding, in-kind contribution, data access, or thing of value from any political campaign, political party, political action committee, super PAC, ballot initiative committee, 501(c)(4) organization primarily engaged in electoral or political advocacy, or any entity primarily engaged in electoral or political activity. No individual employed by, contracted to, or compensated by any such entity within the preceding three (3) years may serve as a principal investigator, co-investigator, statistical lead, or methodological lead on the research.
(C) No Concurrent Employment.—No principal investigator, co-investigator, or individual with substantive control over the research design, data access, or analytical methodology shall, during the research period, hold any concurrent paid or unpaid position with any prohibited agency described in subparagraph (A), any entity described in subparagraph (B), or any Targeting Infrastructure Contractor as defined in Sec. 1003(8). Tenured or tenure-track academic positions, hospital clinical positions, and unaffiliated journalism are not concurrent positions within the meaning of this subparagraph.
(D) No Post-Research Transfer Through Personnel.—For a period of three (3) years following completion or termination of the research, no principal investigator, co-investigator, or individual with substantive control over the research design, data access, or analytical methodology shall: accept employment, consulting engagement, advisory position, or compensated speaking arrangement with any prohibited agency described in subparagraph (A), any entity described in subparagraph (B), or any Targeting Infrastructure Contractor; or provide any consultation, advisory service, methodology transfer, training, or expert assistance to any such agency or entity, whether compensated or uncompensated, that relates to the subject matter, methodology, or findings of the research.
(E) No Institutional Government or Political Service Arrangement.—Neither the research institution nor any department, center, laboratory, or research unit conducting the research shall, during the research period or the three (3) year firewall period following completion, enter into any service contract, cooperative agreement, advisory arrangement, or methodology-licensing arrangement with any prohibited agency described in subparagraph (A) or any entity described in subparagraph (B) that relates to the subject matter, methodology, or findings of the research.
(F) Firewall Period.—The firewall period under subparagraphs (D) and (E) runs for three (3) years from the date of permanent destruction of all research materials under paragraph (3), or three (3) years from the date of final peer-reviewed publication, whichever is later.
(G) Disclosure and Certification.—The principal investigator and the research institution shall jointly certify annually to the Bureau, under penalty of perjury, compliance with all conditions of this paragraph. The certification shall identify all funding sources, all institutional affiliations and outside compensation of each investigator, and any contemplated post-research positions or arrangements known to the investigator at the time of certification.
(H) Forfeiture and Penalties.—Violation of any condition of this paragraph terminates the carve-out, subjects all research materials to immediate destruction under paragraph (3), and subjects the violating investigator and institution to the full prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) and the penalties of this subtitle. Violation involving knowing transfer of methodology or expertise to a government law enforcement agency, intelligence agency, immigration enforcement agency, or political organization constitutes a per se willful Tier 3 violation under Sec. 1122(e).
(I) Relationship to Sec. 1062(g).—The firewall on researcher and institutional conduct established by this paragraph operates in coordination with the prohibition on government acquisition of academic carve-out outputs under Sec. 1062(g). The two provisions are independently enforceable. Compliance with this paragraph does not authorize any government agency to acquire carve-out outputs in violation of Sec. 1062(g), and compliance by a government agency with Sec. 1062(g) does not relieve any researcher or institution of the obligations of this paragraph. Penalties under this paragraph and under Sec. 1062(g) are cumulative and do not displace each other.
SEC. 1012. CLINICALLY SUPERVISED MENTAL HEALTH APPLICATION EXEMPTION.
(a) Eligibility.—A mental health application operated by or under the clinical supervision of a licensed mental health professional, licensed healthcare entity, or accredited behavioral health organization may collect and process data concerning a user's emotional state, psychological condition, mood, or behavioral patterns solely within the direct therapeutic or supportive relationship with that user, subject to all conditions of this section. An entity that satisfies all conditions of this section is exempt from the prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) and from the prohibition of Sec. 1021(a) to the extent of the data compiled or processed within the therapeutic relationship for the purpose of providing the specific mental health service for which the user enrolled.
(b) Conditions.—The exemption applies only where all of the following conditions are continuously satisfied:
(1) Use Limitation.—The data is used exclusively to provide the specific mental health service for which the user enrolled and for no other purpose.
(2) No Third-Party Transfer.—The data shall not be sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any third party, including any data broker, advertiser, employer, insurer, law enforcement agency, government entity, or foreign person. Notwithstanding the foregoing, deidentified aggregate data may be transferred to academic researchers operating under Sec. 1011(c) provided the recipient meets all conditions of that section and the transfer is approved by the user through separately executed opt-in consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards.
(3) Security.—The application shall implement security standards no less protective than those required by the HIPAA Security Rule, 45 C.F.R. Part 164, Subpart C, regardless of whether the application is a covered entity under HIPAA. This requirement establishes an independent statutory floor applicable to all mental health applications under this section. Compliance with HIPAA by a covered entity satisfies this requirement but does not limit the obligation of non-covered entities to meet the same standard.
(4) Consent.—The application must obtain explicit, informed, separately executed written consent — not bundled within general terms of service or end-user license agreements — disclosing in plain language what specific data is collected, how it is used within the therapeutic relationship, the third-party transfer prohibition of paragraph (2), and any deidentified research transfer permitted under paragraph (2).
(5) No Advertising Use.—The data shall not be used for advertising targeting, audience segmentation, or any commercial purpose other than providing the specific mental health service.
(c) Penalties for Violation.—Any violation of the conditions of subsection (b) — including any third-party transfer in violation of subsection (b)(2) — simultaneously strips the exemption of subsection (a) and subjects the entity to the full prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) and Sec. 1021(a). A violation of subsection (b)(2) is a per se willful violation subject to Tier 3 civil penalties under Sec. 1122(e) and the criminal penalties of Sec. 1123, not eligible for the Tier 1 reduction of Sec. 1122(a).
SEC. 1013. CONVERSATIONAL AI SYSTEM EXEMPTION — USER-INITIATED DISCLOSURE.
(a) Eligibility.—The collection or processing of information that would otherwise constitute a Psychological Profile is exempt from the prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) where:
(1) the information is disclosed by a user to a conversational artificial intelligence system in the ordinary course of the user's interaction with that system;
(2) the disclosure occurs in the ordinary course of the user's interaction with the system, and the system does not employ prompts, conversational patterns, or interface design specifically engineered to elicit psychological self-disclosure for the purpose of profile construction, advertising targeting, or any purpose other than responding to the user's stated objective. Conversational inquiry into a user's feelings or emotional state in the natural course of responding to that user's request is permitted and does not constitute engineered elicitation under this paragraph; and
(3) all conditions of subsection (b) are continuously satisfied.
(b) Conditions.
(1) Use Limitation.—The disclosed information is used solely to respond to the user's current request and to provide the conversational service for which the user is engaged. It may not be used to construct a persistent psychological model of the user across sessions.
(2) Retention.—The disclosed information is not retained beyond the current Session as defined in Sec. 1003(22), except as part of conversation history that the user has affirmatively chosen to retain through a deliberate retention action, in which case retention is governed by Sec. 1094 first-party behavioral data limits.
(3) No Transfer.—The disclosed information is not sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any third party. The narrow service provider exception of Sec. 1081(f) applies.
(4) No Profile Output.—The system does not produce, derive, or store any score, index, classification, or model output representing the user's personality, emotional vulnerability, cognitive susceptibility, or political belief based on the disclosed information.
(5) No Advertising Use.—The disclosed information is not used for advertising targeting, audience segmentation, or any purpose other than providing the conversational service.
(c) Model Training.—Disclosed information may be used to train, fine-tune, or improve the conversational AI system only where the user has provided opt-in consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards, separately from acceptance of terms of service, and where the training process does not produce a model output capable of generating Psychological Profiles concerning identified or identifiable users.
(d) Relationship to Sec. 1012 and Sec. 1014.—A conversational AI system that holds itself out as providing mental health treatment, counseling, or therapy under clinical supervision is subject to Sec. 1012 and not this section. A conversational AI system that holds itself out as a consumer mental health application without clinical supervision is subject to Sec. 1014 and not this section. A general-purpose conversational AI system that incidentally receives mental health-related disclosures from a user is governed by this section.
SEC. 1014. CONSUMER MENTAL HEALTH APPLICATION EXEMPTION.
(a) Eligibility.—A consumer mental health application that is not operated under clinical supervision but that holds itself out as providing mental health, wellness, mood, or emotional support functions — including but not limited to mood-tracking applications, journaling applications with emotional content analysis, meditation applications with biometric or emotional state monitoring, and equivalent consumer products — may collect and process data concerning a user's emotional state, mood, or behavioral patterns subject to all conditions of this section. An entity satisfying all conditions of this section is exempt from the prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) to the extent of the data compiled or processed within the direct service relationship.
(b) Conditions.—The exemption applies only where all of the following conditions are continuously satisfied:
(1) Use Limitation.—The data is used exclusively to provide the specific consumer mental health service the user has enrolled in.
(2) No Inference Output.—The application does not produce, derive, or store any score, index, classification, or model output representing the user's personality, psychological state, emotional vulnerability, cognitive susceptibility, or political belief. Aggregate visualizations of the user's own self-reported data to that same user — such as mood graphs displayed to the user — are not inference outputs prohibited by this paragraph, provided no comparative ranking, predictive scoring, or assessment of psychological characteristics is generated.
(3) Retention.—The data is retained only for the period reasonably necessary to provide the service, and in no event longer than ninety (90) days following the user's last interaction with the service, except as part of content the user has affirmatively chosen to retain through a deliberate retention action — such as saved journal entries or saved mood logs — which is governed by Sec. 1094 first-party behavioral data limits and the user's continuing direction.
(4) No Third-Party Transfer.—The data shall not be sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any third party, including any data broker, advertiser, employer, insurer, law enforcement agency, government entity, or foreign person. The narrow service provider exception of Sec. 1081(f) applies. Notwithstanding the foregoing, deidentified aggregate data may be transferred to academic researchers operating under Sec. 1011(c) provided the recipient meets all conditions of that section and the transfer is approved by the user through separately executed opt-in consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards.
(5) No Advertising Use.—The data shall not be used for advertising targeting, audience segmentation, or any commercial purpose other than providing the specific consumer mental health service.
(6) Security.—The application shall implement security standards no less protective than those required by the HIPAA Security Rule, 45 C.F.R. Part 164, Subpart C, regardless of whether the application is a covered entity under HIPAA.
(7) Consent.—The application must obtain explicit, informed, separately executed written consent — not bundled within general terms of service or end-user license agreements — disclosing in plain language what data is collected, how it is used, the retention period, the third-party transfer prohibition of paragraph (4), and any deidentified research transfer permitted under paragraph (4).
(c) Distinguished from Clinical Applications.—An application that holds itself out as providing clinical mental health treatment, therapy, or counseling, or that operates under licensed clinical supervision, is governed by Sec. 1012 and not this section.
(d) Penalties for Violation.—Any violation of the conditions of subsection (b) simultaneously strips the exemption of subsection (a) and subjects the entity to the full prohibition of Sec. 1011(a). A violation of subsection (b)(4) is a per se willful violation subject to Tier 3 civil penalties under Sec. 1122(e) and the criminal penalties of Sec. 1123.
CHAPTER II — PROHIBITION ON PRECRIME RISK ASSESSMENTS
SEC. 1021. PROHIBITION ON PRECRIME RISK ASSESSMENTS.
(a) General Prohibition.—Except as provided in subsection (c), no entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall compile, derive, produce, sell, license, transfer, or use a Precrime Risk Assessment concerning any United States person for any purpose.
(b) Government Acquisition Prohibition.—No Federal Agency, state or local government entity, or Government Contractor shall purchase, license, or use a Precrime Risk Assessment from any commercial source, or direct or fund the development of a Precrime Risk Assessment system through any contract, grant, or cooperative agreement. This subsection operates in addition to and not in lieu of the government acquisition prohibition of Sec. 1062.
(c) Permitted Systems.—The prohibition in subsection (a) does not apply to:
(1) Actuarial Criminal-History Tools in Sentencing and Parole.—Actuarial risk assessment tools used in criminal sentencing or parole proceedings based solely on an individual's own documented criminal history, as distinguished from predictive behavioral models based on demographic, associational, or population-level data.
(2) Federal Correctional Risk and Needs Assessment.—Risk and needs assessment tools used by the Bureau of Prisons within the federal correctional system pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3632, for the purposes specified in subparagraph (A) and subject to the limitations of subparagraph (B). Congress does not find that such tools constitute a Precrime Risk Assessment within the meaning of Sec. 1003(5) with respect to their use within the federal correctional system for these purposes, because they operate on individuals already convicted and sentenced through constitutional criminal process, for the purpose of allocating correctional services and making reentry determinations, and not for the purpose of allocating Coercive Consequences against the general population.
(A) Permitted Uses.—Such tools may be used for: rehabilitative programming allocation including education, vocational training, substance abuse treatment, and cognitive behavioral programming; reentry placement decisions including halfway house placement and home confinement eligibility; community supervision level determinations; and any other purpose specifically authorized by the First Step Act of 2018.
(B) Prohibited Uses.—Scores and underlying data from such tools may not be used for any purpose constituting predictive policing — meaning any decision to investigate, surveil, stop, search, or target an individual who is not already subject to a pending criminal proceeding or an existing term of federal supervision. Such scores may not be the sole or primary basis for denying supervised release or home confinement without individualized review by a qualified case manager or court. Such data and scores may be disclosed to courts and probation officers in connection with sentencing, supervised release, and violation proceedings involving the assessed individual; to interstate compact supervision agencies receiving a released individual; to sex offender registration authorities for tier determination purposes; to federally coordinated reentry services providers for the purpose of matching released individuals with appropriate community services; and to subsequent federal prosecutors in connection with sentencing of a previously assessed individual, through the presentence investigation report process. Such data and scores may not be sold, licensed, or transferred to any commercial entity, any foreign government, or any law enforcement agency for use in investigations unrelated to an existing proceeding involving the specific assessed individual.
(3) Child Welfare Predictive Risk Assessment Tools.—Predictive risk assessment tools used by state, local, or tribal child welfare agencies to assist caseworkers in identifying children at risk of maltreatment are permitted.
(d) Loss of Permitted-System Status.—The permissions in subsection (c) do not apply where the permitted system is: (1) sold, licensed, or transferred to any government entity at any level beyond what is specifically permitted by the terms of the relevant permission; (2) used to make decisions affecting individuals outside the specific commercial, clinical, or correctional relationship for which the system was developed; or (3) combined with data from external non-relationship sources — meaning data from sources outside the specific relationship within which the permitted system operates — to produce outputs extending beyond the specific function for which the permission is claimed.
(e) Relationship to Sec. 1012 and Sec. 1014.—Mental health applications operating in compliance with Sec. 1012 (clinically supervised) or Sec. 1014 (consumer) are exempt from the prohibition of subsection (a) to the extent specified in those sections.
(f) Relationship to Sec. 1003(5).—Activities that do not fall within the definition of Precrime Risk Assessment under Sec. 1003(5) — including private commercial risk scoring used within a direct service relationship and not transferred for the allocation of any Coercive Consequence — are not regulated by this section. The scope of Sec. 1021 is co-extensive with the definition of Precrime Risk Assessment, no broader and no narrower.
SEC. 1022. FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL RISK ASSESSMENT TRANSPARENCY AND NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF JUSTICE STUDY.
(a) Annual Reporting Requirement.
(1) The Director of the Bureau of Prisons shall transmit to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on the Judiciary, and the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittees of the Senate and House Committees on Appropriations, on an annual basis, a report containing:
(A) the score distribution of any risk and needs assessment tool used by the Bureau of Prisons pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3632, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, offense category, and federal correctional facility;
(B) the correlation between such scores and observed recidivism outcomes within each demographic category;
(C) any modifications made to the assessment tool or its underlying model during the reporting period, together with the Director's assessment of whether and how those modifications affected score distribution disparities; and
(D) the Director's assessment of the causes of any persistent disparities and the steps being taken to address them.
(2) The first report shall be transmitted not later than one year after the date of enactment of this subtitle, and reports shall continue annually thereafter.
(b) Sense of Congress.—It is the sense of Congress that racial and ethnic disparities in the score distributions of federal correctional risk and needs assessment tools are a matter of serious concern that warrants ongoing federal attention.
(c) National Institute of Justice Study.
(1) The National Institute of Justice, in coordination with the Bureau of Prisons, shall conduct a study examining whether the predictive accuracy of correctional risk and needs assessment can be maintained while reducing racial and ethnic disparities in score distributions, including through alternative variable selection, model architecture, scoring methodology, or post-scoring calibration.
(2) The findings of the study shall be transmitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on the Judiciary not later than two years after the date of enactment of this subtitle. The findings shall be made publicly available in full.
CHAPTER III — PROHIBITION ON OPERATIONAL PROFILES AND BEHAVIORAL BASELINES
SEC. 1031. PROHIBITION ON OPERATIONAL PROFILE ASSEMBLY.
(a) General Prohibition.—No entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall: compile, assemble, or maintain an Operational Profile concerning any United States person; sell, license, transfer, or provide access to an Operational Profile or Operational Profile capability to any third party; or build, operate, or provide services designed to produce Operational Profiles on behalf of any third party. The prohibition applies regardless of whether the capability is operated for the entity's own commercial purposes or on behalf of a third party, and regardless of whether the underlying data elements are stored together, stored separately, aggregated at query time, or processed through any intermediary step. The prohibition is on the capability to produce a cross-context behavioral record, not solely on a compiled record held in active storage.
(b) Four-Condition Framework.—Assembly of behavioral data concerning a specific individual derived from two or more independent contextual sources constitutes a prohibited Operational Profile within the meaning of subsection (a) where any of the four conditions of Sec. 1004(a) fails to be satisfied with respect to that assembly. The four conditions are operationalized as follows:
(1) Failure of Operational Necessity Condition (Sec. 1004(a)(1)).—The existence of the data exceeds what is reasonably and demonstrably necessary to perform the specific function the data subject has affirmatively requested from the holding entity. Necessity is determined by reference to the function the data subject has requested, not by the entity's characterization of its service offering. Data collection, retention, or processing for purposes including service improvement, behavioral analytics, A/B testing of user behavior, personalization beyond what the data subject has expressly requested, future product development, training of machine learning models, advertising targeting, or any commercial purpose other than performing the specific requested function and necessary security and fraud prevention required to deliver that function, exceeds operational necessity and constitutes failure of this condition unless authorized by the data subject through separately executed consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards specifically identifying the additional purpose. General terms of service consent, bundled consent, or consent that does not specifically identify the additional purpose does not satisfy this requirement. Congress may by specific finding establish that the retention serves a compelling public purpose, in which case the assembled data must continue to satisfy paragraphs (2), (3), and (4) of this subsection. Nothing in this paragraph treats as failure of operational necessity the collection, retention, or processing of service-health telemetry — including error logs, crash reports, latency measurements, uptime metrics, and similar operational diagnostics necessary to monitor and maintain the reliable delivery of the specific requested function — provided such telemetry is used solely to monitor and maintain service delivery and is not used to produce or contribute to the production of Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, behavioral analytics, or any commercial purpose other than service delivery.
(2) Failure of Bounded-Retention Condition (Sec. 1004(a)(2)).—The assembled record is retained beyond the operational necessity established under paragraph (1), except where retention is required by independent legal authority including specific federal statute or court-ordered preservation.
(3) Failure of Non-Combination Condition (Sec. 1004(a)(3)).—The assembly combines data from sources between which the individual has separate service relationships, without independent justification meeting the standards of this subtitle. Independent justification under this paragraph includes separately executed consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards, the within-platform consented combination exception of subsection (d), and any other authority specifically established by this subtitle for cross-context combination.
(4) Failure of Access-Regime Condition (Sec. 1004(a)(4)).—The access regime around the assembled record is not robust enough to prevent suppression-end government use, including by making the record accessible to any third party other than through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection, by permitting commercial acquisition by government, by permitting compelled disclosure outside Constitutionally Equivalent Collection, or by permitting acquisition through fusion centers, contractors, intermediaries, or laundering arrangements.
(c) Independent Contextual Sources.—For purposes of subsection (b) and of Sec. 1003(3), "independent contextual sources" means data from unrelated commercial, clinical, or operational contexts as distinguished from multiple data points arising from a single direct service relationship with the individual. Each distinct service operated by an entity — including a general search engine, video hosting platform, electronic mail service, mapping and navigation service, e-commerce marketplace, and social networking platform — constitutes an independent contextual source for purposes of this section, regardless of whether those services share common ownership, common authentication, common account identifiers, or common billing. Data originating from a single service does not constitute data from multiple independent contextual sources by reason of that service collecting multiple categories of behavioral data in the course of providing that single service.
(d) Within-Platform Consented Combination Exception.—Notwithstanding subsection (b)(3), data combination across distinct services operated by a single entity or its commonly owned affiliates does not constitute failure of the non-combination condition where:
(1) the data subject has provided separately executed consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards specifically authorizing the combination of the identified services;
(2) the combined data is used solely by the entity or its commonly owned affiliates to provide services to that data subject within the direct service relationship;
(3) the combined data is not sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any third party in any form, including as audience segments, lookalike models, derived inferences, or aggregated statistics about identifiable individuals; and
(4) the combined data is not used to produce Psychological Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or any output prohibited under Secs. 1011, 1021, or this section.
(5) Loss of Exception.—An entity that violates any condition of paragraphs (1) through (4) of this subsection immediately loses the exception with respect to all combined data covered by it, and the underlying combined data becomes a prohibited Operational Profile subject to subsection (a) and the deletion machinery of Sec. 1051.
(e) Anti-Evasion.—An entity may not avoid the prohibition of subsection (a) by structuring its data architecture to aggregate data at query time rather than in stored form, by routing data through intermediate processing steps, by allocating components of an Operational Profile capability across multiple legally distinct entities, or by any other technical, organizational, or contractual mechanism designed to achieve the functional equivalent of an Operational Profile while avoiding formal storage of a compiled record.
(f) Evidentiary Inference from Multi-Source Acquisition.—Where an entity acquires individually linkable Covered Personal Data from two or more independent commercial sources in a manner not falling within the within-platform consented combination exception of subsection (d) or another exception established by this subtitle, a rebuttable presumption arises in any enforcement proceeding that the entity has assembled or maintained an Operational Profile capability within the meaning of subsection (a). The entity may rebut this presumption by demonstrating, through the certification of a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor as defined in Sec. 1003(25), that each data acquisition served a specific, discrete commercial purpose that did not require or produce a cross-context behavioral record of any individual, and that no such record was produced as an output of the combined data.
(g) Mandatory Downstream Contractual Condition.—Every entity that transfers Covered Personal Data to any downstream party — whether through sale, license, API access, or any other mechanism permitted under this subtitle — shall include in each transfer agreement an express written prohibition on the downstream party's combination of the transferred data with data from any source in a manner that would fail any of the four conditions of subsection (b). Failure to include this mandatory prohibition creates strict liability under subsection (a) for any prohibited combination that results from the downstream chain, regardless of the transferring entity's actual knowledge of downstream conduct.
(h) Bureau Interpretive Guidance.—The Bureau shall publish interpretive guidance applying this section to common platform architectures within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service, including illustrative examples of data assembly that does and does not constitute an Operational Profile under each of the four conditions of Sec. 1004(a) as operationalized through subsection (b), and the within-platform consented combination exception of subsection (d). Such guidance shall be updated not less than annually.
(i) Relationship to Secs. 1003(3) and 1004(a).—This section operationalizes the definition of Operational Profile in Sec. 1003(3) and the four-condition operative principle of Sec. 1004(a). Data assembly that satisfies all four conditions of Sec. 1004(a), as operationalized through subsection (b) of this section, is not an Operational Profile within the meaning of Sec. 1003(3) and is not regulated by this section.
SEC. 1032. PROHIBITION ON COORDINATED DATA COLLECTION AND AGGREGATION ARRANGEMENTS.
(a) Prohibition on Coordinated Assembly.—No two or more entities shall coordinate, agree, combine, or act in concert — expressly or tacitly, formally or informally, directly or through any intermediary — for the purpose of collectively:
(1) assembling or maintaining a Population Coverage Database as defined in Sec. 1003(4), where the combined data holdings and access capabilities of the coordinating entities would exceed the threshold of that definition even if no single entity individually exceeds it;
(2) compiling, deriving, or producing Psychological Profiles as defined in Sec. 1003(2) concerning United States persons; or
(3) assembling or maintaining an Operational Profile capability as defined in Sec. 1003(3) concerning United States persons.
For purposes of this subsection, the combined data holdings and access capabilities of coordinating entities include all Covered Personal Data held by each entity; all Covered Personal Data accessible to any entity through any API, query interface, access arrangement, or contractual right to obtain data from any other coordinating entity; and all Covered Personal Data transferred from any entity to any other within the preceding twenty-four (24) months in a transfer structured in whole or in part to reduce any entity's individual record count below a threshold of this subtitle.
(b) Indicators of Prohibited Coordination.—The following circumstances constitute evidence sufficient to establish a prima facie case of prohibited coordination, subject to rebuttal through clear and convincing evidence of genuinely independent business decisions:
(1) two or more entities operating under a common data standard, common identifier system, or common technical protocol that enables combination of their respective data holdings at query time;
(2) two or more entities that are members of the same industry association that has developed data interoperability standards enabling cross-entity Covered Personal Data combination;
(3) two or more entities that have entered into bilateral or multilateral access agreements that together provide any participating entity with functional access to the combined data of all participants;
(4) two or more entities that collectively offer advertisers or government entities targeting access based on the combined data of multiple entities; and
(5) two or more entities that have restructured their corporate relationships within the twenty-four (24) months preceding a Bureau investigation in a manner reducing any entity's individual record count below a threshold of this subtitle while maintaining functional combined access.
(c) Industry Association Responsibility.—An industry association, trade group, or standards body that develops or licenses a data standard or technical protocol enabling its members to combine their respective Covered Personal Data holdings is a participant in prohibited coordination under this subtitle and is jointly and severally liable with its members for violations arising from coordinated activity enabled by that standard or protocol.
(d) Virtual Population Coverage Databases.—A set of distributed data systems held by two or more entities constitutes a Population Coverage Database within the meaning of Sec. 1003(4) and is subject to the prohibition of Sec. 1041 and the divestiture requirement of Sec. 1051 where the combined data holdings of all entities exceed the threshold of Sec. 1003(4) and any entity can query, access, or combine data from any other entity's system through any technical mechanism. Each entity maintaining a component of a Virtual Population Coverage Database is jointly liable with all other participating entities for violations of Sec. 1041 regardless of whether that entity individually holds data concerning more than ten million United States persons.
(e) Sequential Transaction Chains.—Where Covered Personal Data passes through a chain of two or more transactions and the combined effect produces a prohibited output that no single entity could have produced from its own data holdings alone, each entity in the chain that knew or had reason to know that its data would be combined to produce a prohibited output is jointly and severally liable for that prohibited output.
An entity had reason to know where:
(1) the entity's own marketing materials described the data's use for profiling or combination with other data sources;
(2) the entity received a price substantially above the arms-length market price explainable only by the data's value for combination;
(3) the downstream recipient is a Data Broker, Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, or entity registered under Sec. 1113; or
(4) the specific data categories transferred are commercially valuable primarily in combination with other data sources.
An entity that transferred data in good faith without actual or constructive knowledge of prohibited downstream use, and that promptly notified the Bureau upon learning of the prohibited use, is not subject to joint liability under this subsection.
SEC. 1033. INTERNATIONAL TRANSFER PROHIBITION.
(a) General Prohibition.—No entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall sell, license, transfer, export, or transmit any Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, Population Coverage Database, or Precrime Risk Assessment to any foreign person, entity, or Sensitive Nation-State Actor, regardless of the number of United States persons concerned.
(b) Absolute Transfer Prohibition.—No entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall sell, license, transfer, export, or transmit any Covered Personal Data concerning any United States person to any foreign person, entity, or Sensitive Nation-State Actor, regardless of the number of United States persons concerned, except as provided in subsection (b)(1).
(1) Permitted Transfers.—The prohibition of this subsection does not apply to:
(A) transfer to the data subject themselves, including transmission of the data subject's own data to that individual at any location;
(B) transfer to a foreign branch, subsidiary, or affiliate under common ownership with the transferring entity, where the foreign recipient is a United States-Directed Entity under Sec. 1003(16) and the transfer is necessary to deliver a service the data subject has chosen to receive from the corporate group; or
(C) transfer to a foreign entity providing service to the data subject at the data subject's direction, where the data subject has authorized the transfer through opt-in consent meeting Sec. 1121 standards.
No transfer permitted under this paragraph may be made to any Sensitive Nation-State Actor regardless of the data subject's consent or any other circumstance. All transfers under this paragraph remain subject to the prohibitions of Sec. 1033(a) (no Profile or PCD transfer regardless of carve-out), Sec. 1033(c) (no foreign access to PCDs), and Sec. 1033(d) (PCDs must be stored in US territory).
(c) Access Prohibition.—No entity shall grant any foreign person, entity, or government direct or indirect access to a Population Coverage Database or to any system capable of producing Psychological Profiles or Operational Profiles concerning United States persons.
(d) Domestic Storage Requirement.—Any entity holding a Population Coverage Database concerning United States persons shall store such data exclusively on servers physically located within the United States or its territories.
(e) CFIUS Mandatory Review.—Any acquisition of a domestic entity holding a Population Coverage Database by a foreign person or Sensitive Nation-State Actor is subject to mandatory CFIUS review under 50 U.S.C. § 4565 and is hereby designated a covered transaction regardless of transactional form.
SEC. 1034. SANCTIONS AGAINST FOREIGN NATIONS CONDUCTING PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILING OPERATIONS.
(a) Congressional Direction.—It is the sense of Congress that the President should consider imposing sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq., against any foreign government, state-owned enterprise, or entity controlled by a foreign government that the Director of National Intelligence determines is conducting psychological profiling operations against United States persons — meaning operations involving the collection, derivation, or deployment of Psychological Profiles concerning any United States persons.
(b) Annual Assessment.—Not later than one hundred eighty (180) days after enactment, and annually thereafter, the Director of National Intelligence shall transmit to Congress a classified assessment, with an unclassified summary, identifying any foreign government or state controlled entity engaged in psychological profiling operations against United States persons, the scale and nature of such operations, and a recommendation as to whether sanctions under IEEPA or other available statutory authority are warranted.
(c) Congressional Notification.—Where the Director of National Intelligence determines that a foreign government is conducting psychological profiling operations against United States persons and the President declines to impose sanctions within ninety (90) days of receiving the DNI assessment, the President shall transmit to Congress a written explanation of the basis for that decision, which shall be made available to the relevant intelligence committees.
SEC. 1035. MANDATORY CARRIER FORENSIC LOCATION DATA RETENTION AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ACCESS.
(a) Congressional Finding — Operational Necessity.—Congress finds that the retention of cell-site location information and network-assisted location data by commercial mobile carriers for a bounded period serves a compelling forensic purpose for the investigation of serious crime, including kidnapping, human trafficking, child abduction, and homicide. Congress further finds that this retention does not constitute the commercial Operational Profile capability prohibited under Sec. 1031, provided the data is maintained in a dedicated forensic reserve technically isolated from all commercial systems, accessible only through judicially supervised process meeting the standards of subsection (c), and subject to the destruction requirements of subsection (e). The four-condition operative principle of Sec. 1004(a), as operationalized for Operational Profile assembly through Sec. 1031(b), is satisfied for this retention by virtue of (A) the operational necessity established by this congressional finding, satisfying Sec. 1004(a)(1) and Sec. 1031(b)(1); (B) the bounded retention period of subsection (a)(1), satisfying Sec. 1004(a)(2) and Sec. 1031(b)(2); (C) the single-relationship origin of the data, satisfying Sec. 1004(a)(3) and Sec. 1031(b)(3); and (D) the robust access regime established by subsections (b) through (g), satisfying Sec. 1004(a)(4) and Sec. 1031(b)(4).
(1) Retention Requirement.—Every provider of commercial mobile radio service as defined in 47 U.S.C. § 332(d)(1) shall retain, for a period of not less than twenty-four (24) months from the date of collection, all cell-site location information and network-assisted location data generated in connection with each subscriber's device. This retention period applies to: (i) cell site location information identifying the tower or base station to which a subscriber's device connected, with associated timestamp, geographic coordinates, and sector data where available; and (ii) network-assisted location data providing GPS-precision location information where the carrier's network collects such data in the ordinary course of providing service. This subtitle establishes a uniform national minimum retention standard, superseding any inconsistent state law requiring a shorter retention period, and does not require any carrier to collect location data it does not already collect in the ordinary course of providing service.
(2) No Commercial Extension.—The twenty-four (24) month retention period is a minimum retention floor only for forensic purposes. A carrier may retain location data for a period longer than twenty-four (24) months only where required by independent legal authority — including a customer's express written request, applicable state law, or court-ordered preservation — and not for any commercial purpose. Commercial retention beyond the forensic floor would constitute an Operational Profile under Sec. 1003(3) and is prohibited.
(b) Forensic Reserve Purpose Only.—Data retained under this section constitutes a forensic reserve. Retained location data may not be: sold, licensed, or transferred to any data broker, advertiser, or commercial entity for any purpose; used for advertising targeting, behavioral profiling, or commercial analytics; or transferred to any government entity except as specified in subsection (c).
(c) Law Enforcement Access.—Retained location data shall be accessible to law enforcement only through the following processes, each of which constitutes Constitutionally Equivalent Collection under this subtitle:
(1) Warrant — Historical Data.—A warrant issued by a court of competent jurisdiction upon a showing of probable cause, consistent with Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), for historical location data concerning a specific identified subscriber.
(2) Warrant — Geofence and Tower Dump.—A warrant issued by a court of competent jurisdiction upon a showing of probable cause and particularity as to the geographic area and time period, authorizing a geofence search identifying all subscriber devices present within a defined area during a defined time period, or a tower dump identifying all devices connecting to a specified cell site during a defined time period. The warrant application must specify the geographic boundaries; the time period, which shall be no longer than reasonably necessary; and the specific crime under investigation. Data produced under a geofence or tower dump warrant concerning individuals who are determined through subsequent investigation not to be suspects shall be destroyed within thirty (30) days of that determination and may not be retained, analyzed further, or used in any other investigation.
(3) Emergency Disclosure.—A law enforcement officer may request emergency disclosure from a carrier where the officer has a good faith belief, based on specific and articulable facts, that an emergency involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury — including kidnapping, human trafficking, child abduction, or attempted homicide — requires disclosure without delay, consistent with 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(8). The carrier may make the disclosure upon receipt of the request. Not later than seven (7) days after an emergency disclosure, the law enforcement agency that made the request shall apply to the nearest available federal magistrate judge for a judicial order confirming that the emergency threshold was genuinely met. The magistrate shall review the factual basis and issue an order confirming or rejecting the emergency basis. During the seven (7) day period before magistrate review, data obtained through emergency disclosure may be used solely for the specific emergency that justified the request; any broader investigative use beyond the specific emergency is subject to the magistrate's confirmation order. If the magistrate finds the emergency threshold was not met, the data obtained may not be used in any proceeding and shall be destroyed within forty-eight (48) hours of the magistrate's order; any evidence derived from that data during the seven-day window is subject to a motion to suppress in any subsequent proceeding on the ground that the underlying disclosure was not justified.
(4) Court Order in Trafficking or Missing Persons Investigation.—A court order issued in connection with a human trafficking investigation under 18 U.S.C. § 1591 et seq. or a missing persons investigation where there is reasonable basis to believe the subject may be a trafficking victim.
(d) Security.—Carriers shall protect forensic location data retained under this section using security measures no less rigorous than those applied to their most sensitive customer proprietary network information, and shall ensure that retained forensic data is not accessible to any commercial, advertising, or marketing system or personnel.
(e) Destruction.—Location data retained pursuant to the mandatory retention floor of subsection (a)(1) shall be permanently and irreversibly deleted upon expiration of the twenty-four (24) month retention period applicable to that specific data, unless subject to a court-issued preservation order in connection with a specific pending investigation. Carriers shall certify annual compliance with deletion requirements to the FCC.
(f) FCC Implementation.—The FCC shall promulgate rules implementing the security and deletion requirements of this section within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment.
(g) Isolation Conditions.—The forensic reserve under subsection (a) satisfies the operational necessity condition of Sec. 1004(a)(1), as operationalized in Sec. 1031(b)(1), only where the carrier complies with all of the following conditions:
(1) the retained data is held exclusively in a dedicated forensic reserve system that is technically isolated from all commercial, advertising, marketing, and analytics systems and personnel of the carrier;
(2) the carrier does not combine the retained data with any other Covered Personal Data from commercial sources to produce Operational Profiles, Psychological Profiles, or Precrime Risk Assessments;
(3) the retained data is not accessible to any person or system within the carrier's organization except through the law enforcement access process specified in subsection (c); and
(4) access to retained data by any government entity, including any request by the carrier's own security or fraud personnel, may occur only pursuant to a court order meeting the standards of subsection (c)(1) through (c)(4) or an emergency disclosure under subsection (c)(3).
Where a carrier loses the protection of this subsection by failing to maintain any condition of paragraphs (1) through (4), the carrier's obligation to retain forensic location data under subsection (a)(1) continues unaffected — the divestiture requirement of Sec. 1041 does not apply to data subject to mandatory retention under this section. Instead, the Bureau shall:
(A) impose civil penalties under Sec. 1122 for each day of continued non-compliance with the isolation conditions;
(B) require the carrier to submit a remediation plan within thirty (30) days restoring full compliance with all conditions of this subsection; and
(C) appoint a Bureau-certified technical monitor at the carrier's expense to oversee compliance during the remediation period.
Upon the expiration of the twenty-four (24) month retention period for any specific data, that data is subject to the deletion requirement of subsection (e) regardless of whether the carrier's exemption has been restored. A carrier that fails to submit a timely remediation plan or fails to restore compliance within ninety (90) days of Bureau notification is subject to mandatory deregistration under Sec. 1124 if registered, and to Tier 3 civil penalties on a per-day basis for continued non-compliance.
CHAPTER IV — PROHIBITION ON POPULATION COVERAGE DATABASES
SEC. 1041. PROHIBITION ON ASSEMBLING, MAINTAINING, AND MAKING AVAILABLE POPULATION COVERAGE DATABASES.
(a) Commercial Activity Prohibition.—No entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall engage in the commercial activity of assembling, maintaining, or making available a Population Coverage Database as defined in Sec. 1003(4). This subtitle prohibits a commercial activity — the business of assembling and maintaining data for the purpose of selling, licensing, or providing third-party access to behavioral information about specific individuals — not the holding of property in connection with the provision of a functionally distinct service to the data subjects themselves. For purposes of this subsection, a "functionally distinct service" means a service whose primary function is something other than data access — a product, tool, or capability provided to the data subject that is not itself the holding, presentation, organization, or provision of access to behavioral information about the data subject or other individuals. The provision of search, lookup, or directory access to behavioral information held by the entity does not constitute a functionally distinct service for purposes of this exclusion, regardless of whether the data subject is among the individuals who may search the database. The holding of personal information by an entity that does not also provide a functionally distinct service to the data subject is the assembly and maintenance of a Population Coverage Database for purposes of subsection (a). Congress exercises its Commerce Clause authority over this activity because:
(1) the commercial activity of assembling and maintaining behavioral information for sale, license, or third-party access substantially affects interstate commerce by creating private instruments of coercive power over individuals, enabling foreign governments to conduct influence operations against American citizens through commercial data channels, and systematically undermining constitutional rights of United States persons in a manner that distorts the free flow of information, political participation, and economic activity across state lines;
(2) Population Coverage Databases constitute a form of data monopoly whose existence constitutes a structural restraint on the trade in personal information in which individuals are simultaneously participants and objects; and
(3) Population Coverage Databases constitute critical national security infrastructure held in private hands, analogous to covered transactions under the Defense Production Act, whose divestiture Congress may require on national security grounds independent of Commerce Clause authority.
(b) Compliance Window.—The following phased application of subsection (a) and of Secs. 1011, 1021, and 1031 governs the divestiture period for any prohibited holding subject to Sec. 1051:
(1) From the date of enactment, the prohibition on assembling any new Population Coverage Database, Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment takes immediate effect, together with the prohibitions on international data transfer under Sec. 1033, government acquisition under Sec. 1062, and contractor laundering under Sec. 1063. No new prohibited holdings may be assembled and no prohibited holdings may be transferred after the date of enactment.
(2) The prohibition on maintaining existing prohibited holdings takes effect ninety (90) days after enactment — the date by which certified divestiture inventories are due under Sec. 1051(a)(1). An entity holding prohibited holdings on the date of enactment is not in violation of subsection (a) or of Secs. 1011, 1021, or 1031 solely by reason of continued maintenance of those holdings during the first ninety (90) days after enactment.
(3) An entity that timely submits its certified divestiture inventory under Sec. 1051(a)(1) by the ninety (90) day deadline is not in violation of the relevant prohibition solely by reason of continued maintenance of prohibited holdings during the period between day ninety (90) and the day one hundred thirty-five (135) destruction deadline. This protection attaches automatically and objectively upon timely inventory submission and terminates automatically at day one hundred thirty-five (135) regardless of whether destruction is complete. An entity may petition the Bureau for a discretionary extension of not more than sixty (60) additional days beyond day one hundred thirty-five (135) solely upon a showing of technical impossibility — meaning that the physical or technical constraints of a specific identified system make compliant destruction within one hundred thirty-five (135) days genuinely impossible, as certified by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor. No extension shall be granted on the basis of legal objection, business disruption, cost, or any ground other than documented technical impossibility of a specific identified system. During any extension period, a Bureau-appointed technical monitor shall be present at the entity's facilities at the entity's expense.
(4) Any entity that fails to submit a certified inventory by day ninety (90), or that submits an inventory by day ninety (90) but fails to complete certified destruction by the applicable deadline — day one hundred thirty-five (135), or such later date as the Bureau may authorize under paragraph (3) or paragraph (5) of this subsection — is in full violation of the relevant prohibition from the date of the applicable missed deadline, with each day of continued maintenance constituting a separate Tier 3 violation under Sec. 1122(e).
(5) Extended Phased Destruction Schedule for Documented Technical Impossibility.—An entity that has submitted a timely and complete certified divestiture inventory under Sec. 1051(a)(1) and that demonstrates through certification by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor as defined in Sec. 1003(25) that full destruction of all prohibited holdings within one hundred thirty-five (135) days is technically impossible — meaning the physical or technical constraints of one or more specifically identified systems make compliant destruction within that period genuinely impossible as distinguished from commercially inconvenient, operationally disruptive, or financially costly — may petition the Bureau for an extended phased destruction schedule under which the following milestones govern:
(A) From the date of enactment: all new data collection causing prohibited holdings shall permanently cease;
(B) Within one hundred thirty-five (135) days of enactment: not less than fifty percent (50%) of total prohibited records shall be permanently and irreversibly deleted, with certified destruction reports submitted to the Bureau within five (5) business days;
(C) Within two hundred seventy (270) days of enactment: not less than seventy-five percent (75%) of total prohibited records shall be permanently and irreversibly deleted, with certified destruction reports submitted within five (5) business days; and
(D) Within three hundred sixty-five (365) days of enactment: one hundred percent (100%) of all remaining prohibited records shall be permanently and irreversibly deleted, with certified destruction reports submitted within five (5) business days of completion.
The Bureau shall not approve a phased schedule on the basis of commercial disruption, business impact, revenue loss, or any ground other than documented technical impossibility of a specifically identified system as certified by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor. Failure to meet any milestone constitutes an immediate Tier 3 violation from the date of the missed milestone. During any approved phased schedule, the entity shall submit monthly progress reports to the Bureau, certified under penalty of perjury by the entity's CEO and Chief Privacy Officer or designated responsible officer under Sec. 1113(e), documenting the status of destruction activities for each system identified in the divestiture inventory, the volume of records destroyed in the preceding month, and the entity's projection for meeting remaining milestones. The Bureau retains the right to conduct unannounced on-site technical audits at any time during any approved phased schedule.
(c) Takings and Property Rights Findings.—Congress expressly finds that the required divestiture under Sec. 1051 does not constitute a taking of legitimately acquired property within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment, for the following reasons:
(1) The activity prohibited by this subtitle — the commercial assembly and maintenance of databases for the purpose of selling, licensing, or providing third-party access to behavioral information about specific individuals — has been conducted primarily through the covert extraction of personal information from United States persons without their meaningful knowledge or consent, through surveillance infrastructure that courts have found to implicate Fourth Amendment protections under Carpenter v. United States and its progeny. The individuals whose personal information constitutes the substance of Population Coverage Databases retain cognizable interests in that information that have not been extinguished by their nominal inclusion in commercial data ecosystems through terms of service agreements that courts have recognized as contracts of adhesion.
(2) Congress finds that consent purportedly provided through general terms of service, privacy policies, and end-user license agreements to the commercial aggregation and sale of personal information does not constitute a legitimate property foundation entitling holders to just compensation under the Fifth Amendment upon the divestiture required by this subtitle. A database assembled through such purported consent rests on a clouded property title that does not command full market-value compensation upon congressionally required divestiture.
(3) The market value of Population Coverage Databases is substantially derived from activities — including the commercial sale of behavioral profiles, the licensing of population-scale targeting infrastructure to advertisers and government agencies, and the aggregation of data through surveillance ecosystems — that this subtitle prospectively prohibits. Under Andrus v. Allard, 444 U.S. 51 (1979), the destruction of the economic value of property through prospective prohibition does not automatically constitute a compensable taking where the prohibition is a valid exercise of congressional authority and the property retains other value. Value that is wholly derived from activities Congress has determined to be incompatible with constitutional order and democratic governance is not compensable as just compensation under the Fifth Amendment.
(4) Congress further finds that the mandatory destruction requirement of Sec. 1051 is constitutionally distinguishable from a physical taking under Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, 594 U.S. 139 (2021). Cedar Point addressed a government-compelled physical invasion of real property — a fundamentally different category from the compelled destruction of data assets assembled through the commercial activity being prohibited. Where Cedar Point governs government appropriation of property for its own use, this subtitle requires the elimination of a commercial activity capability — not appropriation of it by the government.
(5) The appropriate constitutional framework for evaluating the destruction requirement is the Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, 438 U.S. 104 (1978), multi-factor balancing test applicable to regulatory takings, applied against the constitutional foundation established in findings (1) through (4). Under that framework: the economic impact on regulated entities, while significant, is fully offset by the structured compliance credit of subsection (d), which reimburses all documented and reasonable costs of the destruction process; the interference with reasonable investment-backed expectations is minimal because Carpenter v. United States had, by 2018, placed the industry on notice that government-circumventing commercial data collection was constitutionally impermissible; and the character of the governmental action — elimination of commercial activity that threatens constitutional order — represents a paradigmatic exercise of the police power that Congress may constitutionally require.
(6) Value created through the unlawful extraction of personal information from United States persons and through the government procurement relationships that this subtitle prohibits is not compensable as just compensation under the Fifth Amendment. Population Coverage Databases derive substantial value from both sources — from the data subjects whose information was extracted without meaningful consent, and from the government contracts that this subtitle finds to be constitutionally impermissible — and neither source of value commands compensation upon required divestiture.
(7) The compelled divestiture of privately held assets on national security grounds is a constitutionally established exercise of congressional authority. In TikTok Inc. v. Garland, 604 U.S. ___ (2025), the Supreme Court upheld a congressionally mandated divestiture-or-prohibition requirement imposed on a data platform to prevent a designated foreign adversary from capturing the personal data of United States persons. Ralls Corp. v. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, 758 F.3d 296 (D.C. Cir. 2014), confirms that such divestiture is constitutionally permissible provided the affected party receives due process — notice and an opportunity to review and rebut the unclassified evidence relied upon — which the procedures of this subtitle supply. The question of compensation is governed by the regulatory-takings framework set forth in findings (1) through (6) of this subsection.
(d) Structured Compliance Credit.—Any entity that completes deletion of prohibited holdings in full compliance with Sec. 1051 within the required deadlines shall be entitled to a federal tax credit equal to one hundred percent (100%) of documented, reasonable compliance costs — meaning the actual costs of the destruction process, independent auditor fees, and technical migration — but not including the asserted market value of the destroyed data itself. Notwithstanding the foregoing, an entity that demonstrates through clear and convincing evidence that specific data assets subject to mandatory destruction were acquired through documented arm's-length commercial transactions with full, informed, and individually negotiated consent of the data subjects — as distinguished from consent obtained through general terms of service or privacy policies — may petition the Commission for additional compensation reflecting a portion of the documented acquisition cost of those specific assets. The Commission shall promulgate rules governing the standards, procedures, and limits applicable to such petitions, including a cap on total additional compensation per entity, within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment. This credit is available to any entity that submits a timely certified destruction report under Sec. 1051(c) covering all systems known to the entity at the time of certification. Where an entity in good faith subsequently discovers a system containing prohibited holdings that was not identified in the original divestiture inventory, the entity shall submit a supplemental certified destruction report covering that system within thirty (30) days of discovery; timely submission of a supplemental certification does not disqualify the entity from the compliance credit, provided the original certification was complete as to all systems then known to the entity and the supplemental system is destroyed within the thirty (30) day window. The credit is not available to entities that miss required deadlines, whose certifications are found to be deliberately false or incomplete as to known systems, or that fail to timely submit supplemental certifications for subsequently discovered systems. The Commission, in coordination with the Secretary of the Treasury, shall jointly promulgate rules defining eligible compliance costs and the procedures for claiming the credit within thirty (30) days of enactment. Not later than forty-five (45) days after enactment, the Commission shall publish interim guidance identifying the categories of costs that are presumptively eligible under this subsection pending promulgation of final rules, including at minimum: direct contractor costs of certified data destruction; independent auditor fees required under Sec. 1051(c); and technical system migration costs directly attributable to the destruction process. Entities that incur costs in reliance on this interim guidance shall not be denied the credit solely because final rules adopt a different or narrower definition of eligible costs, provided the costs were reasonable and directly attributable to destruction. The credit shall be claimed under procedures established by the Internal Revenue Service pursuant to those jointly promulgated rules. To the extent necessary to effectuate this credit, the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to treat it as a credit against tax imposed under chapter 1 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
(e) Severable Compensation Fallback.—If, notwithstanding the findings of subsection (c), a court of competent jurisdiction enters a final judgment holding that the divestiture or destruction required by this section or Sec. 1051 effects a taking of private property requiring just compensation under the Fifth Amendment—
(1) Prohibition Preserved.—The prohibition of subsection (a) and the divestiture and destruction requirements of this section and Sec. 1051 shall remain valid and in full force and effect; no such holding shall entitle any entity to retain a prohibited holding, resume a prohibited activity, or obtain injunctive or declaratory relief against any prohibition or requirement of this subtitle, and the destruction and divestiture requirements shall remain enforceable regardless of the pendency or outcome of any claim for compensation.
(2) Exclusive Remedy.—The sole remedy for such a taking shall be a claim for just compensation against the United States under section 1491 of title 28, United States Code, in the United States Court of Federal Claims; the obligation to pay just compensation shall not be a defense to, or a ground for staying, any divestiture, destruction, or enforcement obligation under this subtitle.
(3) Measure of Compensation.—Any compensation awarded under paragraph (2) shall be limited to the fair value of the legitimately and lawfully acquired property interest, determined consistently with the findings of subsection (c), and shall exclude (A) value derived from any activity prohibited by this subtitle, (B) value derived from the unlawful extraction of personal information from United States persons or from government procurement relationships prohibited by this subtitle, and (C) value resting on consent obtained through general terms of service, privacy policies, or other contracts of adhesion; and shall be reduced by the structured compliance credit under subsection (d) and any additional compensation paid under that subsection for the same assets.
(4) Severability Intent.—Congress would have enacted the prohibition and the divestiture and destruction requirements of this section and Sec. 1051 irrespective of whether their application in any case requires the payment of just compensation, and intends, for purposes of Sec. 1166, that in any such case those provisions be preserved and enforced and the affected party relegated to the compensation remedy of this subsection, rather than held invalid or unenforceable.
CHAPTER V — DIVESTITURE
SEC. 1051. DIVESTITURE SCHEDULE.
(a) Any entity holding on the date of enactment a Population Coverage Database, a Psychological Profile concerning any United States person, an Operational Profile concerning any United States person, or a Precrime Risk Assessment concerning any United States person, in violation of Secs. 1011, 1021, 1031, or 1041, shall delete the prohibited holdings within the following schedule:
(1) Within ninety (90) days of enactment: the entity shall submit to the Bureau — or, prior to the Bureau Director's first day of service, to the Bureau of Consumer Protection acting as interim enforcement authority pursuant to Sec. 1152(1) — a certified divestiture inventory, prepared by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor, specifically enumerating every system — including primary databases, backup systems, cold storage archives, disaster recovery systems, off-site backups, cloud storage instances, third-party backup services, and any other location in which prohibited holdings are held — and the total volume of prohibited records in each system, organized by the category of prohibition violated (PCD under Sec. 1041, Psychological Profile under Sec. 1011, Operational Profile under Sec. 1031, or Precrime Risk Assessment under Sec. 1021).
(2) Within one hundred thirty-five (135) days of enactment: the entity shall complete destruction of all prohibited records in all systems identified in the divestiture inventory, including all primary databases, active backups, cold storage archives, and disaster recovery systems. The entity shall submit a certified destruction report to the Bureau — or, prior to the Bureau Director's first day of service, to the Bureau of Consumer Protection acting as interim enforcement authority pursuant to Sec. 1152(1) — within five (5) business days of completion.
(3) Entities whose divestiture inventory identifies specific technical systems that cannot achieve compliant destruction within one hundred thirty-five (135) days due to documented technical constraints may petition the Bureau for an extension for those specific systems only. Extensions are not available for the entity's overall divestiture program, only for specifically identified technical constraints affecting specific enumerated systems. The Bureau shall grant or deny any such petition within fifteen (15) days of receipt. No extension under this paragraph shall exceed one hundred ninety-five (195) days from enactment, except that the Bureau may approve an extended phased destruction schedule under Sec. 1041(b)(5). During any extension period, a Bureau-appointed technical monitor shall be present at the entity's facilities at the entity's expense.
(b) Divestiture Means Destruction.—Compliance requires the certified, permanent, irreversible deletion of all prohibited records from every system in which they are held. The following do not constitute compliant divestiture and are independently prohibited:
(1) sale or transfer of prohibited records to any other entity — including any subsidiary, affiliate, successor entity, related party, or third party — constitutes an independent violation of this subtitle subject to Tier 3 civil penalty;
(2) anonymization, de-identification, tokenization, or any other transformation of prohibited records without deletion. The insufficiency of anonymization for divestiture purposes reflects Congress's finding that the re-identification risk of prohibited holdings cannot be eliminated by technical transformation alone, and that destruction is the only reliable remedy for that risk. This finding is not inconsistent with the academic research carve-out of Sec. 1011(c), which permits work on anonymized data derived from limited research datasets under strict IRB supervision, destruction requirements, and auditor certification — conditions that are categorically different from the prohibited holdings subject to the divestiture requirement of this subtitle;
(3) transfer of prohibited records to a government entity; and
(4) moving prohibited records to systems outside United States jurisdiction.
(c) Certification Requirements.—The destruction certification required under this section must:
(1) be prepared by a Bureau-certified independent technical auditor who has independently verified, through direct system examination, that all records enumerated in the divestiture inventory have been permanently and irreversibly deleted from every listed system;
(2) specifically address every backup system, cold storage archive, disaster recovery system, and third-party backup service identified in the divestiture inventory — a certification that does not specifically address every enumerated backup and archive location is incomplete and constitutes a Tier 2 violation;
(3) be signed under penalty of perjury by both the entity's CEO and CPO as well as the lead auditor; and
(4) be submitted to the Bureau within five (5) business days of completion of destruction.
(d) Penalties for Backup Retention.—Discovery of any retained prohibited record in any system after the certified deletion date shall:
(1) create an automatic presumption of willful violation subject to Tier 3 civil penalties retroactive to the certified deletion date;
(2) result in personal criminal liability referral for the CEO and CPO who signed the destruction certification, for potential prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 for false statements in a federal filing, where the Bureau finds specific and articulable evidence that the CEO or CPO had actual knowledge of the existence of the relevant backup system at the time of signing the destruction certification. Criminal referral does not apply where the retained data is discovered in a system that the entity demonstrably did not know existed at the time of certification — such unknown-system discoveries are governed by the civil presumption of paragraph (1) and the supplemental certification procedures of Sec. 1041(d), not by this paragraph;
(3) result in revocation of the certifying auditor's Bureau certification; and
(4) require a new comprehensive divestiture process beginning from the submission of a new inventory under subsection (a)(1).
(e) It shall not be a defense to any penalty under this subtitle that the entity was unaware of the existence of a backup, archive, or copy of prohibited data. An entity's failure to maintain a comprehensive inventory of all systems in which its data is held constitutes negligence per se for purposes of this subtitle.
(f) Ongoing Compliance.—Any entity that, following deletion, subsequently acquires or assembles a prohibited holding shall destroy the prohibited holding within thirty (30) days. Each day of continued non-compliance is a separate violation subject to Tier 3 civil penalty.
(g) No Reconstitution.—No entity that has divested shall reconstitute a prohibited holding by any subsequent means. Any transaction that would reconstitute a prohibited holding is subject to prior Bureau review and is presumptively prohibited. An entity seeking Bureau review of a proposed transaction shall submit a written description of the transaction and its anticipated data holdings to the Bureau. The Bureau shall issue a written determination within thirty (30) days of receiving a complete submission. If the Bureau fails to issue a written determination within thirty (30) days, the transaction remains presumptively prohibited. The entity may petition the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for expedited review, which shall issue a determination within fifteen (15) days of filing. Bureau inaction does not authorize the transaction to proceed.
CHAPTER VI — GOVERNMENT ACQUISITION PROHIBITION AND CONTRACTOR LAUNDERING
SEC. 1061. CONGRESSIONAL FINDINGS — GOVERNMENT ACQUISITION OF COMMERCIAL SURVEILLANCE DATA.
Congress finds the following:
(1) Federal, state, and local government agencies have systematically purchased access to commercial data compilations — including location histories, behavioral profiles, social network maps, and biometric databases — assembled by private data brokers without the knowledge or meaningful consent of the individuals whose data they contain. This commercial data acquisition strategy has been used to acquire information that agencies could not constitutionally compel through warrant, subpoena, or other lawful process, circumventing the Fourth Amendment protections recognized in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which held that the government cannot use the third-party doctrine to evade constitutional warrant requirements for comprehensive personal data revealing the privacies of life.
(2) The use of algorithmic risk scoring tools to make enforcement decisions — including decisions to stop, search, question, detain, or subject individuals to heightened police contact — is constitutionally suspect and, on the available evidence, counterproductive to effective law enforcement. The Supreme Court of the United States, in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), established that a stop requires specific and articulable facts justifying individualized reasonable suspicion — not generalized statistical likelihood based on demographic, geographic, or associational data. The application of stop-and-frisk programs based on population-level risk profiles, most extensively documented in Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 (S.D.N.Y. 2013), was found to constitute an unconstitutional pattern of Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment violations, disproportionately targeting Black and Hispanic individuals at rates that could not be explained by any legitimate law enforcement variable. Congress finds that algorithmic Precrime Risk Assessment tools, when used to make enforcement decisions, replicate and automate this unconstitutional pattern at scale — substituting a statistical score for the individualized reasonable suspicion the Constitution requires.
(3) A substantial body of research indicates that enforcement-based uses of predictive and algorithmic policing tools — those that flag individuals as high-risk to increase police contact — tend to erode the community trust essential to effective law enforcement: affected communities report reduced willingness to report crimes, cooperate with investigations, or engage with law enforcement, undermining the very public-safety outcomes the tools purport to serve. Congress finds that community trust is a primary determinant of whether law enforcement can solve violent crimes, identify witnesses, and prevent retaliatory violence, and that practices systematically eroding it impose public-safety costs that outweigh any marginal benefit from algorithmic risk prediction.
(4) By contrast, evidence-based violence-intervention programs — including Ceasefire-model programs that connect high-risk individuals with social services, employment, housing, and violence-interruption resources — have shown promising reductions in homicide and violent crime in cities including Oakland, Chicago, Baltimore, and Richmond, California, without the constitutional violations or community-trust erosion associated with algorithmic enforcement. Congress finds the distinction between using risk identification for support and using it for coercive enforcement to be constitutionally, empirically, and ethically fundamental, and designs this subtitle to preserve the former while prohibiting the latter.
(5) The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has contracted with commercial data analytics providers — including through its Investigative Case Management system and related data integration platforms — to assemble and analyze comprehensive profiles of individuals using commercially acquired data including travel histories, biometric data, social media data, license plate reader data, and financial records. Congress finds that these commercial data integration capabilities constitute the precise circumvention of Fourth Amendment warrant requirements that Carpenter prohibits, applied in the immigration enforcement context. The termination of these commercial data acquisition contracts is required by this subtitle and reflects Congress's determination that immigration enforcement, like all federal law enforcement, must operate within constitutional constraints.
(6) Congress finds that the commercial data surveillance industry — including entities that aggregate, profile, license, and sell comprehensive behavioral data about United States persons to government agencies — has developed its business model in substantial part around enabling government agencies to acquire information without the constitutional process that direct government collection would require. The termination of these commercial relationships does not impair legitimate law enforcement — it requires law enforcement to use the constitutionally prescribed tools of warrant, subpoena, and consent that the Framers designed and that courts have repeatedly held are adequate to meet legitimate public safety needs.
(7) Congress further finds that government data collection serves legitimate purposes outside law enforcement — tax administration, communicable-disease surveillance, the decennial census, financial regulation, veterans' benefits and federal health programs, and other functions of democratic governance — and that the agency-specific carve-outs preserved in Chapter XIV reflect Congress's judgment that these functions are legitimate, necessary, and constitutionally grounded. That legitimacy does not extend to sharing such data with law enforcement or other agencies beyond the collecting agency's statutory mission. Each carve-out therefore operates within a strict prohibition on interagency data sharing for law enforcement purposes: data collected by the Internal Revenue Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Census Bureau, or any other agency under a Chapter XIV carve-out may not be transferred, shared, or made accessible to any law enforcement agency, intelligence agency, or other Federal Agency beyond the specific statutory function for which it was collected, except as required by the specific statutory authority governing each agency's mandatory disclosure obligations.
(8) Congress further finds that the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States described its holding as narrow and did not decide whether the government's purchase of commercially available data constitutes a search. Congress exercises its own constitutional judgment — consistent with the principle recognized in Carpenter and with the House-passed Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (H.R. 4639, 118th Congress (2024)) — to close the commercial-acquisition pathway the Court left unaddressed.
(9) Congress finds that the restriction in Sec. 1063(c) operates on a State or local government only in its capacity as a purchaser or recipient of commercial data — its capacity as a market participant — and operates on private sellers and brokers directly by prohibiting the transfer of Covered Personal Data to government buyers. It is not a direction to any State legislature and does not commandeer the States within the meaning of Murphy v. NCAA, 584 U.S. 453 (2018). It is the regulation of private conduct, coupled with preemption of any State law purporting to authorize what this subtitle prohibits, that Murphy expressly permits.
SEC. 1062. PROHIBITION ON FEDERAL AGENCY ACQUISITION OF COMMERCIAL SURVEILLANCE DATA.
(a) No Federal Agency, and no Government Contractor acting on behalf of a Federal Agency, shall: purchase, license, access, or otherwise acquire any Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, Precrime Risk Assessment, Population Coverage Database, or data that the acquiring agency knows or has reason to know originates from, was derived from, or constitutes a component of any such prohibited compilation, from any commercial source; receive any of the foregoing from another agency where originally acquired commercially unless the receiving agency could independently obtain such data through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection; or use, analyze, disseminate, or retain any Covered Personal Data acquired in violation of this subtitle.
(b) Functional Equivalence Standard.—This prohibition applies to any acquisition that is functionally equivalent to a search of the kind that would require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, as interpreted by Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018) and its progeny — meaning any acquisition of data that reveals the kind of detailed, intimate information about an individual's movements, associations, communications, or private life that the Fourth Amendment protects against warrantless government intrusion, regardless of the formal mechanism through which that data is acquired. The form of acquisition is not determinative; an agency may not avoid this prohibition by purchasing, licensing, or obtaining through contract what it could not compel through a warrantless search.
(c) Existing Government Contracts.—All contracts, licenses, subscriptions, and arrangements under which any Federal Agency currently acquires Covered Personal Data or any prohibited compilation from commercial sources are terminated by operation of law upon enactment of this subtitle. The following compensation framework governs terminated contracts:
(1) Contracts entered into before June 22, 2018 — the date of the Supreme Court's decision in Carpenter v. United States — are terminated pursuant to the termination-for-convenience standards of 48 C.F.R. § 49.1. Contractors holding such pre-Carpenter contracts may recover actual costs incurred prior to termination, reasonable costs of winding down performance, and a reasonable profit on work already completed. Anticipated profits on work not yet performed are not recoverable.
(2) Contracts entered into on or after June 22, 2018 are terminated without expectation damages. Contractors holding such post-Carpenter contracts may recover only documented wind-down costs and actual costs incurred and not yet reimbursed as of the date of enactment. Anticipated profits on work not yet performed are not recoverable, because the constitutional infirmity of commercial surveillance data acquisition by government agencies was established by Carpenter at the time these contracts were entered, and contractors who chose to enter such agreements after that date assumed the legal and constitutional risk that Congress would prohibit these activities.
(3) All compensation claims arising from termination under this subtitle shall be brought exclusively in the United States Court of Federal Claims under 28 U.S.C. § 1491 and evaluated under the framework of this subsection. No claim for expectation damages, lost future profits, or anticipatory breach shall be cognizable under any contract terminated by this subtitle.
(4) Written notice of termination shall be provided by each Federal Agency to each affected contractor within thirty (30) days of enactment. No Federal Agency shall take any new action under any terminated contract after the date of enactment.
(d) Inventory Requirement.—The head of each Federal Agency shall transmit a complete inventory of all contracts terminated under subsection (c) — including the contractor name, contract value, contract date, description of data acquired, and the agency's classification of the contract as pre- or post-Carpenter — to the Comptroller General, the relevant Inspector General, and the relevant congressional oversight committees within sixty (60) days of enactment. The Comptroller General shall review and publish a consolidated report within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment.
(e) No Agency Exception by Designation.—A Federal Agency may not avoid these requirements by designating a contractor, fusion center — meaning any entity that serves as an intelligence-sharing hub between federal and state or local law enforcement agencies, regardless of its formal organizational structure or funding source — state or local law enforcement partner, or foreign partner as nominal recipient. Any arrangement functionally providing a Federal Agency with access to prohibited data is prohibited regardless of formal structure.
(f) Court-Supervised Supervision Conditions.—Nothing in this subtitle limits the authority of any court to impose conditions of supervised release, parole, or probation that require an individual convicted of a qualifying felony to submit to location monitoring, warrantless search, or other supervision conditions as a judicially imposed term of their sentence. For purposes of this subsection, "qualifying felony" means any felony that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another, or any felony that by its nature involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person of another may be used in the course of committing the offense. Data collected pursuant to a court-imposed supervision condition:
(1) may be collected and used by the supervising corrections, probation, or parole authority solely for the purpose of monitoring compliance with supervision conditions and investigating crimes committed during the supervision period;
(2) may not be sold, licensed, or transferred to any commercial entity or data broker; and
(3) is governed by the records retention schedules and applicable law of the supervising jurisdiction, which are not modified by this subtitle.
This subsection does not authorize the purchase of commercial data about supervised individuals from data brokers or commercial sources; law enforcement agencies seeking additional data about supervised individuals must use Constitutionally Equivalent Collection under subsection (a).
(g) Prohibition on Government Acquisition of Academic Carve-Out Outputs.
(1) General Prohibition.—No agency described in Sec. 1011(c)(7)(A) as prohibited — including any law enforcement agency, intelligence agency, immigration enforcement agency, Department of Defense element whose primary mission includes signals intelligence or cyber operations, or any state, local, or tribal law enforcement agency — and no Government Contractor acting on behalf of any such agency, shall acquire, license, access, commission, fund the production of, or otherwise obtain:
(A) any Psychological Profile, model weights, trained parameters, scoring algorithm, or other artifact capable of producing Psychological Profile outputs concerning the domestic general public that was produced under, derived from, or developed in connection with research conducted under the academic carve-out of Sec. 1011(c);
(B) any aggregate statistical findings, methodology paper, peer-reviewed publication, or derivative work produced under the academic carve-out where the agency seeks the work for the purpose of, or with the reasonably foreseeable result of, reconstructing, replicating, or operationalizing a Psychological Profile capability against any United States person; or
(C) any consulting service, advisory service, methodology transfer, training, or expert assistance from any individual subject to the firewall period under Sec. 1011(c)(7)(D), where such service relates to the subject matter, methodology, or findings of the research.
(2) Permitted Acquisitions Distinguished.—The prohibition of paragraph (1) does not extend to:
(A) an agency's review of peer-reviewed academic publications for the purpose of informing the agency's general scientific awareness, public reporting, or non-operational research mission, where the publication is publicly available and the agency does not seek to operationalize or reconstruct any Psychological Profile capability from it;
(B) an agency described in Sec. 1011(c)(7)(A) as permitted — including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, Department of Veterans Affairs research programs, and other federal civilian research agencies whose missions do not include law enforcement, intelligence, immigration enforcement, or military operations — engaging with academic carve-out outputs in furtherance of its own civilian research mission, provided the engagement does not constitute a methodology transfer to any prohibited agency under paragraph (1); or
(C) the routine purchase by any government library, depository institution, or research collection of academic journals, conference proceedings, or scholarly publications containing carve-out outputs, where the acquisition is for institutional reference rather than operational use.
(3) Anti-Laundering Through Permitted Agencies.—No agency described in Sec. 1011(c)(7)(A) as permitted shall acquire academic carve-out outputs and subsequently transfer, share, or make accessible those outputs, or any derivative work based on them, to any agency described in Sec. 1011(c)(7)(A) as prohibited. An agency that violates this paragraph forfeits the protection of paragraph (2)(B) and is subject to the prohibition of paragraph (1) as a primary violator.
(4) Anti-Laundering Through Contractors.—No Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, Data Broker, or other commercial entity shall acquire academic carve-out outputs and subsequently transfer, license, or make accessible those outputs, or any derivative work based on them, to any agency described in Sec. 1011(c)(7)(A) as prohibited. The commercial entity is subject to the same prohibitions, civil penalties, and criminal penalties as the prohibited agency itself, on the same terms as Sec. 1063.
(5) Functional Equivalence.—The form of acquisition is not determinative. An agency may not avoid the prohibition of paragraph (1) by commissioning a successor study that replicates the methodology of a carve-out study, by hiring researchers from a carve-out study during their firewall period under Sec. 1011(c)(7)(D), by licensing a methodology paper rather than the underlying model, or by any other arrangement that produces functional equivalence to direct acquisition of prohibited outputs.
(6) Penalties.—Violation of this subsection is a Tier 3 violation under Sec. 1122(e). Where the violation involves knowing acquisition by a federal agency of a Psychological Profile capability for operational use, the violation constitutes a per se willful violation, and the agency officials who authorized or directed the acquisition are subject to personal civil liability under Sec. 1122(g) and, where the violation was willful, criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 242.
(7) Coordinated Enforcement with Sec. 1011 Firewall.—Where the Bureau identifies a violation of this subsection that also involves a violation of the Government and Political Entity Firewall under Sec. 1011(c)(7), the Bureau shall pursue enforcement under both provisions. The penalties under this subsection and under Sec. 1011(c)(7)(H) are cumulative and do not displace each other.
(h) Narrow Intelligence Community Carve-Out.—Notwithstanding subsection (g), an element of the Intelligence Community as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3003(4) may acquire any output or service described in subsection (g)(1) for use exclusively in collection or analysis authorized under Sec. 1071 — meaning either collection against non-United States persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States, or collection against United States persons satisfying the predicate and order requirements of Sec. 1072. The absolute limits of Sec. 1071(b), the information-sharing prohibitions of Sec. 1071(b)(4), and the pretextual-designation criminal penalties of Sec. 1074 apply to all activity under this subsection. This carve-out is unavailable to any agency or component whose primary mission is domestic law enforcement or civil immigration enforcement, to any fusion center as defined in Sec. 1062(e), and to any state, local, or tribal law enforcement agency. This subsection creates no exception to the Government and Political Entity Firewall of Sec. 1011(c)(7) and does not expand any IC element's underlying collection authorities under 50 U.S.C. § 1801 et seq., Executive Order 12333, or other applicable authority.
SEC. 1063. CONTRACTOR LAUNDERING PROHIBITION.
(a) No Targeting Infrastructure Contractor shall build, operate, or provide services that: produce Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or Population Coverage Databases on behalf of any Federal Agency, Government Contractor, state government, local government, county or municipal government, tribal government, fusion center as defined in Sec. 1062(e), or joint task force; integrate commercially acquired Covered Personal Data with government records, law enforcement databases, intelligence feeds, or any other government data assets to produce prohibited compilations; or provide any government entity at any level — federal, state, or local — with access to or analytical outputs from any commercially acquired Covered Personal Data that the government entity is prohibited from acquiring directly under Sec. 1062.
(b) A Targeting Infrastructure Contractor providing services described in subsection (a) is subject to the same prohibitions, civil penalties, and criminal penalties as a Federal Agency that directly acquires the prohibited data. The provision of infrastructure, platform, or analytical services through which any government entity accesses prohibited data does not insulate the contractor from liability. Any existing contract for services described in subsection (a) shall terminate not later than one hundred eighty (180) days after enactment, subject to the same compensation framework established in Sec. 1062(c).
(c) State and Local Government Acquisition Prohibition.—The prohibition on commercial data acquisition in Sec. 1062 applies to all state governments, local governments, county and municipal governments, tribal governments, and all agencies and subdivisions thereof, to the same extent as it applies to Federal Agencies. No state or local law purporting to authorize such acquisition shall be construed to permit what this subtitle prohibits. State and local governments may seek Covered Personal Data only through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection — warrant, subpoena, or consent directed to the original holder of such data. Nothing in this subsection prevents any state, local, or tribal government from imposing additional restrictions on the acquisition of commercial data that are more protective of individual privacy than the requirements of this subtitle.
(d) Local Law Enforcement Operations Carve-Out.—Nothing in Sec. 1062 or this subtitle prohibits a state, local, tribal, or municipal government from:
(1) Operating surveillance infrastructure owned and controlled by that local government — including fixed or mobile cameras, automated license plate reader systems, gunshot detection systems, drones, and equivalent technologies — where such infrastructure is deployed for the purpose of investigating specific crimes, responding to active incidents, or deterring criminal activity in public spaces, provided that:
(A) data collected through such infrastructure is used solely for local law enforcement purposes and is not sold, licensed, or transferred to any commercial data broker, advertising entity, or federal government entity except pursuant to a court order issued by a federal magistrate judge or district court judge upon a showing that the data is relevant to a specific, identified federal criminal investigation — voluntary disclosure of locally collected surveillance data to any federal agency outside this court order process is prohibited regardless of whether the local government received a request, suggestion, or informal inquiry from any federal actor;
(B) data is not retained beyond the period reasonably necessary for the specific investigative purpose, and in no event longer than the retention period established by applicable state or local law;
(C) the system does not produce or maintain a Population Coverage Database or persistent Operational Profile of individuals who are not subjects of a specific active investigation; and
(D) access to data collected by other jurisdictions — including neighboring cities, counties, or regional networks — is permitted only in connection with a specific documented criminal investigation, authorized through a formal written interagency request identifying the investigation, the data sought, and the law enforcement purpose, and limited to the specific data necessary for that investigation — routine or standing cross-jurisdictional data access that is not tied to a specific documented investigation is prohibited;
(2) Subscribing to or accessing license plate reader data from a commercial vendor for the purpose of investigating a specific identified crime or locating a specific individual subject to an arrest warrant, provided that such access is limited to the specific investigative purpose and does not result in the construction or maintenance of a persistent cross-context behavioral record of any individual not subject to an active criminal proceeding;
(3) Operating evidence-based violence intervention programs that identify specific individuals as high-risk based on individual documented criminal history, direct caseworker assessment, or intelligence developed through specific criminal investigations — as distinguished from commercial algorithmic scoring based on demographic, associational, or population-level predictive data — and offering those individuals social services, employment support, housing assistance, and violence interruption resources. Risk identification tools and processes — including commercially developed algorithmic tools — may be used solely for the purpose of connecting high-risk individuals with intervention services, support resources, and prevention programs. The use of any risk score, algorithmic output, or caseworker assessment to make any enforcement decision — including decisions to stop, question, search, detain, arrest, or subject an individual to heightened police contact — is prohibited under Sec. 1021 regardless of whether that tool is also used for prevention purposes under this paragraph. Commercial algorithmic risk scoring tools used for enforcement decisions are not protected by this carve-out and remain subject to the full prohibitions of Sec. 1021; and
(4) Using commercial data analytics platforms or dashboards for patrol allocation, resource deployment, or crime pattern analysis, provided that such use does not involve the acquisition of Covered Personal Data about specific identified individuals from commercial sources, does not produce Psychological Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or Operational Profiles of identified individuals, and is limited to aggregate, anonymized, or geographically-based pattern data. The carve-out of this subsection applies only to local governments operating under a publicly adopted, written policy governing the use of each relevant technology that is made available to the public and reviewed by an appropriate oversight body — such as a city council, police commission, or inspector general — not less than annually. A local government that fails to maintain and publish such a policy forfeits the carve-out for the relevant technology until a compliant policy is adopted and published. Nothing in this subsection authorizes any government to acquire, from any commercial source, Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or Population Coverage Databases as those terms are defined in Sec. 1003.
CHAPTER VII — NARROWLY SCOPED NATIONAL SECURITY EXEMPTION
SEC. 1071. SCOPE AND ABSOLUTE LIMITS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY EXEMPTION.
(a) The prohibitions of Chapters I, III, IV, and V shall not apply to collection or analysis by an element of the Intelligence Community as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3003(4), where both stages of the predicate review established in Sec. 1072 are satisfied and the minimization and particularity requirements of Sec. 1072(c) through (e) are observed. This exemption authorizes only targeted collection against specific identified individuals satisfying the Stage One predicate of Sec. 1072(c). It does not authorize bulk, mass, or population-level collection of any kind. It does not authorize collection based on attendance at political assemblies, participation in protests, membership in political organizations, or any other constitutionally protected activity, regardless of any foreign connection asserted at the organizational level. The fact that an organization has a valid individual predicate target within it does not authorize surveillance of the organization's other members, activities, or communications except as specifically authorized under Sec. 1072(f).
(b) Absolute Limits.—The following are categorically prohibited and no predicate satisfaction under Sec. 1072 authorizes them:
(1) collection targeting an individual or organization solely because of constitutionally protected political beliefs, associations, electoral activities, journalistic activities, labor organizing, religious practice, or social justice advocacy, regardless of any secondary national security characterization;
(2) collection designed to map, document, or monitor the membership, internal communications, or organizing activities of any First Amendment Organization's domestic participants, even where the organization's leadership is a valid predicate target under Sec. 1072;
(3) collection of information about domestic political activities of any First Amendment Organization for the purpose of assessing, disrupting, suppressing, or countering the effectiveness of that organization's political advocacy;
(4) use of intelligence collected under this exemption to provide operational intelligence to any political campaign, political party, electoral organization, government official for the purpose of gaining electoral, partisan, or political advantage including for use in any electoral campaign, opposition research, or partisan political operation, or for the purpose of disrupting, suppressing, monitoring, or discouraging constitutionally protected political organizing, protest activity, or peaceful assembly — regardless of whether such sharing is characterized as a legitimate law enforcement or security function; private person, commercial entity, corporation, lobbying firm, foreign government, or any other non-governmental recipient for any commercial, financial, competitive, or private benefit. This prohibition specifically covers the sharing of activist surveillance intelligence with corporations, pipeline operators, private security firms, or other commercial entities that are the subject of the activist organization's advocacy — a practice documented in the Standing Rock pipeline surveillance context and other cases in which law enforcement intelligence about protected political activity was shared with private commercial interests; and
(5) any collection predicated on an individual's or organization's association with, receipt of funding from, or expression of solidarity with a foreign organization, where that foreign relationship does not constitute Foreign Direction as defined in Sec. 1003(12).
(c) No Necessity Defense for Absolute Limits.—No court shall accept operational necessity, national security urgency, or extraordinary circumstance as justification for collection within the absolute limits of subsection (b). These limits are categorical, reflecting Congress's determination that the government cannot be trusted to apply a balancing test to the surveillance of domestic political activity without systematically abusing that discretion, as the historical record documented in Sec. 1002 demonstrates.
(d) Finding on Limited Psychological-Profiling Authority.—Congress finds that the authority under this section for an element of the Intelligence Community to compile or use a Psychological Profile is narrowly drawn: it is available only as to a specific individual for whom an order has issued under Sec. 1072 on specific and articulable evidence of Foreign Direction, tested by an adversarial amicus, and it reaches no United States person absent such an order. This authority is analogous to the targeting of agents of foreign powers long authorized under chapter 36 of title 50, United States Code, and authorizes no psychological profiling of the general public or of any United States person who is not the subject of such an order.
SEC. 1072. TWO-STAGE PREDICATE REVIEW VIA FISA COURT.
(a) Routing.—Applications for collection under the national security exemption of Sec. 1071 shall be submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court established under 50 U.S.C. § 1803. The Stage One and Stage Two standards of this subtitle shall govern the FISA Court's review and shall take precedence over any FISA Court practice or interpretation inconsistent with those standards.
(b) Adversarial Review.—Notwithstanding the procedures of 50 U.S.C. § 1804, every application under this subtitle shall be reviewed with the participation of an amicus curiae drawn from the pool established under 50 U.S.C. § 1803(i), who shall have demonstrated expertise in First Amendment law and civil liberties in addition to national security expertise. This amicus shall have standing to challenge the application on any legal, factual, or constitutional ground, including arguments that the predicate constitutes a pretext for surveillance of First Amendment-protected activity.
(c) Stage One — Foreign Direction Standard.—Collection is available only where the government demonstrates by specific and articulable evidence that a specific, identified individual or organizational entity — not a general class of persons — is subject to Foreign Direction as defined in Sec. 1003(12), meaning the target is receiving operational direction, material funding satisfying the criteria of Sec. 1003(12), or strategic coordination from a foreign government, foreign intelligence service, or their knowing agents; and that the collection sought is targeted at the foreign direction relationship rather than at the domestic political activities, membership, or advocacy of the target or of any associated organization.
(d) Foreign Direction — What Does Not Qualify.—The following do not satisfy Stage One: receipt of funding not meeting the materiality criteria of Sec. 1003(12); participation in international civil society networks; expression of positions that align with or are publicly supported by a foreign government; attendance at international conferences organized by foreign civil society organizations; receipt of grants from foreign-based philanthropic foundations operating independently of any government; or any combination of the foregoing regardless of number of foreign contacts.
(e) Stage Two — Minimization Targeting.—Where Stage One is satisfied, the FISA Court shall issue a collection order specifying: the specific individuals whose communications may be collected, limited to those for whom independent evidence of a personal connection to the foreign direction relationship has been demonstrated, expressly excluding general organizational membership; that collection is limited to communications relevant to the foreign direction relationship and explicitly excludes domestic political organizing, membership activities, public advocacy, and internal political debates; the collection period, not to exceed ninety (90) days, subject to renewal upon a fresh showing; and Minimization Procedures governing incidentally collected information concerning domestic political activities, requiring immediate sequestration and prompt destruction.
(f) Organizational Intelligence — Scope, Purpose Limitation, and Retention.—Where Stage One is satisfied against a specific identified individual within an organization, the FISA Court may authorize collection that incidentally reveals information about the organization's structure, communications, and membership to the extent necessary to determine the scope and nature of the foreign direction relationship. Such organizational collection is authorized for an initial period not to exceed one hundred eighty (180) days, subject to renewal upon a fresh showing to the FISA Court that continued organizational-level access remains necessary to assess the scope of the foreign direction relationship. A renewal application must specifically justify continued organizational-level access — it is not sufficient to show only that the individual Stage Two order is renewed. All organizational-level information collected under this subsection is subject to the following conditions:
(A) Purpose Limitation.—Organizational intelligence collected under this subsection may not be used for any political assessment, shared with any political campaign, party, electoral organization, or government official for political advantage, or used to disrupt, suppress, or penalize the organization's constitutionally protected domestic activities. Use in a domestic criminal investigation arising from information discovered in the course of the foreign direction inquiry is permitted.
(B) Retention upon Conclusion.—Upon conclusion of the foreign direction investigation, organizational intelligence collected under this subsection shall be transferred to the classified judicial archive established under subtitle B of this Act rather than destroyed. Information held in the classified judicial archive is not in active circulation and may be retrieved only upon issuance of a new Stage Two order by the FISA Court in connection with a subsequent foreign direction investigation.
(C) Membership Predicate Limitation.—Organizational-level collection under this subsection does not automatically constitute a Stage One predicate against individual members of the organization. Organizational intelligence may be submitted to the FISA Court as supporting evidence in an application for an individual predicate, where the Court independently determines that it establishes the required foreign direction connection for that specific identified individual or set of individuals.
(g) Renewal of Stage Two Orders.—A Stage Two collection order issued under subsection (e) may be renewed upon application to the FISA Court, subject to all of the following requirements:
(1) The government shall file a renewal application not later than fifteen (15) days before the expiration of the current order. The renewal application shall specifically demonstrate, by specific and articulable evidence independent of and in addition to the evidence supporting the original Stage One predicate, that:
(A) the target remains subject to Foreign Direction as defined in Sec. 1003(12) — it is not sufficient to rely solely on the finding made in the original or any prior order;
(B) the collection sought continues to be targeted at the foreign direction relationship rather than the domestic political activities, membership, or advocacy of the target or any associated organization; and
(C) the collection has been conducted in compliance with the Minimization Procedures specified in the existing order and has not been used for any purpose prohibited by Sec. 1071(b).
(2) Adversarial Participation.—The amicus curiae designated under subsection (b) shall participate in every renewal proceeding to the same extent as in the original application. The amicus shall have access to: the full record of the original order; all collection conducted under the order to date; any Stage Two minimization compliance reports; and the government's renewal application. The amicus shall have standing to oppose renewal on any legal, factual, or constitutional ground, including argument that the collection has drifted from its authorized scope toward surveillance of constitutionally protected activity.
(3) Compliance Review as Condition of Renewal.—The FISA Court shall not grant renewal unless it affirmatively finds, on the basis of the compliance record submitted by the government and any objection raised by the amicus, that collection conducted under the expiring order has complied with the Minimization Procedures and has not been used for any purpose prohibited by Sec. 1071(b). A finding of material non-compliance with Minimization Procedures shall result in denial of renewal and referral of the compliance failure to the JEOS Director under subsection (i).
(4) Renewal Limit — Individual Orders.—No Stage Two order targeting a specific individual may be renewed more than three (3) times without a fresh Stage One determination. Following three renewals, continued collection against the same individual requires a new application demonstrating Stage One predicate by fresh evidence that has not previously been presented to the FISA Court in any prior application involving that individual.
(5) Renewal Limit — Organizational Orders.—No organizational-level collection order under subsection (g) may be renewed more than two (2) times. Following two renewals, the government must demonstrate to the FISA Court's satisfaction that continued organizational-level collection is the only means by which the scope of the foreign direction relationship can be assessed — a showing that is not satisfied by general assertions of ongoing foreign government activity.
(6) Emergency Renewal.—Where a Stage Two order will expire before a renewal application can be timely reviewed, the FISA Court may, upon government application made not later than twenty-four (24) hours before expiration, extend the existing order by not more than ten (10) days solely to permit completion of the renewal proceeding. No emergency extension may be granted on the basis of failure to timely prepare the renewal application. Collection conducted during an emergency extension is subject to all Minimization Procedures of the expiring order.
(h) Prohibited Use of Collected Intelligence.—Intelligence collected under a valid predicate may not: map membership or build operational files on any First Amendment Organization's domestic participants; be shared with any political campaign, party, or electoral organization; or be used to disrupt or penalize domestic political activities.
(i) JEOS Monitoring of Compliance.—The FISA Court shall transmit to the JEOS Director, on a classified basis, a summary of each order granted and each application denied under this subtitle, including the basis for any denial. The JEOS Director shall monitor compliance with Stage Two minimization requirements and shall have authority to refer violations to the Special Ethics Advocate and to Congress.
(j) Annual Transparency Report.—The Director of National Intelligence shall publish an annual report disclosing, in unclassified form, the number of orders sought, granted, and denied — with the general basis for denials in aggregate — the general categories of foreign direction relationships targeted, and an assessment of compliance with minimization and particularity requirements.
SEC. 1073. FOREIGN INTERFERENCE RESPONSE MECHANISM — MANUFACTURED FOREIGN DIRECTION PREDICATES.
(a) Trigger.—Where the FISA Court or the JEOS Special Ethics Advocate identifies a pattern of commercial transactions from a foreign government, foreign intelligence service, or their knowing agents that lacks a plausible legitimate commercial purpose or appears structured to manufacture a Foreign Direction predicate against a domestic First Amendment Organization, the following three tracks shall be initiated simultaneously and independently. No track is contingent on the action or inaction of any other. Such a pattern shall not be treated as evidence of Foreign Direction of the targeted organization and may not be used as a Stage One predicate under Sec. 1072.
(b) Track 1 — Judicial Record.—The FISA Court shall issue a classified finding documenting the foreign interference pattern, the basis for its determination, and the identity of the foreign government actors involved to the extent known, transmitted directly and simultaneously to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary. The FISA Court's classified finding constitutes an independent judicial record that exists and is enforceable regardless of any executive branch action or inaction.
(c) Track 2 — Congressional Notification.—The JEOS Director, as an Article III officer independent of the executive branch, shall simultaneously transmit a classified referral documenting the foreign interference pattern directly to the Gang of Eight — the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority Leader, the Senate Minority Leader, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — without passing through any executive branch channel. Receipt of this referral by the congressional leadership constitutes independent legislative notice of the foreign interference operation from an Article III source.
(d) Track 3 — Executive Branch Notification.—Simultaneously with Tracks 1 and 2, the JEOS Director shall transmit a classified referral to the Director of National Intelligence for assessment under Sec. 1034 of this subtitle. The Director of National Intelligence shall, within ninety (90) days, assess whether the conduct constitutes a foreign interference operation and transmit: a written recommendation to the President as to whether sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq., or other available statutory authority are warranted; and a written report to the JEOS Director and to the congressional intelligence committees identified in Track 1 confirming whether a sanctions recommendation has been transmitted to the President, the substance of that recommendation, and the President's response if any. DNI inaction does not suspend or delay Tracks 1 and 2, and congressional receipt of Tracks 1 and 2 enables Congress to act regardless of executive branch conduct.
(e) Criminal Liability.—Individual agents of a foreign government who knowingly participate in a pattern of transactions designed to manufacture a Foreign Direction predicate are subject to criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 951 in addition to any applicable penalties under this subtitle.
SEC. 1074. CRIMINAL OFFENSE — PRETEXTUAL SURVEILLANCE DESIGNATION.
(a) Any government official who knowingly makes, approves, or forwards for judicial authorization a national security collection designation under this subtitle: primarily for the purpose of enabling surveillance of domestic political activity, knowing the evidentiary basis is insufficient to satisfy the Stage One standard; or knowing that the collection sought is targeted at domestic political activities rather than the foreign direction relationship; shall be guilty of a felony subject to criminal penalties under 18 U.S.C. § 242 (deprivation of civil rights under color of law), enhanced under this subtitle to a mandatory minimum of three (3) years and a maximum of ten (10) years imprisonment, plus a fine of not more than $500,000.
(b) Conspiracy to commit a pretextual surveillance designation is subject to the same penalties under 18 U.S.C. § 371. A government official who knowingly fails to report, or actively conceals, evidence that a collection program under this subtitle is being used for purposes prohibited by Sec. 1071(b) is subject to the same criminal penalties as a principal offender.
CHAPTER VIII — COMMERCIAL SAFE HARBOR FOR FIRST-PARTY DATA
SEC. 1081. SAFE HARBOR.
(a) Nothing in this subtitle prohibits any entity from collecting and using Covered Personal Data to provide goods or services to individuals with whom the entity has a direct commercial relationship, where such use is limited to the Tier 1 or Tier 2 permitted categories below and complies with the combination prohibition of subsection (d). Entities relying on this safe harbor remain fully subject to the general prohibition standard and advertising data taxonomy of Chapter IX of this subtitle; the safe harbor of this subtitle does not exempt any entity from compliance with the advertising targeting prohibitions of Secs. 1091 through 1095. An entity that qualifies for the safe harbor of this subtitle but engages in advertising targeting practices that violate Chapter IX is subject to the full enforcement provisions of this subtitle for those Chapter IX violations notwithstanding its safe harbor status.
(b) Tier 1 — Unconditionally Permitted: first-party purchase and transaction history with the direct merchant; explicit user-declared preferences affirmatively stated for the purpose of receiving relevant content; current-session contextual signals requiring no persistent profile; coarse geographic data at postal-code level from stated location or current-session IP, not retained beyond the session; basic self-reported demographics voluntarily provided to the first-party platform; and in-session search queries within the same platform, not retained beyond the session. An entity does not become a Data-Monetizing Collector under Sec. 1003(7) solely by reason of deriving revenue from advertising selected and delivered on the basis of Contextual Advertising Signals satisfying all conditions of Sec. 1003(21), because session-limited contextual advertising signal processing that does not result in the transfer of Covered Personal Data to any third party does not constitute the sale, licensing, or transfer of Covered Personal Data within the meaning of Sec. 1003(7). Where an entity delivers contextual advertising through an advertising exchange or supply-side platform and provides that exchange with a Contextual Advertising Signal meeting all conditions of Sec. 1003(21) solely for the purpose of selecting and delivering the specific advertisement, that provision of the signal to the exchange does not constitute a transfer of Covered Personal Data within the meaning of Sec. 1003(7), provided: the signal is not retained by the exchange beyond the duration of the specific advertising transaction; the signal is not combined by the exchange with any other Covered Personal Data for any purpose; and the exchange agreement contractually prohibits such retention and combination.
(c) Tier 2 — Conditionally Permitted: first-party behavioral data retained no longer than ninety (90) days, used solely within the same platform, never shared with any third party, with functional opt-out taking effect within twenty-four (24) hours; single-platform retargeting with affirmative opt-in consent, no cross-context tracking, limited to thirty (30) days from the original interaction; aggregate non-identified cohort targeting where no individual record is retained, the cohort satisfies the cohort size threshold of Sec. 1094B(d) under either the Cohort Size Track or the Differential Privacy Track at the entity's election, the cohort is annually certified under Sec. 1094B(d)(2) by the applicable category of auditor, and no prohibited variable is used in cohort definition as classified under Sec. 1094B; and stated price-range and product category preferences explicitly provided through account settings, not behaviorally inferred.
(d) Combination Prohibition.—Data individually within Tier 1 or Tier 2 becomes prohibited when combined with other data in a manner that produces or is reasonably capable of producing a Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment. In an enforcement proceeding, where the Bureau demonstrates that an entity holds both permitted data and prohibited data within systems that are logically or technically capable of interaction, the Bureau may present this as evidence supporting an inference that the combination prohibition has been violated. The burden then shifts to the entity to demonstrate, by a preponderance of the evidence and through the testimony of a Bureau-certified independent technical auditor, that the permitted and prohibited data are maintained in systems with no logical or technical pathway for combination and that no prohibited outputs have been generated. This evidentiary inference applies in specific enforcement proceedings; it does not constitute a standing presumption of violation applicable to all entities by operation of law.
(e) Scope of Safe Harbor.—This safe harbor applies only to entities that: do not sell, license, or transfer Covered Personal Data to any third party for commercial purposes; do not participate in any data cooperative, exchange, or audience-segment licensing arrangement; and do not qualify as a Data Broker or Data-Monetizing Collector under Sec. 1003(6) and (7). An entity that otherwise qualifies but transfers data outside the direct service relationship loses safe harbor protection for the specific practice or data category that violated these conditions — not for its entire data operation — unless the violation was knowing and willful, in which case the entity loses safe harbor protection for all of its data practices.
(f) Narrow Service Provider Exception.—The transfer of Covered Personal Data to a third-party technical service provider does not cause an entity to lose safe harbor protection under this subtitle solely by reason of that transfer, provided all of the following conditions are strictly and continuously met:
(1) the transfer is limited to the minimum Covered Personal Data technically necessary for the service provider to perform a single, discrete operational function — such as payment processing, fraud detection within a direct commercial relationship, identity authentication, or infrastructure hosting — on behalf of and under the documented written direction of the entity;
(2) the transfer is governed by a written data processing agreement that:
(A) prohibits the service provider from accessing, retaining, using, or disclosing Covered Personal Data for any purpose other than performing the specific contracted function;
(B) prohibits the service provider from selling, licensing, transferring, or providing access to Covered Personal Data to any third party under any circumstances;
(C) prohibits the service provider from using Covered Personal Data for its own commercial purposes, including advertising, profiling, or analytics;
(D) requires the service provider to delete or return all Covered Personal Data upon completion of the contracted function or termination of the relationship, whichever is earlier; and
(E) requires the service provider to notify the entity of any breach or unauthorized disclosure within forty-eight (48) hours of discovery;
(3) the service provider does not itself qualify as a Data Broker or Targeting Infrastructure Contractor under Sec. 1003(6) and (8) with respect to any data it holds, and the entity has verified this as part of its vendor selection process;
(4) the entity does not grant the service provider any access to Covered Personal Data beyond what is technically necessary for the specific contracted function, and maintains documented technical controls preventing such access;
(5) the entity maintains a current written register of all service providers receiving Covered Personal Data under this exception, available to the Bureau upon request within five (5) business days; and
(6) this exception does not apply to any transfer that enables the service provider to combine the transferred Covered Personal Data with data from any other source, or that results in the service provider holding Covered Personal Data concerning more than one hundred thousand (100,000) United States persons from any single entity's transfers. A service provider that violates the terms of a data processing agreement under this subsection bears independent liability under this subtitle for those violations. The entity's safe harbor protection is not affected by a service provider's unauthorized use where the entity had no actual knowledge of the violation and maintained reasonable contractual and technical controls. An entity that knowingly permits a service provider to use Covered Personal Data beyond the scope of this exception loses safe harbor protection in full and is liable as a primary violator.
(g) United States-Directed Entities.—A United States-Directed Entity as defined in Sec. 1003(16) is eligible for the safe harbor of this subtitle on the same terms as any domestic entity with respect to its first-party commercial data activities involving United States persons. A United States-Directed Entity that collects and uses Covered Personal Data solely to provide goods or services to United States consumers with whom it has a direct commercial relationship — and that complies with all conditions of Tier 1 and Tier 2 of this subtitle — is not prohibited from such collection and use by reason of its foreign incorporation or domicile. Nothing in this subsection limits the application to United States-Directed Entities of the prohibitions of Chapters I, II, III, IV, V, VI, IX, and X — the safe harbor of this subtitle covers first-party commercial data use only and does not authorize any United States-Directed Entity to assemble Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, or Population Coverage Databases concerning United States persons, or to transfer any Covered Personal Data to any foreign government, foreign intelligence service, data broker, political organization, or any third party other than as necessary to fulfill the specific commercial transaction for which the data was collected.
SEC. 1082. PLATFORM PROVIDER RESPONSIBILITY FOR HOSTED WEBSITES AND APPLICATIONS.
(a) Where a platform provider — meaning any entity that provides website hosting, application building, e-commerce infrastructure, content management, or equivalent services to third-party operators — collects, processes, or facilitates the collection of Covered Personal Data from visitors to or users of a hosted site or application, the platform provider bears primary regulatory responsibility under this subtitle for any data collection, processing, or transfer that:
(1) occurs through technical infrastructure installed, configured, or operated by the platform provider rather than by the operator of the hosted site or application;
(2) is mandated by the platform provider's standard terms of service or default technical configuration, without affirmative installation or configuration by the operator; or
(3) is conducted by the platform provider for its own commercial purposes rather than solely on behalf of and at the direction of the operator.
(b) An operator of a hosted site or application — including any individual, small business, nonprofit, or other entity using a platform provider's services to operate a website or application — is not liable under this subtitle for data collection, processing, or transfer described in subsection (a) that is conducted by the platform provider, provided the operator has not independently configured, directed, or benefited from the prohibited collection.
(c) An operator of a hosted site or application that independently configures additional data collection — meaning data collection beyond the platform provider's default infrastructure, affirmatively added by the operator — bears responsibility for that additional collection to the same extent as any direct collector under this subtitle.
(d) Platform providers subject to this subtitle shall:
(1) disclose to all operators in plain language what data is collected by the platform provider's default infrastructure from visitors to and users of hosted sites and applications;
(2) provide operators with a technically functional mechanism to disable any data collection by the platform provider that is not strictly necessary for the operation of the hosted service; and
(3) not condition the provision of core hosting services on the operator's acceptance of third-party data collection that the operator cannot disable.
(e) For purposes of this subtitle, "platform provider" includes but is not limited to: website hosting services, website building platforms, e-commerce platforms, application hosting services, content delivery networks that collect behavioral data, and any equivalent service through which third-party operators publish digital content or services to the public.
SEC. 1083. CONTENT RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS — PERMITTED AND PROHIBITED PURPOSES.
(a) Congressional Findings.—Congress finds:
(1) Content recommendation systems serve two distinct and separable functions:
(A) connecting users with content relevant to interests they have expressed, accounts they have chosen to follow, and communities they have chosen to join — a legitimate service function that serves the user's expressed preferences; and
(B) optimizing content selection to maximize psychological engagement, emotional captivation, time-on-platform, or susceptibility to persuasive content — which constitutes the deployment of a Psychological Profile within the meaning of Sec. 1011(a) and is prohibited by that Section regardless of whether content is organic, editorial, or paid.
(2) A recommendation system that selects content based on the user's expressed interests serves that user. A recommendation system that selects content based on predicted psychological engagement exploits that user's cognitive vulnerabilities. The prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) applies with equal force to Psychological Profiles deployed for advertising and to Psychological Profiles deployed for content ranking.
(3) Congress finds that content recommendation systems that optimize for psychological engagement rather than user-expressed preference can disadvantage content creators, pressuring them toward constant posting cadences and escalating emotional intensity to maintain algorithmic visibility.
(4) The prohibition of this Section is directed at the construction and deployment of an individualized model of a specific user's predicted psychological or emotional response — conduct that exploits that user — and not at a platform's editorial selection, ranking, or arrangement of third-party content by subject matter, expressed user interest, viewpoint, or general popularity. In Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024), the Court recognized that a platform's compilation and curation of a feed is protected expressive activity and that the government may not regulate it merely to improve or balance the marketplace of ideas. This Section does not reach that editorial activity or the marketplace of ideas; it reaches the deployment of a Psychological Profile against an individual, which Sec. 1011(a) independently prohibits.
(b) Permitted Content Recommendation.—Notwithstanding Sec. 1011(a) and Chapters III, IV, and V of this subtitle, an entity operating a content platform with a direct commercial relationship with users may operate a content recommendation system that:
(1) ranks or surfaces content from accounts, communities, or topic areas the user has explicitly followed, subscribed to, or joined, on the basis of:
(A) recency of publication;
(B) aggregate engagement signals among that account's followers generally — not individual engagement modeling of the specific target user; or
(C) explicit quality or relevance signals designated by the user through the platform's content controls;
(2) surfaces content from outside the user's explicit follows, using only data derived exclusively from the direct relationship between the platform and the user — meaning all data inputs originate from the user's own activities within this single platform and no data from any external source is combined with platform data for this purpose (which ensures this activity does not constitute an Operational Profile capability within the meaning of Sec. 1003(3) because it does not derive data from two or more independent contextual sources) — on the basis of:
(A) contextual signals from the content the user is currently viewing within the current Session as defined in Sec. 1003(22), without reference to prior session history;
(B) Explicit User-Declared Preferences as defined in Sec. 1003(24), including follows, subscriptions, saves, bookmarks, category-level like patterns, and deliberate content initiations meeting all conditions of that definition — for purposes of this subparagraph, "based on follows" means: surfacing content from the specific accounts the user follows; surfacing content topically similar to the specific content the user has saved, bookmarked, or deliberately initiated, where topical similarity is determined from that content's own subject matter rather than from behavioral engagement modeling. It does not authorize surfacing content from accounts the user does not follow on the basis that those accounts' content is psychologically similar to content the user has engaged with;
(C) aggregate popularity signals within a content category the user has explicitly expressed interest in, derived from engagement across all users of the platform within that category rather than from modeling of the specific target user's predicted individual engagement response; or
(D) social graph signals — content that specific accounts the user explicitly follows have themselves publicly engaged with — derived from the user's explicit social connections and limited to one degree from the user's own follows (the signal does not extend to accounts followed by followed accounts through further social graph traversal).
The permissions of this subsection apply only where all data used in the recommendation system is derived exclusively from the direct relationship between the platform and the user. The moment any external data source is combined with single-platform user data for recommendation purposes, the protection of this subsection no longer applies and the full prohibition of Sec. 1031(a) governs.
(3) applies content filtering based on the user's explicitly stated preferences for categories or accounts to exclude; and
(4) uses Explicit User-Declared Preferences as defined in Sec. 1003(24) as recommendation inputs, subject to the retention framework of Sec. 1003(24) for each signal type. Follows, subscriptions, saves, and bookmarks are not subject to the ninety (90) day first-party behavioral data retention limit. Passive behavioral engagement signals used as recommendation inputs are subject to the ninety (90) day limit and may not be retained beyond that period.
(c) Prohibited Content Recommendation.—The following practices constitute violations of Sec. 1011(a):
(1) engagement optimization — any system that scores, ranks, or selects content for a specific user based on a model predicting that user's emotional, psychological, or behavioral response to that content, including models predicting or optimizing for watch time, emotional arousal, anger, fear, outrage, social comparison responses, or any other metric reflecting a psychological or behavioral response rather than whether content falls within a category the user has explicitly expressed interest in;
(2) notification timing optimization — any system that determines when to send notifications based on a model of when a specific user is most psychologically susceptible to returning to the platform;
(3) prohibited collaborative filtering — any collaborative filtering system that determines user similarity based on behavioral modeling identifying psychological, emotional, or engagement-pattern similarity, or uses engagement behavior of similar users to predict the target user's emotional or psychological response to content;
(4) progressive emotional intensification — any system that deliberately sequences content to move users from lower-arousal to higher-arousal emotional states for the purpose of increasing time-on-platform or engagement metrics; and
(5) prohibited objective functions — any recommendation system whose objective function includes as a primary, secondary, or weighted component: time-on-platform or session duration; return visit frequency; scroll depth or content consumption volume used as a proxy for engagement; notification response rate or re-engagement rate following inactivity; or any other metric the Bureau determines through rulemaking under Sec. 1133 constitutes a proxy for psychological captivation rather than relevance to user-expressed preferences.
Permitted collaborative filtering includes:
(A) surfacing content broadly popular among users who have explicitly stated the same interest categories as the target user through Explicit User-Declared Preferences, where similarity is based on explicit stated interest category overlap and not on behavioral modeling; and
(B) surfacing content from accounts followed by a meaningful proportion of users who also follow the same accounts as the target user, based on social graph overlap from explicit follows and not on psychological or behavioral similarity modeling.
(d) Objective Function Disclosure.—Any entity operating a content recommendation or feed ranking system on a platform with more than one million (1,000,000) monthly active United States users shall:
(1) disclose to the Bureau within one hundred eighty (180) days of this subtitle taking effect, and annually thereafter, a plain-language description of the objective function of each such system, identifying each metric the system is trained to maximize or minimize, whether any component is prohibited under subsection (c)(5), and whether the system uses collaborative filtering and if so the basis for user similarity determination;
(2) make available to users an explanation of how content is recommended to them; and
(3) provide to any user who requests it, without penalty or service degradation, a chronological feed of content from accounts that user explicitly follows, in reverse chronological order of publication, free from algorithmic reordering, suppression, or insertion of content from accounts the user does not follow. No entity shall use any technical or interface mechanism to make the chronological feed option less accessible, less functional, or less visually prominent than any algorithmic feed option.
(e) Bureau Rulemaking.—The Bureau shall, within three hundred sixty-five (365) days after the Director's first day of service, initiate notice-and-comment rulemaking to specify technical criteria distinguishing permitted interest-based recommendation objective functions from prohibited engagement optimization objective functions under subsection (c)(5), and technical criteria distinguishing permitted from prohibited collaborative filtering under subsection (c)(3). Until final rules are published, subsections (c) and (d) are operative and enforceable on their plain terms.
(f) Permitted Output Characteristics.—An output of an algorithmic system does not constitute a Psychological Profile solely by reason of being generated by a system that also receives as inputs data categories described in the Psychological Profile definition, where the output satisfies all of the following conditions:
(1) the output is limited to a binary or categorical determination of whether specific content, product, or service falls within a category a user has explicitly declared interest in through an Explicit User-Declared Preference meeting all conditions of this subtitle, without generating any score, index, or ranking predicting the user's emotional or psychological response to that specific content, product, or service;
(2) the output does not distinguish between two pieces of content within the same user-declared category on the basis of any predicted differential in emotional impact, psychological engagement, outrage potential, persuasion susceptibility, or behavioral response specific to the individual user; and
(3) the output is not combined with any signal, score, or inference concerning the user's current or predicted emotional state, psychological condition, or cognitive vulnerability.
(g) Prohibited Output Characteristics.—Notwithstanding the permissibility of any input, an output constitutes a Psychological Profile and is subject to the absolute prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) where:
(1) the output ranks, scores, sequences, or selects content, products, services, or messaging for a specific individual user based on a model predicting that user's emotional engagement, psychological response, re-engagement likelihood, or behavioral response to that specific content, product, service, or messaging;
(2) the output includes any score, index, or signal predicting a specific individual user's susceptibility to persuasion, emotional arousal, psychological captivation, or behavioral response to specific content or messaging; or
(3) the output, if disclosed to a third party, would enable that third party to calibrate content, products, services, or messaging to exploit that specific individual user's predicted psychological responses, emotional state, or cognitive vulnerabilities.
(h) Objective Function Compliance Test.—For purposes of determining whether a content recommendation system's objective function produces a prohibited output under subsection (g), an entity shall apply the following two-part test:
(1) Substitution Test.—The objective function is permitted where, if applied to two pieces of content that a user has explicitly declared interest in through Explicit User-Declared Preferences, the function would rank those pieces of content identically regardless of any differential in their predicted emotional impact on that specific user. The objective function is prohibited where it would rank one above the other based on any predicted differential in emotional response, psychological engagement, or persuasion susceptibility specific to that user.
(2) Category Collapse Test.—An objective function that produces, over any thirty (30) day period for any given user, a pattern of recommendations in which the user receives content from fewer than three (3) distinct subcategories within any single content category in which that user has declared interest is presumptively prohibited as producing a Psychological Profile through systematic engagement optimization. The entity may rebut this presumption by demonstrating through a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor that the category concentration resulted from the user's own Explicit User-Declared Preferences rather than from algorithmic optimization.
(i) Annual Objective Function Certification.—Any entity operating a content recommendation system on a platform with more than one million (1,000,000) monthly active United States users shall certify annually to the Bureau, within thirty (30) days of the close of each calendar year, that its recommendation system objective function satisfies the Substitution Test of subsection (h)(1) and has not produced a prohibited Category Collapse pattern under subsection (h)(2) during the preceding calendar year. The certification shall be prepared by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor, shall describe the auditor's methodology and test results in sufficient detail to permit Bureau verification, and shall be signed under penalty of perjury by both the entity's Chief Executive Officer and Chief Privacy Officer or designated responsible officer.
(j) Relationship to Sec. 1011(a). A content recommendation system satisfying all conditions of subsection (b) does not produce a Psychological Profile within the meaning of Sec. 1011(a) by reason of those activities. A content recommendation system violating any provision of subsection (c) produces a Psychological Profile within the meaning of Sec. 1011(a) and is subject to the full prohibition and penalties of that Section.
SEC. 1084. EXPLICIT USER-DECLARED PREFERENCE — CONDITIONS, RETENTION, AND PLATFORM REQUIREMENTS.
(a) Scope.—This section specifies the conditions governing the collection, use, retention, and platform obligations applicable to Explicit User-Declared Preferences as defined in Sec. 1003(24), wherever that term is used in this subtitle, including in Secs. 1081(b), 1093, 1094, and 1083.
(b) Categories of Active Preference Signal.—The following constitute Explicit User-Declared Preferences:
(1) Structured preference declarations — a preference affirmatively selected through a dedicated preference interface operated by the platform;
(2) Follows and subscriptions — a user's active decision to follow, subscribe to, or join a specific account, creator, channel, community, or content source. Follows and subscriptions may be retained for the duration of the user's active account subject to revocability, and the ninety (90) day first-party behavioral data retention limit of Sec. 1094 does not apply to these signals;
(3) Saves and bookmarks — a user's active decision to save or bookmark specific content. The ninety (90) day limit does not apply to save and bookmark signals;
(4) Category-level like patterns — a pattern of affirmative reactions accumulated within an identifiable content category. The underlying individual engagement records are governed by the ninety (90) day retention limit; only the derived category-level preference may be retained beyond ninety (90) days; and
(5) Deliberate content initiation — a user's active initiation of specific content by clicking, tapping, or navigating to it specifically, as distinguished from content that began playing or displaying through autoplay, algorithmic continuation, or scroll-based display without affirmative user action. The operative signal is the deliberate act of selection, not the duration of engagement following selection. The category-level preference derived must reflect the most natural general category of the content and may not be defined at a granularity enabling inference of sensitive characteristics.
(c) Governing Conditions.—All Explicit User-Declared Preferences are subject to all of the following conditions:
(1) Affirmative Selection Only — No Behavioral Pre-Population.—Population-level decisions about which preference categories to offer to all users do not constitute prohibited behavioral pre-population, but nothing in this permission insulates any platform from applicable civil rights or anti-discrimination law;
(2) No platform-inferred sensitive categories — a user may affirmatively declare their own interest in content related to their religious beliefs, political views, health interests, or any other topic. The prohibition is on the platform inferring these characteristics from behavioral surveillance without the user's knowledge or explicit statement. Where a user affirmatively declares a preference for content in a sensitive category, that preference may be used within the platform only, subject to all conditions of Sec. 1094B(e)(3);
(3) Voluntary;
(4) Revocable within seventy-two (72) hours;
(5) Platform-specific — not shared with any other platform or entity regardless of common ownership;
(6) Plain-language disclosure; and
(7) Permitted and prohibited model training — active preference signals may be used to train models that identify content within the user's stated categories and improve the platform's ability to serve those stated interests, but may not be used to infer characteristics the user has not affirmatively expressed, including demographic inference, cross-category interest modeling, or psychological engagement prediction.
(d) Preference Recalibration.—Any recommendation or targeting model trained using active preference signals shall be retrained or recalibrated using current active preference signals not less than once every one hundred (100) days. The platform recalibrates automatically without requiring the user to re-express preferences. Recalibration does not delete the user's active preference signals — it governs only how frequently the model using those signals must be updated to reflect their current state.
(e) Intra-Category Diversity.—Where active preference signals have established a user's interest in a general content category, a recommendation system using those signals to surface content must surface content from a reasonably diverse range of sources, topics, perspectives, and subcategories within that general category, and may not systematically collapse the category to a narrow subcategory or specific topical niche. Systematic failure to provide intra-category diversity constitutes a prohibited engagement optimization objective function under Sec. 1083(c)(5).
CHAPTER IX — GENERAL PROHIBITION STANDARD FOR ADVERTISING TARGETING DATA
SEC. 1091. GENERAL PROHIBITION STANDARD.
(a) No entity shall collect, retain, use, license, sell, or process for advertising targeting purposes any data or derived inference that: enables, or in combination is reasonably capable of enabling, an assessment of psychological state, emotional condition, cognitive vulnerabilities, or susceptibility to persuasion; enables political belief, affiliation, or susceptibility inference; enables religious, health, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or financial distress inference; enables behavioral prediction going beyond transactional intent to predicting responses to persuasive or ideological messaging; or is derived from or combines data from contexts unrelated to the direct commercial relationship. For purposes of this subsection, where an entity operates multiple platforms or services, data from each platform or service constitutes a separate commercial relationship context — data from one platform or service may not be combined with data from another platform or service for advertising targeting purposes even where both are operated by the same entity, unless the user has explicitly opted in to cross-platform data use through a separately executed, affirmative consent instrument that clearly discloses the specific platforms whose data will be combined and the purposes for which the combined data will be used. The prohibitions of this subsection apply to the inference, derivation, or determination of these characteristics from behavioral data, engagement history, algorithmic modeling, or any source other than the data subject's own affirmative declaration through the means specified in Sec. 1003(24). They do not prohibit an entity from collecting, processing, or using a sensitive category where the data subject has affirmatively declared that category through an Explicit User-Declared Preference meeting all conditions of Sec. 1003(24) and the use is limited to providing content or advertising within the platform in compliance with Sec. 1094B(e)(3) of this subtitle. A user who affirmatively selects "Christian content," "LGBTQ content," "conservative news," "progressive politics," or any other content category touching on a sensitive characteristic is making a permitted Explicit User-Declared Preference about their own content interests — the prohibition of this subsection does not apply to that declaration. The prohibition applies to the platform inferring these characteristics from behavioral surveillance without the user's knowledge or explicit statement. This subsection does not apply to Contextual Advertising Signals as defined in Sec. 1003(21) where all conditions of that definition are continuously satisfied, because a signal that by definition does not enable behavioral prediction, cross-session profiling, or psychological state assessment does not meet the threshold of this subsection. Frequency capping implemented through a device-level impression counter that records only impression counts for a specific advertisement unit, does not record any behavioral data in connection with those impressions, does not associate the counter with any individual-level behavioral record or account identifier, resets at the end of the defined time window, and is not shared with any third party, is similarly outside the scope of this subsection.
(b) This standard applies regardless of commercial labeling. The illustrative categories in Sec. 1092 are non-exhaustive; compliance with that list alone is not a safe harbor where the general standard is otherwise met.
SEC. 1091A. CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING SIGNAL — QUALIFYING CONDITIONS AND PERMITTED USE.
(a) Qualifying Conditions.—A Contextual Advertising Signal as defined in Sec. 1003(21) satisfies that definition only where all of the following conditions are met:
(A) the signal is derived solely from the content currently being consumed or the query currently being submitted, and not from any prior behavioral history, cross-session record, interest graph, or account-level data point associated with the user or device, except that Explicit User-Declared Preferences as defined in Sec. 1003(24) may be used as an additional input without defeating qualification under this definition;
(B) the signal is processed within the current Session as defined in Sec. 1003(22) and is not retained in any individual-level or device-level record beyond the conclusion of that Session;
(C) no individual-level or device-level record is created, stored, or transmitted as a result of signal processing, except for session-level network identifiers — including IP addresses and session tokens — used solely for routing the current request and returning the current response, which are not retained beyond the Session and are not used for any purpose other than routing that specific request;
(D) the signal is not combined with any behavioral history, cross-session data, interest graph, Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Covered Personal Data beyond what is necessary to serve the specific current request; and
(E) the advertising selection process does not produce a Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment.
(b) Permitted Use.—The collection, processing, and use of a Contextual Advertising Signal for advertising selection is permitted notwithstanding the general prohibitions of this subtitle where all conditions of subsection (a) are satisfied and the applicable safe harbor of Sec. 1091 or Sec. 1096 applies.
(c) Clean-Inputs Rule.—The clean-inputs rule of Sec. 1011(b) applies to all systems processing Contextual Advertising Signals. A system that uses permitted contextual signals as inputs but produces output constituting a Psychological Profile has produced a prohibited output and violated Sec. 1011(a) regardless of the permissibility of the inputs.
(d) Exchange and Supply-Side Platform Provision.—An entity does not become a Data-Monetizing Collector under Sec. 1003(7) solely by reason of deriving revenue from advertising selected and delivered on the basis of Contextual Advertising Signals satisfying all conditions of Sec. 1003(21). Where an entity delivers contextual advertising through an advertising exchange or supply-side platform and provides that exchange with a Contextual Advertising Signal meeting all conditions of Sec. 1003(21) solely for the purpose of selecting and delivering the specific advertisement, that provision of the signal to the exchange does not constitute a transfer of Covered Personal Data, provided: the signal is not retained by the exchange beyond the duration of the specific advertising transaction; the signal is not combined by the exchange with any other Covered Personal Data for any purpose; and the exchange agreement contractually prohibits such retention and combination.
SEC. 1092. ILLUSTRATIVE PROHIBITED ADVERTISING DATA CATEGORIES.
Prohibited under Sec. 1091, including but not limited to: psychographic and personality profiles, including OCEAN-framework models or equivalent taxonomy; emotional and psychological state inference from any source; cross-context behavioral aggregation from two or more unrelated platforms via any tracking mechanism; social graph and relationship inference; vulnerability and life-event inference derived from behavioral or purchase data; precise or persistent location data with precision greater than postal-code level or retained beyond the current session; content-consumption-based political, religious, or health inference regardless of commercial interest-category labeling; lookalike audience modeling using any variable itself prohibited under this subtitle; and behavioral prediction scoring predicting responses to persuasive or ideological messaging rather than transactional intent.
SEC. 1093. TIER 1 — UNCONDITIONALLY PERMITTED ADVERTISING DATA.
The following may be used for advertising targeting without restriction, provided they are not combined with any prohibited data: first-party purchase and transaction history; explicit user-declared preferences affirmatively stated for receiving relevant content; current-session contextual signals requiring no persistent profile; coarse geographic data at postal-code level from stated location or current-session IP, not retained beyond the session; basic self-reported demographics voluntarily provided to the first-party platform; and in-session search queries within the same platform.
SEC. 1094. TIER 2 — CONDITIONALLY PERMITTED ADVERTISING DATA.
The following may be used only subject to stated conditions: first-party behavioral data retained no longer than ninety (90) days, used solely within the same platform, never shared, with functional opt-out within twenty-four (24) hours; single-platform retargeting with affirmative opt-in consent, no cross-context tracking, limited to thirty (30) days; aggregate non-identified cohort targeting with no individual record, the cohort satisfies the cohort size threshold of Sec. 1094B(d) under either the Cohort Size Track or the Differential Privacy Track at the entity's election, the cohort is annually certified under Sec. 1094B(d)(2) by the applicable category of auditor, and no prohibited variable is used in cohort definition as classified under Sec. 1094B; and stated price-range and category preferences explicitly provided, not inferred.
Cohort Variable Standards.—The classification of cohort definition variables for purposes of the "no prohibited variable in cohort definition" requirement of this subtitle is governed by Sec. 1094B. Sec. 1094B sets forth: the presumptively permitted cohort variables; the presumptively prohibited cohort variables; the cohort size threshold and compliance tracks under which aggregate non-identified cohort targeting is permitted; the conditions under which a cohort definition variable derived from Explicit User-Declared Preferences in a sensitive category may be used for intra-platform targeting; and the petition-and-deemed-approval mechanism for unclassified variables. The Commission's authority to reclassify any listed variable derives from Sec. 1095(c) and may be exercised only through completed notice-and-comment rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553.
SEC. 1094A. SESSION TERMINATION RULES AND ADVERTISING DATA RETENTION.
(a) Scope.—This section governs Session termination for purposes of advertising data retention and specifies when Contextual Advertising Signals must cease to be processed and when session-limited data retention permissions under Secs. 1091, 1093, 1094, and 1096 expire. This section does not govern the retention of stored user content or the continuity of service delivery.
(b) Session Termination Conditions.—A Session ends upon the earliest of:
(1) the user closing the relevant application, browser tab, or browser window;
(2) the user logging out of any account associated with the interaction;
(3) thirty (30) continuous minutes of user inactivity, subject to the active service delivery exception of subsection (c); or
(4) twenty-four (24) hours from Session initiation, subject to subsection (e).
(c) Active Service Delivery Exception.—A user is not inactive during any period in which the platform is actively delivering a real-time service, including: a live voice or video communication in which the user is a participant, regardless of whether the user is speaking or has made any keyboard or mouse input; a live audio or video streaming session the user has initiated and not paused or terminated; a real-time collaborative working session in which the user is connected and the platform is actively synchronizing content; or any other service state in which the platform is performing active real-time processing on behalf of the user. The inactivity timeout runs only from the last moment at which the user has genuinely disengaged from all active service delivery.
(d) Multi-Device Sessions.—Where a platform operates across multiple tabs, applications, or devices simultaneously, the inactivity timeout runs from the most recent moment of active service delivery or affirmative user input on any such tab, application, or device within the same authenticated session.
(e) Twenty-Four Hour Limit.—The twenty-four (24) hour limit applies to contextual advertising signal processing and session-limited retention permissions only and does not interrupt, terminate, or limit the delivery of any service, communication, or real-time session. A new advertising Session begins every twenty-four (24) hours for ongoing service sessions, but this renewal does not affect the continuity of the underlying service delivery in any way.
(f) Stored User Content Unaffected.—This subtitle does not govern the retention of stored user content, including messages, files, documents, photographs, and any other content a user has stored within their account. A messaging conversation that is dormant or inactive is stored user content — it is not a Contextual Advertising Signal — and the fact that the user is not currently sending or reading messages does not cause stored messages to expire or be deleted under this subtitle. Nothing in this subtitle requires a platform to delete stored user content or interrupt a service by reason of the passage of any time period.
(g) Implementation Safe Harbor.—An entity that implements Session termination using only the thirty (30) minute inactivity rule and the twenty-four (24) hour hard cap — without applying the active service delivery extension of subsection (c) — is deemed fully compliant with this subtitle for all advertising data retention purposes. The Bureau shall not challenge such an entity's practices solely on the ground that longer session boundaries would have been permissible under subsection (c).
SEC. 1094B. COHORT VARIABLE CLASSIFICATION STANDARDS.
(a) Presumptively Permitted Cohort Variables.—The following cohort definition variables are presumptively permitted for aggregate non-identified cohort targeting under this subtitle, subject to the cohort size threshold and annual auditor certification of subsection (d), all other applicable Tier 2 conditions, and Commission reclassification through completed notice-and-comment rulemaking:
(1) postal code or ZIP code of the user's stated residential address or billing address, at no finer than five-digit postal code level;
(2) product category of prior purchases within the direct commercial relationship, at a level of generality equivalent to four-digit North American Industry Classification System codes or equivalent standard retail industry taxonomy, provided the category does not itself function as a proxy for a prohibited characteristic;
(3) account age expressed in whole years;
(4) subscription tier, service tier, or product tier within the platform, provided tier definitions are not themselves defined by reference to any prohibited cohort variable;
(5) device type at the level of mobile device, desktop computer, or tablet, as reported by the device's operating system or user agent;
(6) content language preference as affirmatively stated by the user in account settings; and
(7) time zone of the user's primary enrolled device as reported by that device's operating system;
(8) Explicit User-Declared Preferences as defined in Sec. 1003(24), subject to the intra-platform restriction of subsection (e) where the preference is in a sensitive category; and
(9) stated price-range and product category preferences explicitly provided through account settings, not behaviorally inferred.
(b) Presumptively Prohibited Cohort Variables.—The following cohort definition variables are presumptively prohibited as functioning as proxies for prohibited categories, subject to Commission permission through completed notice-and-comment rulemaking:
(1) any variable derived from or correlating with health or medical search queries, health-related content consumption, pharmacy purchase history, or medical appointment scheduling behavior;
(2) any variable derived from or correlating with financial distress signals, including credit inquiry frequency, overdraft transaction patterns, payday loan search queries, debt collection contact history, or bankruptcy filing records;
(3) any variable derived from location visit patterns enabling inference of religious practice, including regular visitation to religious facilities or participation in religious calendar events;
(4) any variable derived from location visit patterns enabling inference of participation in political organizing, including regular visitation to campaign offices, party headquarters, or advocacy organization facilities in connection with campaign activity;
(5) any variable derived from location visit patterns enabling inference of healthcare facility utilization, including visitation to reproductive health clinics, mental health treatment facilities, addiction treatment centers, oncology centers, or HIV treatment facilities; and
(6) any variable that an independent technical audit has found to produce differential targeting impact on any class protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, or the Americans with Disabilities Act exceeding twenty (20) percentage points in any validated study submitted to or conducted by the Commission.
(c) Unclassified Variables — Petition and Deemed Approval.
(1) An entity wishing to use a cohort definition variable not listed in subsection (a) or (b) and not previously classified by the Commission may petition the Commission for a written classification determination.
(2) The Commission shall issue a written classification determination within ninety (90) days of receiving a complete petition.
(3) Where the Commission fails to issue a determination within ninety (90) days, the variable shall be deemed granted provisional Tier 2 classification with respect to the petitioning entity only. The deemed classification:
(A) is specific to the petitioning entity and the variable as described in the petition;
(B) remains in effect until the Commission issues a final written classification through completed notice-and-comment rulemaking;
(C) provides a complete reliance defense for the petitioning entity's use of the variable during the period of deemed classification; and
(D) may not be revoked retroactively — the Commission may classify the variable as prohibited prospectively only, with ninety (90) days' written notice to the petitioning entity.
(4) An entity that has filed a complete petition shall not be subject to enforcement action for use of the petitioned variable during the pendency of the Commission's review, provided the entity suspends use of the variable within five (5) business days of receiving any Commission written notification that the variable is likely prohibited pending final classification.
(d) Cohort Size Threshold.—Aggregate non-identified cohort targeting permitted under Sec. 1081(c), Sec. 1094, and this Section is subject to the cohort size threshold established by this subsection.
(1) General Rule.—An entity engaged in aggregate non-identified cohort targeting shall satisfy one of the following two compliance tracks for each cohort deployed:
(A) Cohort Size Track.—The cohort comprises not fewer than one hundred thousand (100,000) individuals at the time of deployment, the cohort is technically incapable of individual identification, and the entity does not retain any record permitting reverse identification of cohort members or the intersection of any individual cohort member's membership across multiple cohorts; or
(B) Differential Privacy Track.—The cohort selection mechanism satisfies (ε, δ)-differential privacy with ε ≤ 1.0 per natural person per calendar quarter under advanced composition accounting, and δ ≤ 10⁻⁶, as those terms are used in NIST Special Publication 800-226 (Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees) or its successor publication. An entity electing this track shall maintain composition accounting records sufficient to demonstrate compliance with the privacy budget for each natural person across all cohort deployments during the certification period. The privacy unit for purposes of this track is the natural person, defined as a single United States person across all records associated with that person within the entity's systems, regardless of how many devices, accounts, or identifiers that person uses.
(2) Annual Auditor Certification.
(A) Cohort Size Track Certification.—An entity electing the Cohort Size Track for any cohort shall obtain annual certification by a Commission-approved independent auditor that no cohort deployed during the certification period fell below one hundred thousand (100,000) individuals. The annual certification must cover not only the technical architecture of the cohort system but also logs maintained by the entity documenting the minimum cohort size actually deployed during the certification period.
(B) Differential Privacy Track Certification.—An entity electing the Differential Privacy Track for any cohort shall obtain annual certification by an auditor holding current certification under the differential privacy auditor track established within Sec. 1116(c) that the entity's deployed mechanism satisfies the parameters of paragraph (1)(B). The certification shall describe the noise mechanism, the sensitivity calculation, the composition accounting framework, and the privacy unit definition in sufficient detail to permit Bureau verification.
(C) Mixed-Track Certification.—An entity that uses both compliance tracks during the certification period shall obtain certification under each applicable track for cohorts deployed under that track.
(3) Election.—An entity may elect either track on a per-cohort basis. The election shall be documented in the entity's compliance records and identified to the certifying auditor. An entity may not switch tracks for a deployed cohort during the certification period without notice to the auditor and re-certification of the cohort under the new track.
(4) Self-Certification of Differential Privacy Parameters — Scope and Conditions.
(A) Self-Certification Obligation.—An entity electing the Differential Privacy Track for any cohort shall additionally certify under penalty of perjury, signed by the entity's Chief Executive Officer and Chief Privacy Officer or designated responsible officer, that the deployed system satisfies the claimed differential privacy parameters. The certification shall include publication of the implementation specification — including the noise mechanism, sensitivity calculation, composition accounting method, privacy unit definition, and ε and δ parameters — in a format permitting independent technical evaluation. The Bureau retains the right to inspect source code, query logs, composition accounting records, and supporting infrastructure to verify any claim made under this paragraph. False or materially misleading self-certifications under this paragraph are subject to the criminal penalties of Sec. 1123(e).
(B) Application.—The self-certification obligation of this paragraph applies only to entities electing the Differential Privacy Track for any cohort deployment. Entities engaged exclusively in cohort-based targeting under the Cohort Size Track of paragraph (1)(A) are not subject to the self-certification obligation of this paragraph and remain subject only to the standard auditor certification of paragraph (2)(A). Entities not engaged in aggregate non-identified cohort targeting are not subject to this paragraph regardless of their other data activities.
(C) Small Business Treatment.—The procedural exemption available to Small Businesses under Sec. 1161 does not exempt a Small Business that elects the Differential Privacy Track from the self-certification obligation of this paragraph. A Small Business that elects only the Cohort Size Track retains its full procedural exemption with respect to differential privacy certification.
(e) Sensitive-Category Cohorts Derived from Explicit User-Declared Preferences.
(1) General Prohibition.—A cohort definition variable based on an inferred or derived sensitive category falling within the categories prohibited under Sec. 1091(a) — including inferred political belief or affiliation, inferred religious belief or practice, inferred health or medical condition, inferred sexual orientation, inferred gender identity, inferred financial distress or financial vulnerability, inferred psychological state or emotional condition, or inferred susceptibility to persuasion — is prohibited.
(2) Affirmative Declaration Carve-Out.—A cohort definition variable based on a sensitive category is not prohibited under paragraph (1) where the variable is derived exclusively from Explicit User-Declared Preferences as defined in Sec. 1003(24), the user affirmatively declared the sensitive category through means specified in that definition meeting all conditions including condition (B) of that definition, and all of the additional conditions of paragraph (3) are satisfied.
(3) Additional Conditions.—Use of a sensitive-category cohort under paragraph (2) for cohort-based advertising targeting within the platform is permitted only where all of the following conditions are continuously satisfied:
(A) Strictly Intra-Platform.—The sensitive category cohort and the identities of individuals within it are not sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any third party outside the platform under any circumstances, including through any programmatic advertising infrastructure;
(B) No Re-Identification. The cohort meets the cohort size threshold and annual auditor certification of subsection (d);
(C) No Cross-Category Inference. The sensitive category cohort may not be combined with any other data to produce inferences beyond the specific sensitive category declared; and
(D) User Disclosure.—The platform must clearly disclose to the user that declaring a sensitive category preference may result in advertising targeting within the platform for that category, and that this information will not be shared outside the platform.
(4) Proxy Variables.—A variable that functions as a reasonably predictable proxy for a sensitive category, enabling inference of that category at the individual or cohort level, is prohibited under paragraph (1) regardless of the source of the variable, as determined by the Commission pursuant to its classification authority under Sec. 1095(c).
SEC. 1095. ADVERTISING COMBINATION PROHIBITION AND FTC CLASSIFICATION.
(a) Individually permitted data becomes prohibited when combined with other data satisfying Sec. 1091(a). In any enforcement proceeding under this Chapter, where the Commission or Bureau demonstrates that an entity holds both permitted data and prohibited data within systems that are logically or technically capable of interaction, the Commission or Bureau may present this as evidence supporting an inference that the combination prohibition has been violated. The burden then shifts to the entity to demonstrate, by a preponderance of the evidence and through the testimony of a Commission-approved independent technical auditor, that the permitted and prohibited data are maintained in systems with no logical or technical pathway for combination and that no prohibited outputs have been generated. This evidentiary inference applies to all entities subject to this Chapter regardless of whether they qualify for the safe harbor of Sec. 1081; it applies in specific enforcement proceedings and does not constitute a standing presumption of violation applicable to all entities by operation of law.
(b) The Commission shall, within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment, issue guidance specifying prohibited combinations.
(c) The Commission shall classify new data types, inference techniques, and targeting methodologies into Tier 1, Tier 2, or the prohibited category by rule under 5 U.S.C. § 553, applying Sec. 1091(a) as the governing test. In any classification proceeding, the Commission shall consider and explicitly address in its rulemaking record: (i) the technical capability of the data type or technique to produce, alone or in combination at commercial scale, a Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment as defined in this subtitle — this factor is dominant and near-determinative; a data type or technique that satisfies this criterion shall be classified as prohibited absent extraordinary circumstances that the Commission shall document with specificity; (ii) the degree to which the data type or technique is necessary to deliver a specific, identifiable legitimate commercial service that cannot be delivered through Tier 1 or Tier 2 permitted data; (iii) the documented history of the data type or technique being used to produce prohibited outputs or to enable government acquisition of constitutionally impermissible information; (iv) the degree to which voluntary consumer consent is a realistic and meaningful protection against the identified harm, given the power asymmetry between data collectors and subjects; and (v) whether the less restrictive alternatives identified in Sec. 1157 — consent requirements, transparency mandates, purpose limitations, and auditing — are sufficient to address the identified harm without categorical prohibition. Factors (ii) through (v) are relevant to the Commission's analysis but do not override a finding under factor (i). Pending classification, any technique plausibly within Sec. 1091(a) is provisionally prohibited. An entity may petition for a provisional Tier 1 or Tier 2 determination; the Commission shall respond within ninety (90) days. An entity that files a complete petition for a provisional determination within thirty (30) days of first deploying or first becoming aware that a technique may be subject to classification shall not be subject to enforcement action for the provisional prohibition during the pendency of the Commission's review, provided the entity suspends deployment of the technique within five (5) business days of receiving any Commission notification that the technique is likely prohibited pending final classification. The Commission shall initiate a classification proceeding within one hundred eighty (180) days of a petition or upon its own motion where a new technique has achieved substantial commercial deployment by two or more entities together reaching more than ten million (10,000,000) United States persons.
Where the Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report published under Sec. 1118 identifies an emerging technology or technique as potentially requiring a classification proceeding, the timeline for initiating that proceeding is governed by Sec. 1118(c), which establishes a ninety (90) day written determination requirement and a hard one hundred eighty (180) day initiation deadline upon reaching the commercial deployment threshold specified in that Section. The Sec. 1118(c) timeline applies in addition to and independently of the petition-based initiation process of this subsection.
SEC. 1096. SEARCH QUERY ADVERTISING SAFE HARBOR.
(a) Permitted Use.—Notwithstanding Chapters III, IV, V, and the general prohibition of Sec. 1091(a) of this subtitle, an entity operating a search engine or query-based information retrieval service may collect, process, and use Covered Personal Data constituting a search query submitted by a user in the current Session as defined in Sec. 1003(22) for the purpose of selecting and delivering advertising relevant to that query, provided all of the following conditions are satisfied:
(1) the query is processed solely to return relevant results and select matched advertising for the specific current query;
(2) the query is not retained as an individual-level or device-level behavioral data point beyond the conclusion of the current Session;
(3) the advertising selection process does not combine the current query with any account-level behavioral history, prior query history, cross-session data, or Covered Personal Data beyond what is necessary to serve the specific current request;
(4) session-level network identifiers — including IP addresses and session tokens — are used solely for the technical purpose of routing the current request and returning the current response, are not retained beyond the Session, and are not combined with any other data for advertising targeting or behavioral profiling purposes; and
(5) the advertising selection process does not produce a Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment.
(b) Aggregate Query Logs for System Quality.—An entity may retain query data in aggregate form for the purpose of improving the accuracy, relevance, and technical quality of search results, subject to all of the following conditions:
(1) query data is processed through a formally defined differential privacy mechanism satisfying the technical standards published by NIST under subsection (e) before any retention;
(2) all individually identifiable records, device identifiers, account identifiers, session identifiers, and IP addresses are stripped from query data before retention in any form, with stripping completed before differential privacy processing;
(3) retained aggregate data is used solely for search quality improvement and is not used for advertising targeting, user profiling, or any purpose other than search quality improvement; and
(4) retained aggregate data is not combined with Covered Personal Data from any source and is not used as training data for any system producing prohibited outputs.
(c) Opt-In Personalized Search.—An entity operating a search engine may offer users an opt-in feature enabling personalized search results and matched advertising based on retained query history, subject to all of the following conditions:
(1) separately executed affirmative opt-in consent meeting all standards of Sec. 1121, specifically disclosing what query history will be retained, the retention period, how retained history will be used, and the revocation procedure;
(2) retained query history is used solely within the direct search relationship and is not transferred to any third party for any purpose;
(3) retained query history is not used to produce Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, or Precrime Risk Assessments;
(4) the user may permanently delete all retained query history at any time through a functional interface requiring no more than three (3) navigational steps, with full permanent deletion taking effect within seventy-two (72) hours;
(5) core search functionality is not conditioned on enrollment in the personalization feature; and
(6) retained query history is subject to the ninety (90) day first-party behavioral data retention limit of Sec. 1094 unless extended by separately executed consent, provided no retention period exceeds three (3) years from the date of each query record regardless of consent.
(d) Prohibited Search Practices.—The following practices constitute violations of Sec. 1091(a):
(1) retaining individual-level or device-level query histories beyond the current Session for advertising targeting, behavioral profiling, or search personalization purposes without separately executed affirmative opt-in consent under subsection (c); and
(2) using query data as an input to any system producing a Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment regardless of whether individual query records are retained.
(e) NIST Standards.—The Director of NIST shall, in consultation with the Bureau and the Commission, publish technical standards for the differential privacy mechanisms required for aggregate query log retention under subsection (b) within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service. Until NIST publishes final standards, entities retaining aggregate query logs shall apply differential privacy using the parameters specified in NIST Special Publication 800-226 or its most recent successor publication as the applicable baseline.
CHAPTER X — PROHIBITION ON COVERT COLLECTION
SEC. 1101. PROHIBITION ON COVERT AUDIO COLLECTION.
(a) Except as authorized by Sec. 1225 of subtitle B for JEOS monitoring of Covered Officials, no entity subject to this subtitle shall activate, access, or use the microphone or audio input of a user's device without: the user's explicit, affirmative, session-specific consent provided immediately before each activation; a visible, persistent on-screen indicator notifying the user that audio is being collected for the duration of collection; and immediate cessation of audio collection when the specific function requiring audio input is no longer active.
(b) No entity shall: process, retain, or analyze audio collected from a user's device for any purpose other than the specific immediate function for which consent was provided; derive, infer, or produce any targeting data, interest category, behavioral signal, or Covered Personal Data from such audio; transmit audio to any third party; or use audio as an input to any system producing outputs used for advertising targeting, behavioral prediction, or profile assembly.
(c) "Audio collection" includes not only the raw audio signal but any derivative, transcript, keyword extraction, ambient environment classification, or other output produced by processing audio from the user's device, regardless of whether the raw audio itself is retained. Processing audio to produce even a derivative output without the required consent constitutes a violation of this subtitle.
(d) On-Device Wake Word Detection.—The prohibition in subsection (a) does not apply to on-device wake word detection systems, provided that such systems:
(1) process audio exclusively on the user's device without transmitting any audio signal, derivative, transcript, keyword extraction, or other output to any external server, third party, or cloud service at any stage of processing;
(2) activate solely to detect a specific trigger phrase and cease processing immediately upon detection or confirmed non-detection of that phrase;
(3) retain no audio, derivative output, or transcript beyond the duration of the detection process itself; and
(4) produce no Covered Personal Data, behavioral signal, interest category, or targeting output from the audio processed. Any wake word detection system that transmits audio, a derivative, or any output to an external server or third party before the user has affirmatively activated the specific requested function, including systems that perform wake word processing in the cloud rather than on-device, requires the full affirmative session-specific consent specified in subsection (a) and is subject to all prohibitions of subsection (b).
SEC. 1102. PROHIBITION ON COVERT VIDEO COLLECTION.
(a) Except as authorized by Sec. 1225 of subtitle B for JEOS monitoring of Covered Officials, no entity shall activate, access, or use the camera or visual input of a user's device without: the user's explicit, affirmative, session-specific consent provided immediately before each activation; a visible, persistent on-screen indicator for the duration of collection; and immediate cessation when the specific function requiring visual input is no longer active.
(b) No entity shall process, retain, or analyze video, images, or visual data collected from a user's device for any purpose other than the specific immediate function for which consent was provided; derive any biometric data, behavioral signal, environmental classification, or Covered Personal Data from such visual data; or transmit it to any third party including any advertising platform, analytics service, or data broker.
(c) "Video collection" includes not only raw video or image capture but any derivative output including facial recognition outputs, object detection results, environmental classifications, emotional state inference from facial analysis, and any biometric data derived from visual processing, regardless of whether the raw visual data itself is retained. For purposes of this subtitle, "object detection results" are prohibited outputs only where they identify, describe, or are reasonably capable of identifying or describing a specific individual or producing Covered Personal Data about an identifiable individual. Object detection outputs that identify non-human objects — including documents, barcodes, QR codes, products, or physical environments — and that do not produce biometric data, behavioral signals, or information about identifiable individuals, are not prohibited outputs under this subsection.
SEC. 1103. PROHIBITION ON KEYSTROKE MONITORING AND INPUT CAPTURE.
(a) Except as authorized by Sec. 1225 of subtitle B for JEOS monitoring of Covered Officials, no entity shall capture, record, transmit, or process the individual keystrokes, text input, voice input, or gesture input of a user beyond the minimum necessary to provide the specific function the user is actively using at the time of input.
(b) No entity shall: capture or retain draft text that the user did not affirmatively submit or send; transmit individual keystrokes or raw text input to any server or third party before the user has affirmatively submitted the relevant text; use keystroke dynamics, typing patterns, or input behavior for any purpose other than accessibility functions explicitly requested by the user; or derive any Covered Personal Data from keystroke or input data, including behavioral fingerprints, psychological assessments, or identity verification markers based on typing patterns.
(c) Autocomplete and predictive text functions that process input locally on the user's device without transmitting individual keystrokes to external servers are permitted. Cloud-based input processing requires affirmative opt-in consent meeting the standards of Sec. 1121 with a clear disclosure that keystrokes are being transmitted to an external server.
(d) Text typed and deleted before submission constitutes private thought and may not be captured, retained, or transmitted under any circumstances. This prohibition applies regardless of the technical architecture of the capturing system and regardless of whether any individual deleted character is retained.
(e) Permitted Enterprise and Fraud Detection Uses.—The prohibitions of this subtitle do not apply to:
(1) Enterprise Data Loss Prevention.—Data loss prevention systems operated exclusively within a closed enterprise network that analyze draft content solely to prevent transmission of classified, proprietary, or regulated information, provided that:
(A) no individual keystroke or draft text is transmitted to any server or third party outside the enterprise network;
(B) the system does not retain draft content beyond the duration of the DLP scanning function;
(C) the system does not produce behavioral profiles, Covered Personal Data, or any output used for advertising targeting or individual assessment; and
(D) the system is not operated by or on behalf of any Data Broker, Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, or entity described in Sec. 1003(6) through (8).
(2) Bot Detection and Fraud Prevention.—Systems that analyze keystroke dynamics, typing patterns, or input behavior solely to distinguish human users from automated systems or to detect fraudulent transaction or account activity in real time, provided that:
(A) keystroke and input data is not retained beyond the specific session or transaction for which detection is performed;
(B) the system does not produce persistent behavioral profiles or Covered Personal Data concerning any identified individual;
(C) outputs are used solely for bot detection or fraud prevention involving the specific transaction or session and are not used for advertising targeting, psychological profiling, or any other purpose unrelated to bot detection or fraud prevention in the specific transaction or session for which the data was collected; and
(D) the system operates exclusively within a direct commercial relationship between the entity and its own users or customers and is not sold, licensed, or transferred to any third party, government entity, or data broker.
SEC. 1104. PROHIBITION ON REAL-TIME MASS BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION IN PUBLIC SPACES.
(a) Except as authorized by Sec. 1225 of subtitle B for JEOS monitoring of Covered Officials, no entity subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and no Federal Agency, state or local government entity, or Government Contractor, shall operate, deploy, or contract for the operation of any system that performs real-time biometric identification — including facial recognition, gait analysis, iris scanning, or voice print matching — of individuals who are present in publicly accessible spaces without those individuals' knowledge or consent.
(b) "Real-time biometric identification" means the automated identification or attempted identification of a specific individual from biometric data captured in public by matching that data against a database of known individuals, where identification occurs at the time of capture or within a period short enough to enable operational response to the individual's current location or activities.
(c) This prohibition applies to: surveillance camera networks equipped with facial recognition capability; drone or aerial surveillance systems with biometric identification functions; any system that scans individuals entering or present at public transit facilities, public streets, parks, places of public assembly, protests, or other public spaces; and any law enforcement tool that creates a real-time or near-real-time identification feed of individuals in public.
(d) The prohibition in subsection (a) does not apply to:
(1) opt-in biometric authentication used by private parties at specific secure access points where individuals voluntarily submit to identification as a condition of access — such as airport security PreCheck enrollment, building access systems, or device unlock features — provided that such systems do not retain biometric data beyond the specific authentication transaction;
(2) post-event forensic analysis of recorded imagery in connection with a specific, identified criminal investigation, pursuant to a warrant issued by a court of competent jurisdiction;
(3) identification of individuals who are themselves subjects of active arrest warrants, conducted pursuant to a court order, where the identification is directed at the specific named individual and not at an undifferentiated public;
(4) Biometric enrollment and authentication programs operated by the Transportation Security Administration pursuant to 49 U.S.C. § 44901, including the TSA PreCheck program and any successor expedited screening program, are governed by Sec. 1146(b) of this subtitle, which is controlling over this subtitle with respect to TSA-operated biometric enrollment and screening programs. Nothing in this subtitle prohibits TSA from retaining biometric enrollment data to the extent required for the administration of TSA PreCheck or equivalent opt-in screening programs under Sec. 1146(b), provided that such retention complies with the conditions and limitations of that Section;
(5) Exigent Circumstances — Named Individual Recovery and Witness Identification.
(A) Named Individual Recovery.—Real-time biometric identification of a specific, individually named individual who is the subject of: (i) an active Amber Alert issued pursuant to 34 U.S.C. § 20501 et seq., or an equivalent state-issued missing person alert for an adult where law enforcement has made a written finding of imminent threat to life; or (ii) a judicial order based on specific articulable facts finding that real-time biometric identification is necessary to prevent an imminent, specific threat to the identified individual's life or physical safety. Identification under this subparagraph is directed exclusively at the named subject.
(B) Witness and Bystander Identification.—Where real-time or recorded biometric identification is conducted under a lawful order pursuant to this subsection or subsection (d)(3), biometric data incidentally captured from individuals other than the named subject — including potential witnesses and bystanders — may be retained and used solely for the purpose of identifying individuals who may have information relevant to the specific investigation or emergency, subject to all of the following conditions: (i) retained biometric data may be used only to facilitate contact with or questioning of those individuals in connection with the specific investigation for which the order was issued; (ii) upon the conclusion of the specific investigation — defined as the recovery of the named individual, the closing of the criminal investigation, the final disposition of any resulting prosecution, or the expiration of the judicial order, whichever is latest — all biometric data of individuals other than the named subject shall be permanently and irreversibly deleted, including from all backup, archival, and evidentiary storage systems, unless a specific court order based on identified evidentiary need requires preservation; (iii) biometric data retained under this subparagraph may not be added to any Population Coverage Database, used to train any biometric model, shared with any commercial entity, or used for any purpose unrelated to the specific investigation; (iv) no such data may be cross-referenced against any commercial database or Population Coverage Database; (v) the law enforcement agency retaining biometric data under this subparagraph shall file a report with the Bureau within thirty (30) days of the conclusion of the investigation certifying destruction of all retained biometric data; and (vi) the judicial order shall specify the maximum retention period, which may not exceed the duration of the investigation plus ninety (90) days for destruction, and shall require a return to the issuing court confirming destruction.
(C) Authorization Requirements.—Any collection under subparagraph (A) or (B) requires: (i) a specific judicial authorization identifying the named individual, the locations authorized for identification, the authorized systems, the duration of authorization not to exceed seventy-two (72) hours subject to renewal upon fresh judicial finding, and the maximum permitted retention period for witness and bystander data; and (ii) that authorization is directed at the specific named individual and not at any class, group, neighborhood, or undifferentiated population;
(6) Opt-In Biometric Authentication for Financial Services.—Biometric identification and authentication systems operated by financial institutions as defined in 31 U.S.C. § 5312, licensed money services businesses, registered broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, and entities operating digital asset platforms registered with or regulated by a federal financial regulator, for the purpose of customer identity verification, account authentication, or fraud prevention, provided that:
(A) the individual has provided affirmative, specific, written opt-in consent to biometric enrollment meeting the consent standards of Sec. 1121;
(B) biometric data is retained exclusively within the direct relationship between the financial institution and the enrolled customer and is used exclusively for that customer's identity verification and authentication;
(C) biometric data is not combined with any data from any external source;
(D) biometric data is not sold, licensed, transferred, or otherwise made available to any third party under any circumstances, including as part of any merger, acquisition, bankruptcy proceeding, or asset sale — in such transactions, enrolled biometric data shall be destroyed rather than transferred unless the successor institution independently obtains fresh opt-in consent from each enrolled individual;
(E) the institution provides a functional, penalty-free revocation mechanism allowing deletion within seventy-two (72) hours of the revocation request;
(F) the institution submits to annual independent technical audit verifying compliance; and
(G) the biometric system is not used for real-time identification of individuals in publicly accessible spaces.
(e) Deletion of Incidentally Captured Biometric Data.
(1) General Rule.—Any biometric data incidentally captured from individuals who are not the subject of a lawful warrant or order under subsection (d) shall be permanently deleted without retention, indexing, or further analysis, immediately upon determination that the individual is not the subject of such a warrant or order, and in no event later than twenty-four (24) hours after the time of capture, except as provided in paragraph (2).
(2) Witness and Bystander Retention Exception.—Where biometric data of an individual who is not the named subject of a warrant or order is retained for witness or bystander identification purposes pursuant to subsection (d)(5)(B), that data shall not be subject to the twenty-four hour deletion requirement of paragraph (1) but is instead subject to the retention and destruction framework of subsection (d)(5)(B)(ii) through (vi).
(3) No Reuse. Biometric data retained under paragraph (2) may not be repurposed, cross-referenced against other investigations, or transferred to any other law enforcement matter without a new judicial order specific to that matter and that individual.
(4) Retention of incidentally captured biometric data beyond the periods specified in paragraphs (1) or (2), or use of such data for any purpose other than those authorized in subsection (d)(5)(B), constitutes an independent violation of this subtitle regardless of the reason for delay or the purpose of reuse. No biometric data captured under the narrow warrant exception of subsection (d) shall be added to any Population Coverage Database, used to train any facial recognition model, or retained beyond the specific criminal investigation for which the warrant was issued.
SEC. 1105. PROHIBITION ON PLATFORM ACCESS TO PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS CONTENT.
(a) General Prohibition.—No operator of a platform, application, or service that provides private electronic messaging between users — including direct messaging, private chat, encrypted messaging, and inbox communications — shall access, read, scan, analyze, process, retain, or disclose the content of private communications between users except as specifically permitted by subsections (b), (c), and (d).
(b) CSAM Detection — Preserved and Required.
(1) Preservation of Existing Practices.—Nothing in this subtitle prohibits or limits any CSAM detection practice currently deployed by a platform, including hash-matching, perceptual hashing, AI-based image and video classification, text-based exploitation detection, or any other method used to identify, remove, or report child sexual abuse material. Nothing in this subtitle impairs any platform's obligation to report known CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A, and any detection activity undertaken for the purpose of fulfilling that obligation is expressly permitted regardless of the technical method used.
(2) Mandatory Baseline — Hash-Matching.—Any platform with one million (1,000,000) or more monthly active United States users shall deploy hash-matching of known CSAM using databases approved by NCMEC not later than one hundred eighty (180) days after the date of enactment. Platforms that already deploy equivalent or more advanced detection are deemed to have satisfied this requirement.
(3) Mandatory Advanced Detection.—Any platform with ten million (10,000,000) or more monthly active United States users shall deploy AI-based detection of novel CSAM — meaning CSAM not yet catalogued in known hash databases — using detection methods certified by NIST under subsection (e) not later than ninety (90) days after NIST publishes applicable certification standards under subsection (e).
(4) Detection Conditions.—CSAM detection under this subsection shall operate subject to the following conditions:
(A) detection shall be automated — no platform employee shall access the content of any private communication except upon a confirmed detection flag;
(B) upon a confirmed detection flag, human review shall be limited to the minimum necessary to verify the detection and prepare a CyberTipline report, and the reviewer shall be a designated trust and safety employee operating under documented legal hold procedures;
(C) detection data, including false positive data, may not be used for advertising targeting, user profiling, behavioral analytics, or any commercial purpose; and
(D) a confirmed detection flag shall be reported to NCMEC's CyberTipline under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A promptly and with all associated metadata, account information, and IP addresses required by applicable law to support law enforcement investigation.
(c) Other Permitted Platform Access.
(1) Platform Security and Integrity.—Automated scanning strictly limited to detecting malware, viruses, and malicious code transmitted through the messaging system; identifying spam, phishing attempts, and coordinated inauthentic behavior patterns that threaten platform integrity or user safety; and enforcing the platform's own terms of service with respect to conduct — not content — including automated detection of known prohibited file types. Security scanning shall be technically designed to examine only the minimum necessary indicators of malicious activity and shall not produce or retain any record of the substantive content of user communications beyond what is technically necessary for the specific security function. No data generated through security scanning may be used for advertising targeting, user profiling, or any commercial purpose.
(2) User-Reported Content.—Review of specific communications that a user has affirmatively reported to the platform as abusive, threatening, harassing, or otherwise violating platform policies, where the review is initiated solely by the user's report, is limited to the specific reported communication and its immediate context, and is conducted for the purpose of evaluating the report and taking appropriate action. No data from user-reported content review may be used for advertising targeting, user profiling, or any commercial purpose.
(d) Legal Process Access.—A platform may access and disclose private communications content in response to:
(1) a valid warrant issued by a court of competent jurisdiction upon a showing of probable cause;
(2) a court order issued under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) upon a showing of specific and articulable facts;
(3) an emergency disclosure where the platform has a good faith belief under 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(8) that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury requires immediate disclosure; or
(4) the affirmative, informed, opt-in consent of all parties to the specific communication. Legal process disclosures shall be limited to the specific communications identified in the legal process instrument and shall not authorize bulk collection or pattern analysis of user communications beyond what is specified.
No platform may voluntarily disclose private communications content to any government entity, law enforcement agency, intelligence agency, or foreign government outside these legal process pathways, regardless of whether the platform received a request, suggestion, or informal inquiry from any government actor.
(e) NIST Standards Development.—The Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology shall, in consultation with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Department of Justice, Thorn — a nonprofit organization specializing in CSAM detection technology — and other nonprofit organizations with recognized expertise in CSAM-detection technology, develop and publish technical certification standards for AI-based novel CSAM detection methods not later than ninety (90) days after the date of enactment. These standards shall address: classifier accuracy and minimum acceptable true positive rates; maximum acceptable false positive rates; trusted execution environment requirements to prevent commercial repurposing of detection outputs; audit and certification procedures for detection methods seeking compliance certification; and procedures for ongoing review and updating of standards as detection technology evolves.
(f) Transparency Reporting.—Any platform with one million (1,000,000) or more monthly active United States users shall transmit an annual report to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce not later than March 1 of each year for the preceding calendar year, and shall provide the same report to NCMEC simultaneously, disclosing:
(1) a description of all CSAM detection methods currently deployed, including whether hash-matching and AI-based novel CSAM detection are in use;
(2) the volume of CSAM detections and CyberTipline reports generated in the reporting year;
(3) false positive rates and a description of how false positives are identified and remediated;
(4) known prosecutorial outcomes resulting from CyberTipline reports generated by the platform, to the extent available from NCMEC or law enforcement;
(5) deployment challenges, including the specific impact of end-to-end encryption on detection capability and the volume of content the platform cannot currently scan;
(6) the platform's assessment of which detection techniques are most effective and its recommendations for improving detection capability, including techniques the platform has not yet deployed and the challenges associated with deployment; and
(7) any significant changes to detection methods made during the reporting year.
(g) Congressional Study.—The Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on the Judiciary, in consultation with NCMEC, the Department of Justice, NIST, and representatives of the platform industry, shall produce a joint report not later than one year after the date of enactment containing: findings on the current state of CSAM detection technology across major platforms; an assessment of the effectiveness of existing voluntary and mandatory detection practices; recommendations for mandatory minimum detection standards appropriate to different platform sizes and types; an assessment of the privacy implications of various detection methods and recommendations for privacy-preserving detection approaches; and recommended legislative action to address gaps identified in the study. The report shall be transmitted to the full Senate and House and made publicly available.
(h) Encryption.—Nothing in this subtitle shall be construed to require any platform to weaken, undermine, or create backdoors in end-to-end encryption or any other technical measure protecting the confidentiality of user communications. This subtitle prohibits platform access to private communications content the platform is technically capable of accessing — it does not require platforms to acquire technical access they do not currently have. This subtitle does not prohibit client-side scanning, server-side scanning operating within the permitted exceptions of subsection (b), or any other detection method that operates within the conditions of subsection (b)(4) without giving the platform general access to private communications content.
(i) Enforcement.—A violation of subsection (a) is subject to the Tier 2 civil penalty under Sec. 1122(d) per affected user per violation. A knowing or willful violation — including any deliberate scan of private communications content for advertising, profiling, or any purpose not permitted by subsections (b) through (d) — is subject to the Tier 3 civil penalty under Sec. 1122(e) and the criminal penalties of Sec. 1123. Each individual user whose private communications are accessed in violation of this subtitle has a private right of action under Sec. 1132 with minimum statutory damages of not less than five thousand dollars ($5,000) per violation regardless of proof of actual harm. Failure to comply with the mandatory detection requirements of subsection (b)(2) or (b)(3) is subject to a civil penalty of not less than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) per day of non-compliance after the applicable deadline.
SEC. 1106. ENFORCEMENT OF CHAPTER X PROHIBITIONS.
(a) Violations of Secs. 1101, 1102, 1103, 1104, and 1105 are subject to the civil penalty framework of Chapter XII, the criminal penalty framework of Chapter XII, the injunctive relief authority of Sec. 1126, the disgorgement authority of Sec. 1125, and the private right of action of Sec. 1132, to the same extent as violations of the other substantive prohibitions of this subtitle.
(b) For purposes of the private right of action under Sec. 1132, any individual whose audio, video, biometric data, or keystroke data was collected, processed, or retained in violation of this Chapter has suffered dignitary harm sufficient to confer standing without proof of additional injury. This includes any individual subjected to real-time biometric identification in a public space in violation of Sec. 1104, regardless of whether the identification was successful or whether the individual was aware of the identification at the time.
(c) Lawful Witness and Bystander Identification — No Private Right of Action for Authorized Collection. No private right of action arises under this subtitle solely from the capture, retention, or use of an individual's biometric data where:
(1) the collection was conducted pursuant to a valid judicial order under Sec. 1104(d)(5);
(2) the individual's biometric data was retained solely for witness or bystander identification purposes in compliance with all conditions of Sec. 1104(d)(5)(B); and
(3) the biometric data was permanently deleted in accordance with Sec. 1104(d)(5)(B)(ii) and the deletion was certified to the Bureau. A private right of action does arise where: (i) the collection exceeded the scope of the judicial order; (ii) the biometric data was used for any purpose other than witness or bystander identification in the specific authorized investigation; (iii) the biometric data was not deleted within the required period; (iv) the biometric data was cross-referenced against any commercial or Population Coverage Database; or (v) the deletion certification was false or incomplete.
(d) The Bureau may treat each individual instance of prohibited collection — each unauthorized activation of audio, each frame of video processed without consent, each biometric scan of each individual in violation of Sec. 1104, each retained keystroke log — as a separate violation for purposes of per-record penalty multipliers under Sec. 1122(h). For biometric identification violations, each individual scanned constitutes a separate violation.
(e) Statute of Limitations.—For violations involving witness or bystander biometric retention, the five-year statute of limitations under Sec. 1132(g) runs from the date the individual discovers, or reasonably should have discovered, that their biometric data was collected.
CHAPTER XI — BUREAU OF DATA SURVEILLANCE
SEC. 1111. ESTABLISHMENT.
(a) Director — Appointment and Term.—The Bureau shall be headed by a Director nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, serving a fixed term of five (5) years, renewable not more than two (2) times, for a maximum total service of fifteen (15) years. The Director shall have demonstrated expertise in data science, privacy law, cybersecurity, or consumer protection enforcement.
Candidate Pool. Not later than ninety (90) days before a Director appointment or reappointment is required, the Office of Personnel Management shall compile and transmit to the President a qualified candidate pool of not fewer than seven (7) and not more than fifteen (15) candidates satisfying all of the following requirements:
(A) demonstrated expertise in data science, privacy law, cybersecurity, or consumer protection enforcement, as assessed by a technical review panel consisting of one representative designated by the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one representative designated by the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and one representative designated by the Comptroller General — no member of the technical review panel shall be a political appointee or shall have been employed by any entity registered or required to register under Sec. 1113 within the preceding seven (7) years;
(B) no direct employment by any entity registered or required to register as a Data Broker or Targeting Infrastructure Contractor under Sec. 1113 within the preceding five (5) years, and no compensated consulting relationship with any such entity within the preceding three (3) years; provided that employment by or consulting for a Data-Monetizing Collector at Tier DM-1 or DM-2 whose primary business is not the assembly or sale of Covered Personal Data shall not be disqualifying unless the candidate's specific role involved the design, operation, or sale of data monetization programs subject to this subtitle;
(C) no political appointment in the executive branch within the preceding seven (7) years;
(D) no spouse, parent, child, or sibling currently serving in a Senate-confirmed executive branch position or in any senior position within any entity registered or required to register under Sec. 1113; and
(E) no financial interest, direct or indirect, in any entity registered or required to register under Sec. 1113, held at any point within the preceding seven (7) years.
OPM shall publish the names and qualifications of all candidates in the pool in the Federal Register upon transmission to the President. The President shall nominate from within the pool. If the President determines that no candidate in the pool is suitable, the President shall transmit a written explanation to Congress and to OPM within thirty (30) days of receiving the pool, whereupon OPM shall compile a new pool of not fewer than seven (7) and not more than fifteen (15) additional candidates within forty-five (45) days. If the President fails to nominate from the second pool within thirty (30) days, the nomination is deemed made by operation of law and the most qualified candidate in the second pool — as determined by the technical review panel's published ranking — shall be deemed nominated and transmitted to the Senate for confirmation. Not later than three hundred sixty-five (365) days after enactment, regardless of pool process status, the most qualified candidate in the then-current pool shall be deemed nominated and confirmed by operation of law if no Director has yet begun service — no presidential rejection or Senate inaction shall delay Bureau establishment beyond this outer deadline.
(2) Initial Confirmation.—The Senate shall vote on any initial nomination within ninety (90) days of receipt. Confirmation requires a simple majority of Senators present and voting. If the Senate fails to act within ninety (90) days, the nominee is deemed confirmed by operation of law and shall begin service immediately. If the deemed confirmation mechanism of this subsection is held unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable, the nominee shall serve in an acting capacity with full statutory authority pending Senate action. Acting service under this paragraph shall not exceed 540 days. During acting service under this paragraph, the President may submit a replacement nominee at any time and is not required to await the expiration of the 540-day period to do so; the prior nominee's acting service terminates when a replacement nominee begins service under this paragraph. If the Senate has not acted within 540 days, the President shall submit a new nominee within 30 days. All actions taken by an acting Director during their service are valid and binding regardless of any subsequent challenge to this subsection.
(3) Renewal and Reconfirmation.—A Director seeking a first or second renewal shall notify the President and the Senate not later than one hundred eighty (180) days before the expiration of their current term. Reconfirmation requires a simple majority of Senators present and voting within ninety (90) days of the Director's notification. If the Senate fails to act within ninety (90) days, the Director is deemed reconfirmed by operation of law for a further five (5) year term. If the deemed reconfirmation mechanism of this paragraph is held unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable, the Director shall serve in a holdover capacity with full statutory authority pending Senate action. Such holdover service shall not exceed one hundred eighty (180) days. If the Senate has not acted within that period, the appointment process shall commence. All actions taken by the Director during such holdover service are valid and binding regardless of any subsequent challenge to this paragraph. If the Senate votes against reconfirmation, or if the Director does not seek renewal, the appointment process shall commence not later than thirty (30) days after that determination, and the departing Director shall serve in a holdover capacity for no more than one hundred eighty (180) days.
(4) Removal.—The President may remove the Director before the end of any term only upon a finding of inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Any removal shall be accompanied by a written statement of reasons transmitted to Congress within forty-eight (48) hours of the removal decision, identifying with specificity the factual basis for the finding. A removal that does not satisfy these requirements is without legal effect and the Director shall be entitled to immediate reinstatement by order of the D.C. Circuit. Any removal is subject to expedited judicial review in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which shall issue a preliminary ruling within thirty (30) days and a full merits decision within ninety (90) days. The D.C. Circuit shall apply de novo review and shall not defer to the President's characterization of the conduct at issue.
(5) Prohibition on Improper Influence Over Enforcement Matters.
(A) No officer or employee of the Executive Office of the President, no Cabinet officer, and no other executive branch official shall communicate with the Director, any Deputy Director, or any Bureau enforcement staff, directly or through any intermediary, for the purpose of influencing, directing, delaying, accelerating, or terminating any specific pending Bureau enforcement matter, investigation, or proceeding.
(B) The Director shall maintain a public Enforcement Communication Log. Any communication received by the Director or any Bureau enforcement staff from any executive branch official — including through intermediaries — that references any specific pending enforcement matter shall be entered into the Log within forty-eight (48) hours of receipt. The Log shall be transmitted to the relevant congressional oversight committees monthly and shall be publicly available on the Bureau's website.
(C) The Director shall take no enforcement action, and shall decline no enforcement action, based on any communication required to be logged under subparagraph (B). Any enforcement decision made within ninety (90) days of a logged communication concerning that matter shall include a written certification from the Director that the logged communication played no role in the decision.
(D) Any executive branch official who communicates with Bureau enforcement staff in violation of subparagraph (A) shall be subject to a civil penalty of not less than $50,000 per communication and referral to the relevant Inspector General. Any such communication made with intent to obstruct, delay, or terminate a Bureau enforcement proceeding constitutes a criminal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 1505, subject to imprisonment of not more than five (5) years.
(E) Any Director who takes or declines an enforcement action based on a communication prohibited by subparagraph (A) shall be subject to removal for malfeasance and to criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1505.
(F) Nothing in this paragraph prohibits: general policy communications between the executive branch and the Bureau that do not reference specific pending enforcement matters; congressional communications to the Bureau about enforcement priorities generally; communications from the Department of Justice regarding criminal referrals under Sec. 1123; or communications required by this subtitle.
(6) Vacancy.—In the event of a mid-term vacancy, the most senior career Deputy Director of the Bureau by length of service shall serve as Acting Director for no more than one hundred eighty (180) days, during which OPM shall compile a new qualified pool within sixty (60) days. If the vacancy arises with fewer than one hundred eighty (180) days remaining in the departing Director's term, the Acting Director shall serve for the remainder of the term without a new nomination being required, unless the Commission by majority vote requests a new nomination for a full five (5) year term.
(7) Financial Disclosure and Recusal.—The Director shall comply with all financial disclosure requirements applicable to senior executive branch officials under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, as recodified at 5 U.S.C. §§ 13101 et seq. The Director shall recuse themselves from any enforcement matter involving any entity with which they had a professional or financial relationship within the preceding seven (7) years. Recusal decisions shall be transmitted to the FTC Inspector General within forty-eight (48) hours. Recused matters shall be decided by the most senior career Deputy Director without direction from the Director.
(8) Post-Service Restrictions.—For a period of three (3) years following the conclusion of service as Director, no former Director shall: be employed by, consult for, represent, or have any compensated relationship with any entity that was registered under Sec. 1113 at any point during the Director's term; appear before the Bureau in any capacity; or acquire any financial interest in any such entity. Violation of this restriction shall be a criminal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 207 as enhanced by this subtitle, subject to a fine of not more than $1,000,000 and imprisonment of not more than five (5) years.
(b) Pending the Bureau's establishment, the Bureau of Consumer Protection shall exercise interim enforcement authority from the date of enactment.
(c) Industry Capture Prohibition.
(1) Senior Restriction.—No individual employed by or serving as compensated consultant to a Data Broker, Data-Monetizing Collector at Tier DM-2 or DM-3, or Targeting Infrastructure Contractor within the preceding five (5) years shall serve in any supervisory, policy, or enforcement decision-making capacity within the Bureau, including as Director, Deputy Director, Division Chief, or senior enforcement counsel.
(2) Technical Staff — Enhanced Recusal.—Individuals with prior employment or consulting relationships with registered entities may serve in technical, analytical, and examination roles within the Bureau subject to the following conditions:
(A) the individual shall recuse themselves from any matter directly involving a former employer or client for a period of three (3) years from the conclusion of that relationship;
(B) recusal decisions shall be documented and transmitted to the FTC Inspector General within forty-eight (48) hours;
(C) the individual shall file enhanced financial disclosure covering all former employer relationships; and
(D) the individual may not participate in any rulemaking proceeding that specifically targets practices in which their former employer was engaged, for a period of three (3) years.
(3) Certification.—The Director shall certify annually to Congress the names, prior employers, and recusal obligations of all Bureau staff subject to enhanced recusal under paragraph (2).
(4) Waiver for Senior Restriction.—No individual may waive the Senior Restriction on their own behalf. Waiver requires affirmative vote of three (3) of the five (5) FTC Commissioners accompanied by a written public finding that the individual's expertise is exceptional, their prior relationship was sufficiently remote from surveillance operations, and enhanced recusal and disclosure obligations have been imposed.
Technical Infrastructure Floor. Not less than twenty percent (20%) of the Bureau's annual appropriation shall fund technical infrastructure including Registry systems, algorithmic audit tooling, automated anomaly detection, and the audit methodology program. The Director shall certify annually to Congress, not later than March 1 of each year, that the Bureau's appropriations for the preceding fiscal year complied with the twenty percent (20%) floor. Where the floor was not met, the certification shall include a remediation plan and the Director shall transmit a follow-up certification to Congress not later than September 1 of that year.
(d) Independence of Enforcement from Removal Protection.—The enforcement of this subtitle does not depend on the removal protection of the Director. The substantive prohibitions of this subtitle are independently enforceable by State attorneys general under Sec. 1131 and through the private right of action under Sec. 1132, and the Director's exercise of authority is constrained by the anti-influence provisions of subsection (a)(5), the mandatory appropriations of Sec. 1112, and the reporting obligations of this subtitle, in each case without regard to the Director's tenure. If the removal limitation of subsection (a)(4) is held invalid and severed under Sec. 1166, the Bureau, its authority, and the operation of this subtitle shall continue in full force, with the Director removable at will.
SEC. 1112. TIERED STAFFING AND FUNDING.
(a) Minimum staffing levels scaling with Registry enrollment:
Year 1 (365 days post-enactment): not fewer than one hundred fifty (150) FTEs, of whom not fewer than sixty (60) shall be technical staff.
Year 2 (730 days post-enactment): not fewer than three hundred (300) FTEs, of whom not fewer than one hundred twenty (120) shall be technical staff.
Year 3 Conditional Floor (1,095 days post-enactment): where Registry enrollment equals or exceeds one thousand (1,000) Data Broker and Targeting Infrastructure Contractor registrants combined, and ten thousand (10,000) Data-Monetizing Collector registrants at Tier DM-1, DM-2, or DM-3, the floor increases to five hundred (500) FTEs with not fewer than two hundred (200) technical staff. If enrollment thresholds are not met, the Year 2 floor remains until both thresholds are crossed, triggering the Year 3 floor automatically.
Notwithstanding the enrollment thresholds of this subsection, the Year 3 staffing floor of five hundred (500) FTEs shall apply not later than four (4) years after the date of enactment, regardless of whether the Registry enrollment thresholds have been met, if the Director certifies to Congress that the Bureau's enforcement workload — measured by the number of open investigations, pending audits, and registered entities under active monitoring — warrants staffing at that level. The Director shall include in each Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report an assessment of whether the enrollment thresholds are on track to trigger the Year 3 floor or whether a workload-based certification is likely to be required.
(b) Mandatory annual appropriations adjusted for inflation:
Year 1: not less than $150,000,000.
Year 2: not less than $300,000,000.
Year 3 and thereafter: not less than $500,000,000 subject to the enrollment condition of subsection (a), otherwise $300,000,000 until thresholds are met.
The mandatory appropriations floors in this subsection shall be adjusted annually for inflation beginning in Year 2, using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the calendar year of enactment as the base year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shall publish the applicable adjustment factor not later than February 1 of each year. Mandatory appropriations floors are not subject to rescission or continuing resolution reduction below the applicable floor. The Director may seek enforcement of the mandatory appropriations floor through emergency action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which shall have jurisdiction to issue injunctive relief within seventy-two (72) hours of filing. Where annual appropriations for the Bureau fall below the applicable floor established by this subsection, the Bureau is authorized to draw from the Supplemental Enforcement Fund established under subsection (c) to make up the shortfall, up to the amount of the shortfall or the available Fund balance, whichever is less. The Director shall transmit a written report to the relevant congressional oversight committees within 30 days of any such draw, specifying the amount drawn, the shortfall it addresses, and the projected impact on pending enforcement actions if the appropriations floor is not restored in the subsequent fiscal year.
(c) Fifty percent (50%) of all civil penalties collected shall be deposited into a dedicated Supplemental Enforcement Fund available to the Bureau without further appropriation.
(d) Supplemental Enforcement Fund Administration:
(1) Unspent balances in the Fund at the close of any fiscal year shall carry forward without limitation and shall remain available to the Bureau without further appropriation until expended.
(2) The Fund is not subject to presidential impoundment, deferral, or rescission under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, 2 U.S.C. §§ 681-688, or any other executive authority. Any presidential attempt to impound, defer, or rescind Fund balances is without legal effect.
(3) The Bureau Director shall have independent disbursement authority over Fund balances for all purposes authorized by this subtitle, without OMB apportionment, allotment, or apportionment approval.
(4) The Director shall report to Congress annually on Fund balances, deposits, disbursements, and projected needs, as part of the Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report under Sec. 1118.
SEC. 1113. NATIONAL DATA SURVEILLANCE REGISTRY.
(a) Registration is triggered by the nature of data activities, not by user volume. The following must register: any Data Broker; any Data-Monetizing Collector at Tier DM-1 or above; any Targeting Infrastructure Contractor; any entity selling or licensing Covered Personal Data to any Federal Agency, state or local government entity, or foreign person; and any entity participating in any Data Cooperative or Audience-Segment Licensing Arrangement as defined in Sec. 1003(19) and Sec. 1003(20).
(b) Entities collecting Covered Personal Data exclusively within a direct commercial relationship, using it solely to serve that relationship, and not transferring it to third parties for commercial purposes are not required to register and are not subject to proactive audit authority absent a credible complaint. Such entities remain subject to all substantive prohibitions.
(c) Grace Period.—An entity that first meets a registration trigger after the date of enactment shall register not later than thirty (30) days after the date on which it first meets the trigger. This grace period is available only once per entity and is not available where the entity had prior actual or constructive knowledge that its data activities met a registration trigger before the thirty (30) day window began.
(d) The Registry shall be public, machine-readable, and electronically accessible at no charge. The Bureau shall publish technical specifications for the Registry format, including API access standards and bulk download capability, within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service. Annual filings shall be submitted to the Bureau not later than ninety (90) days after the close of each calendar year and shall include: complete entity identification including legal name, principal place of business, and registered agent; the name of the Chief Privacy Officer or responsible officer designated under subsection (e), held by the Bureau in a non-public government registry and not published in the public-facing Registry; and a general compliance inquiry contact — such as a dedicated compliance email address or phone number — that is published in the public-facing Registry in lieu of individual officer contact information; enumeration of all Covered Personal Data categories organized by the taxonomy of Chapter IX; all upstream data sources; all downstream data recipients including government entities; the number of United States persons covered, stated as a precise count where technically feasible or as an estimate with methodology disclosure where not; data retention periods for each category of Covered Personal Data held; a technical description of combination-prohibition compliance architecture; the executive summary of the most recent independent technical audit conducted pursuant to Sec. 1115, or a self-certification prepared by the entity's responsible officer for entities not subject to Sec. 1115; and an annual compliance certification signed under penalty of perjury by both the CEO and the Chief Privacy Officer, or by the CEO and the responsible officer designated under subsection (e) where no CPO has been designated. Both signatories are individually subject to criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 for knowingly false certifications. Registration is a legal prerequisite to lawful operation; operating without a current, accurate registration is a per se Tier 2 violation.
(e) Entities Without a Chief Privacy Officer.—An entity that is subject to registration under this subtitle but has no designated Chief Privacy Officer shall designate a responsible officer for purposes of this subtitle not later than thirty (30) days after the registration obligation arises. The designated responsible officer shall have sufficient authority and access to certify the accuracy of the entity's annual filing. The designation does not satisfy any obligation to appoint a Chief Privacy Officer under any other applicable law.
(f) Material change notifications are required within thirty (30) days of any material change to data practices, sources, or transfer relationships.
SEC. 1113A. DATA-MONETIZING COLLECTOR — TIER CLASSIFICATION.
(a) Tier Classification Standards.—Data-Monetizing Collectors are classified into the following graduated tiers based on the percentage of relevant gross revenues derived from the sale, licensing, or transfer of Covered Personal Data to third parties:
(1) Tier DM-1 entities derive five percent (5%) to fifteen percent (15%) of relevant gross revenues from such transfers and are subject to registration and annual certification requirements only;
(2) Tier DM-2 entities derive more than fifteen percent (15%) but less than thirty percent (30%) and are additionally subject to mandatory third-party audit requirements; and
(3) Tier DM-3 entities derive thirty percent (30%) or more and are treated as Data Brokers for all purposes of this subtitle.
(b) Relevant Gross Revenues.—The Commission shall define "relevant gross revenues" by rule within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment, specifying whether the percentage threshold is calculated against total company gross revenues, the gross revenues of the specific business unit or product line engaged in data monetization, or some other appropriate measure. The Commission's rule shall be designed to prevent evasion of these tiers by large entities whose data monetization revenues are substantial in absolute terms but small as a percentage of total company revenues from unrelated business lines.
(c) Scope of Tiered Structure.—The tiered classification of this subtitle governs registration, audit, and enforcement tier classification only. It does not govern the scope of the substantive prohibitions of this subtitle. Entities deriving less than five percent (5%) of relevant gross revenues from third-party data transfers remain fully subject to all substantive prohibitions of this subtitle regardless of their tier classification.
(d) Transitional Tier Classification.—Until the Commission publishes a final rule defining "relevant gross revenues" under subsection (b), an entity required to register under Sec. 1113 shall self-classify using total company gross revenues as the denominator for purposes of applying the tier thresholds of subsection (a). Upon publication of the final rule, each entity shall reclassify within sixty (60) days using the methodology specified in the final rule. No civil penalty shall be assessed against an entity for misclassification during the transitional period where the entity self-classified in good faith using total company gross revenues as the denominator and promptly reclassified upon publication of the final rule. This transitional safe harbor applies to tier classification only and does not affect the entity's obligation to comply with all substantive prohibitions of this subtitle regardless of tier classification.
SEC. 1114. MANDATORY BREACH AND VIOLATION SELF-REPORTING.
(a) Any entity subject to this subtitle — whether or not registered under Sec. 1113 — that discovers a violation shall notify the Bureau within seventy-two (72) hours of discovery. The Bureau shall promulgate rules specifying the minimum content required for a timely notification within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service. Until such rules are final, a notification that identifies the notifying entity, describes the general nature of the violation, estimates the number of individuals affected where known, and provides the name and contact information of the entity's designated compliance officer shall be deemed to satisfy the seventy-two (72) hour requirement. The entity shall submit a full incident report within thirty (30) days of the initial notification.
(b) Failure to provide timely notification is an independent violation carrying a fifty percent (50%) penalty enhancement.
(c) Good-faith self-reporting before Bureau detection results in a ninety percent (90%) penalty reduction, subject to all of the following conditions and exclusions:
(1) The reduction is not available for willful violations — meaning violations the entity knew or reasonably should have known it was committing at the time of commission.
(2) The reduction is not available where the entity derived commercial value from the violation prior to self-reporting, including through the sale, licensing, transfer, or use of prohibited data for targeting, advertising, or any other revenue-generating purpose. Derivation of commercial value from a violation creates a rebuttable presumption that the violation was knowing rather than good faith. The entity may rebut this presumption by demonstrating by clear and convincing evidence that the commercial value was derived without actual or constructive knowledge that the underlying data or activity was prohibited under this subtitle.
(3) The reduction is not available for delayed reporting where the delay was intended to conceal the scope of the violation or to continue deriving value from it before disclosure.
(4) The reduction is not available for violations involving Psychological Profiles or Operational Profiles sold or transferred to any political campaign, political action committee, or electoral organization under Sec. 1011(a).
(5) Where both this subsection and Sec. 1122(a) apply to the same violation, the more favorable reduction applies and the two reductions do not stack.
(6) Even where the penalty reduction applies, disgorgement of all profits, revenues, and financial benefits derived from the violation under Sec. 1125 remains available in full and is not reduced by the self-reporting reduction. The reduction applies to civil penalties only. For purposes of this subtitle, Bureau detection occurs when the Bureau receives a credible complaint, referral from a state attorney general, referral from a whistleblower, or any other information sufficient to open a formal investigation — whichever is earliest. A media report alone does not constitute Bureau detection unless the Bureau has independently confirmed its credibility and opened a formal investigation.
SEC. 1115. INDEPENDENT TECHNICAL AUDIT REQUIREMENT.
(a) Every Data Broker, Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, Tier DM-2 Data-Monetizing Collector, and Tier DM-3 Data-Monetizing Collector shall retain, at its own expense, a Bureau-certified independent technical auditor to conduct an annual audit assessing: whether collection systems acquire only permitted data; whether algorithms produce prohibited outputs regardless of input permissibility; whether combination-prohibition isolation is maintained; whether data transfer practices comply with government-acquisition and international transfer restrictions; and whether retention systems purge data within mandatory limits. Audit reports shall be submitted to the Bureau within thirty (30) days of completion, with executive summaries publicly available through the Registry as required by Sec. 1113(d).
(b) Auditor Rotation.—No Bureau-certified auditor may conduct annual audits for the same entity for more than three (3) consecutive years. Following a mandatory rotation period of not less than two (2) years, the same auditor may resume audit services for that entity. An entity that fails to rotate its auditor as required by this subsection shall be deemed to have filed an incomplete annual certification, constituting a Tier 2 violation.
SEC. 1116. AUDIT METHODOLOGY STANDARDS.
(a) The Bureau shall promulgate mandatory audit methodology standards within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service through notice-and-comment rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553, specifying the framework, criteria, technical procedures, sampling requirements, documentation standards, and reporting formats applicable to all third-party technical audits under Sec. 1115. Operational testing details — including specific synthetic data patterns, algorithmic flag triggers, and detection sequences used in Bureau algorithmic testing under Sec. 1117(h) — shall be designated as law enforcement sensitive and withheld from public disclosure under 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(E), on the basis that disclosure would enable regulated entities to design systems that evade detection while maintaining prohibited capabilities. The Bureau shall publish annually a summary description of its algorithmic testing approach sufficient to enable good-faith compliance without disclosing operationally sensitive detection methodology.
(b) Audit methodology standards shall be reviewed and updated not less than every six (6) months by a technical advisory panel appointed by the Director, which shall include not fewer than two independent cybersecurity researchers with no financial relationship to any registered entity, two representatives of civil society privacy organizations — provided that no civil society representative shall have received funding from any registered entity, directly or through their employer or affiliated organization, in excess of five percent (5%) of their organization's annual operating budget in any of the preceding three (3) years — and one representative of the Bureau-certified auditor community. Emergency methodology updates are available only where the Bureau makes a written finding, published in the Federal Register, that a new technical capability, evasion technique, or data collection method poses an immediate, specific threat to enforcement that cannot await the normal notice-and-comment process. The Bureau shall notify the relevant congressional oversight committees within forty-eight (48) hours of any emergency update. There is no waiting period for emergency methodology updates beyond the Federal Register publication requirement.
(c) Bureau-Certified Auditor Program.—The Bureau shall establish a program for certifying independent technical auditors within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service. Certification requires demonstrated expertise in data systems auditing, algorithmic assessment, and privacy compliance. No auditor may be certified who has a financial interest in any entity it audits or who has been employed by any such entity within the preceding five (5) years. The Bureau shall publish a public list of all certified auditors and shall revoke certification for negligent or fraudulent audit reports. The Bureau shall certify a sufficient number of independent auditors to ensure that no single certified auditor holds active audit relationships with entities that together account for more than twenty percent (20%) of total registered Data Broker and Targeting Infrastructure Contractor entities at any time. The Bureau shall publish annually the total number of certified auditors and the distribution of audit relationships across the auditor pool.
(d) Differential Privacy Auditor Track.—The Bureau-Certified Auditor Program shall include a specialized differential privacy auditor track for purposes of certifying compliance with the Differential Privacy Track of Sec. 1094B(d)(1)(B). Certification under this track requires, in addition to the general expertise requirements of this subsection: graduate-level training in differential privacy theory or equivalent demonstrated experience; demonstrated knowledge of the differential privacy parameters, composition accounting frameworks, and noise mechanisms specified in NIST Special Publication 800-226 or its successor publication; and demonstrated experience reviewing production differential privacy implementations. Only auditors holding current certification under the differential privacy auditor track may certify compliance with the Differential Privacy Track of Sec. 1094B(d)(1)(B). The Bureau shall maintain a published list of differential privacy-certified auditors as a distinguished sub-list of the general certified auditor list. Where the Bureau's general certified auditor pool is insufficient to provide qualified differential privacy auditors at the scale required by entities electing the Differential Privacy Track, the Bureau may consult with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to identify qualified candidates from among federal personnel, national laboratory personnel, and academic institutions, provided that all auditors so identified satisfy the financial-interest and employment-history restrictions of this subsection.
SEC. 1117. BUREAU MONITORING, AUDIT, AND ALGORITHMIC TESTING POWERS.
(a) The Bureau may conduct proactive technical audits of any registered entity without a predicate complaint, including direct examination of data systems, databases, algorithms, API integrations, and transfer logs; testing of algorithms using synthetic data to assess outputs; and review of internal policies, contracts, and technical architecture. Every Data Broker holding more than fifty million (50,000,000) United States person records is subject to a proactive Bureau audit not less than once every three (3) years.
(b) Unannounced Audits — Large Entities.—The Bureau may conduct unannounced technical audits of any entity holding more than fifty million (50,000,000) United States person records without prior notice. The Bureau shall not provide advance notice of an unannounced audit. Upon arrival, Bureau auditors shall be provided immediate, unimpeded access to all relevant systems, records, personnel, and documentation. Obstruction of an unannounced audit carries the same criminal penalties as obstruction of a noticed audit under Sec. 1123(f).
(c) Unannounced Audits — Credible Evidence.—The Bureau may also conduct unannounced technical audits of any registered entity, regardless of record volume, upon a written finding by the Director that credible evidence of a violation exists and that advance notice would risk destruction of evidence or obstruction of the audit. The written finding shall be filed with the Bureau's internal records within twenty-four (24) hours of the audit's commencement and transmitted to the relevant congressional oversight committees within five (5) business days.
(d) The Bureau shall maintain a public complaint portal. Upon receipt of a credible complaint, the Bureau shall acknowledge within fifteen (15) business days and determine whether to open a formal investigation within ninety (90) days. For any open investigation, the Bureau shall transmit a status report to the complainant and to the relevant congressional oversight committees every six (6) months from the date the investigation was opened, describing the current status and the anticipated timeline for resolution. The Bureau shall issue a final resolution within two (2) years of opening a formal investigation, except for matters designated as complex with written public justification filed with Congress.
(e) Investigation Stage Disclosure.—Upon opening a formal investigation under this subtitle, the Bureau shall transmit to the entity under investigation, within thirty (30) days of opening the investigation, a written investigation initiation notice specifying:
(1) the general category of violation alleged, described with sufficient specificity to enable the entity to identify the data practice or practices at issue, but not required to disclose confidential investigative methods, third-party complainant information, or evidence protected by law enforcement privilege;
(2) the approximate time period at issue;
(3) whether the Bureau has classified the investigation as standard, with expected resolution not exceeding twelve (12) months, or complex, with expected resolution not exceeding twenty-four (24) months, with a brief written explanation of the basis for a complex designation;
(4) the name and direct contact information of the Bureau's lead investigator; and
(5) a description of the entity's procedural rights during the investigation as specified in subsection (g).
(f) Statute of Limitations Tolling.—The statute of limitations applicable to any civil action arising from the same general category of conduct as an open Bureau formal investigation is tolled from the date the Bureau transmits its investigation initiation notice under subsection (e) until the earlier of:
(1) the date the Bureau publicly resolves the investigation through a final order, consent agreement, or public declination notice; or
(2) twenty-four (24) months from the date of the investigation initiation notice, after which the tolling period expires regardless of whether the Bureau has issued a final resolution. Nothing in this subsection extends or revives any limitations period that had already expired before the Bureau transmitted its investigation initiation notice.
(g) Entity Rights During Investigation.—An entity that has received an investigation initiation notice under subsection (e) has the following procedural rights during the pendency of the Bureau's investigation:
(1) the right to submit written materials, evidence, legal arguments, or factual clarifications to the Bureau at any stage, which the Bureau shall acknowledge in writing within fifteen (15) business days of receipt and shall consider in reaching its final determination;
(2) the right to request a meeting with the Bureau's lead investigator, which the Bureau shall schedule within thirty (30) days of the request;
(3) the right to propose a compliance agreement at any stage of the investigation, which the Bureau shall respond to in writing within sixty (60) days, either accepting, rejecting with written explanation, or proposing modifications; and
(4) the right to seek expedited judicial review in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia where the Bureau fails to comply with any mandatory procedural requirement of this subtitle. The District Court shall issue a ruling on any such application within thirty (30) days of filing. Nothing in this subsection limits the Bureau's authority to conduct its investigation, issue civil investigative demands, conduct unannounced audits, or seek emergency injunctive relief.
(h) Algorithmic Testing Authority.—The Bureau has specific authority to require any registered entity to submit algorithmic models for technical examination. The Bureau may test submitted algorithms by supplying synthetic or anonymized data inputs and examining outputs to determine whether the algorithm produces prohibited outputs regardless of whether inputs are individually permitted. The Bureau shall promulgate standards for the design and use of synthetic and anonymized test data in algorithmic testing through notice-and-comment rulemaking within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service. Operational testing details shall be designated law enforcement sensitive under Sec. 1116(a). A finding that an algorithm produces prohibited outputs constitutes evidence of a combination-prohibition violation and a general prohibition standard violation regardless of the permissibility of its inputs.
(i) Discretionary Volume-Based Audit Authority.—The Bureau may conduct a proactive technical audit of any entity subject to this subtitle — regardless of whether that entity meets the registration triggers of Sec. 1113 or the mandatory audit thresholds of subsection (a) — upon a written finding by the Director that the entity's data collection volume, data transfer relationships, or technical capabilities present a credible risk of violation of this subtitle. For purposes of this subsection, an entity holding Covered Personal Data concerning more than one million (1,000,000) United States persons is presumptively subject to discretionary audit authority. The Bureau shall maintain a non-public watch list of entities subject to discretionary audit monitoring and shall review that list not less than annually.
SEC. 1118. ANNUAL SURVEILLANCE ECOSYSTEM REPORT.
(a) Not later than March 1 of each year, the Bureau shall publish a comprehensive Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report analyzing: Registry filings and material changes; enforcement actions initiated, resolved, and pending; emerging technologies and targeting techniques identified as potentially requiring classification proceedings under Sec. 1095(c); third-party audit compliance rates and identified deficiencies; recommendations to Congress where existing authority is insufficient to address identified threats; aggregate data on private civil actions filed under Sec. 1132 during the preceding year, including the number of actions filed, the number of class actions certified, the aggregate amount of settlements and judgments, and the categories of violations alleged; and Fund balances, deposits, disbursements, and projected needs under Sec. 1112(d)(4).
(b) Missed Deadline.—If the Bureau fails to publish the Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report by March 1 of any year, the Director shall transmit a written explanation to the relevant congressional oversight committees within fifteen (15) days of the missed deadline and shall publish the report not later than sixty (60) days after March 1.
(c) Emerging Technology Classification Proceedings.—Where the Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report identifies an emerging technology or technique as potentially requiring a classification proceeding under Sec. 1095(c), the Bureau shall publish a written determination within ninety (90) days of the Report's publication either initiating a classification proceeding or explaining with specificity why a proceeding is not yet warranted. Where the Bureau declines to initiate a proceeding but the identified technology or technique subsequently reaches commercial deployment by two or more entities together covering more than ten million (10,000,000) United States persons, the Bureau shall initiate a classification proceeding not later than one hundred eighty (180) days after that deployment threshold is reached. The Bureau shall monitor deployment levels of all technologies identified in any Annual Report as potentially requiring classification and shall report deployment status in each subsequent Annual Report until a classification proceeding is initiated or the Bureau makes a final written determination that classification is not warranted.
CHAPTER XII — CONSENT, PENALTIES, AND ENFORCEMENT
SEC. 1121. CONSENT STANDARDS.
No consent is valid under this subtitle unless: freely given without conditioning service access on consent to non-essential data collection; specific to each data category and purpose; informed through a plain-language disclosure written at a reading level no higher than eighth grade as assessed by a standard readability index designated by the Commission by rule, identifying categories of data collected, purposes of collection, third-party recipients, and revocation method; unambiguously expressed through affirmative action and not inferred from silence, inaction, continued use, or pre-checked boxes; and revocable at any time without penalty with full effect within seventy-two (72) hours. Consent bundled in general terms of service, privacy policies, or end-user license agreements is not valid for any purpose under this subtitle. For purposes of this subtitle, a "penalty" does not include any reduction in service functionality that directly and necessarily results from the absence of data the entity can no longer collect or use following revocation of consent, provided the entity discloses at the time consent is sought that revocation of consent for that specific data category will result in the specified reduction in functionality. A penalty does include any service degradation, price increase, or reduction in service quality applied to a user solely to deter revocation of consent rather than as a direct consequence of the absence of the data itself.
Consent disclosures required under this subtitle shall be provided in both human-readable and machine-readable form. The machine-readable form shall conform to a standardized technical format specified by the Commission by rule within two hundred forty (240) days after the date of enactment. Until the Commission publishes a final rule specifying the machine-readable format, entities shall provide consent disclosures in a structured data format — such as JSON or XML — that includes discrete fields for each required disclosure element: data categories collected, purpose of collection, third-party recipients, and revocation method. The Commission shall promulgate rules specifying the required format, content structure, and readability index applicable to consent disclosures under this subtitle within two hundred forty (240) days after the date of enactment. Any consent disclosure that satisfies the substantive requirements of this subtitle and was obtained prior to the Commission's publication of final format rules remains valid and need not be re-obtained solely on account of noncompliance with the format rules, provided the entity brings all new consent disclosures into compliance with the Commission's format rules within ninety (90) days of their publication. No existing consent obtained through mechanisms otherwise invalidated by this subtitle — including consent bundled in general terms of service or privacy policies — is grandfathered by this provision; the grandfathering applies only to format, not to the substantive validity requirements of this subtitle.
SEC. 1122. TIERED CIVIL PENALTIES.
(a) Tier 1 — Technical Violations.—First offense, no knowing conduct, self-reported before Bureau detection: not less than $10,000 and not more than $100,000 per violation, or 0.5% of global annual revenues, whichever is greater. Reduced by fifty percent (50%) where self-reported and remediated in good faith before Bureau detection, subject to the non-stacking provision of Sec. 1114(c)(5).
(b) Right to Cure Tier 1 Violations.—For violations that would qualify as Tier 1 under subsection (a) of this subtitle — meaning a first offense with no knowing conduct — an entity that has not previously received a civil penalty or formal Bureau enforcement notice for the same category of violation within the preceding three (3) years has a right to cure that violation within thirty (30) days of written notice of the potential violation before any civil penalty may be assessed. This right to cure is an entity right, not subject to the Director's discretion under Sec. 1122(i), and creates a complete defense to civil penalty assessment where the cure conditions are fully met. This right is distinct from and in addition to the self-reporting penalty reduction of Sec. 1114(c), which continues to apply independently. Written notice triggering the cure right may be provided by: the Bureau through a formal notice of potential violation; a state attorney general through a written pre-enforcement notice; or a private plaintiff through a pre-suit demand letter meeting the requirements of Sec. 1132(b) of this subtitle. A violation is cured within the meaning of this subsection only where all of the following are completed within the thirty (30) day period following confirmed receipt of written notice:
(1) the specific violating data practice has permanently and completely ceased;
(2) any Covered Personal Data collected, processed, or retained in violation has been permanently and irreversibly deleted, with deletion certified in writing under penalty of perjury to both the Bureau and the notifying party within five (5) business days of cure completion; and
(3) the entity has implemented documented technical and operational controls reasonably designed to prevent recurrence of the same category of violation. The right to cure does not apply to:
(A) knowing or willful violations;
(B) violations that produced commercial benefit through advertising revenue, data sales, or any other revenue-generating use of prohibited data before the entity became aware of the violation;
(C) violations of the absolute prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) on Psychological Profiles;
(D) violations of the Population Coverage Database prohibition of Sec. 1041 and the mandatory divestiture requirement of Sec. 1051;
(E) violations involving transfer of data to a foreign government or Sensitive Nation-State Actor; or
(F) any second or subsequent violation of the same category within three (3) years of a prior violation of that category, whether or not the prior violation was cured. The right to cure is available only once per violation category per three (3) year period. The self-reporting reduction of Sec. 1114(c) and the cure right of this subsection do not stack — where both apply, the entity may elect the more favorable remedy but may not receive both.
(c) Reduction Mechanism Precedence and Election.
(1) General Rule — Single Mechanism per Violation.—Where more than one penalty reduction or complete defense mechanism under this subtitle applies to the same violation, an entity may invoke only one such mechanism with respect to that violation. The available mechanisms are:
(A) the cure right and complete defense under subsection (b);
(B) the ninety percent (90%) self-reporting reduction under the self-reporting provisions of this subtitle; and
(C) the fifty percent (50%) Tier 1 base reduction under subsection (a).
(2) Written Election.—An entity shall make a written election to the Bureau identifying the mechanism it invokes within fifteen (15) days of receiving written notice of the potential violation triggering a cure period under subsection (b), or within fifteen (15) days of the entity's self-report, whichever occurs first. Where no timely written election is made, the Bureau shall apply whichever single available mechanism produces the most favorable outcome for the entity and shall notify the entity in writing of the mechanism applied before issuing any penalty assessment.
(3) Cure Right Superiority.—The cure right of subsection (b) constitutes a complete defense to civil penalty assessment for the cured violation. Where an entity fully satisfies all cure conditions within the applicable thirty (30) day period:
(A) no civil penalty may be assessed for that specific violation;
(B) the self-reporting reduction does not apply to that violation; and
(C) the Tier 1 base reduction of subsection (a) does not apply to that violation.
(4) Self-Reporting Reduction — Conditions for Availability.—The ninety percent (90%) self-reporting reduction is available only where all of the following are satisfied:
(A) the violation was self-reported before Bureau detection;
(B) the entity did not derive commercial value from the violation;
(C) the violation does not fall within any exclusion in the self-reporting provisions of this subtitle; and
(D) the cure right under subsection (b) is either unavailable or the entity did not complete cure within the thirty (30) day period. Where both the cure right and the self-reporting reduction are available, the cure right is the more favorable mechanism where cure can be completed within thirty (30) days.
(5) Tier 1 Base Reduction — Residual Availability.—The fifty percent (50%) base reduction under subsection (a) applies only where:
(A) the ninety percent (90%) self-reporting reduction is unavailable because the entity derived commercial value from the violation or the violation falls within an exclusion in the self-reporting provisions of this subtitle; and
(B) the cure right under subsection (b) is unavailable because the entity received no prior written notice or failed to complete cure within thirty (30) days. It operates as a residual mechanism only.
(6) Willful Violations — No Reduction Available.—No reduction mechanism under this subtitle is available for any violation the Bureau finds was willful. A violation is willful where:
(A) the entity knew it was committing the violation at the time of commission; or
(B) the entity derived commercial value from the violation with actual or constructive knowledge that the underlying practice was prohibited. Derivation of commercial value creates a rebuttable presumption of willfulness.
(7) Interaction with Disgorgement.—No reduction mechanism under this subtitle applies to disgorgement. Disgorgement is calculated independently and is not reduced by any penalty reduction mechanism.
(8) Interaction with Criminal Penalties.—No reduction mechanism under this subtitle applies to criminal penalties. The availability or exercise of any civil penalty reduction does not limit, preclude, or constitute any defense to criminal prosecution.
(d) Tier 2 — Knowing Violations.—Knowing collection, use, or transfer of prohibited data; failure to self-report; materially false annual certification; failure to maintain current registration; failure to cooperate with a Bureau audit: not less than $100,000 and not more than $1,000,000 per violation, or 2% of global annual revenues, whichever is greater. For purposes of this subsection, failure to cooperate with a Bureau audit means:
(1) knowingly failing to provide access to any system, record, or personnel requested by the Bureau within the time specified in a Bureau audit notice or within forty-eight (48) hours of a request made during an unannounced audit;
(2) knowingly providing materially false, misleading, or incomplete information to Bureau auditors; or
(3) knowingly delaying, obstructing, or impeding any audit process, including by asserting privilege over materials not subject to privilege, by producing documents in a form designed to impede review, or by instructing personnel not to cooperate with Bureau auditors. Cooperation that is partial but made in good faith, where access to specific systems is delayed for documented technical reasons and the entity promptly notifies the Bureau of the delay and the expected resolution, does not constitute failure to cooperate under this subsection.
(e) Tier 3 — Willful and Aggravated Violations.—Willful violations; violations affecting more than one million (1,000,000) individuals; repeat violations within five (5) years of a prior penalty; sale of prohibited data to a Federal Agency or Sensitive Nation-State Actor; intentional failure to complete mandatory divestiture; retention of above-threshold records after certified deletion date; violations with intent to evade detection: the minimum penalty for a Tier 3 violation is (i) not less than $50,000 per violation for entities with global annual revenues below $10,000,000; (ii) not less than $500,000 per violation for entities with global annual revenues of $10,000,000 to $100,000,000; and (iii) not less than $1,000,000 per violation for entities with global annual revenues above $100,000,000; or four percent (4%) of global annual revenues per violation, whichever is greater, with no statutory cap, assessed on a per-violation, per-day basis for continuing violations. A continuing violation affecting more than one million (1,000,000) individuals is assessed at the Tier 3 rate from the date on which the number of affected individuals first exceeded one million (1,000,000), with each day of continued violation constituting a separate violation subject to the per-violation, per-day Tier 3 rate from that date. For purposes of calculating the number of affected individuals, the Bureau shall count all individuals whose Covered Personal Data was involved in the violation at any point during the violation period, without deduplication across time periods.
Per-Enforcement-Action Cap. Notwithstanding the per-violation, per-day, and per-record multiplication authorized by this subsection and by Sec. 1122(h) of this subtitle, the total civil monetary penalty assessed against any single entity in connection with any single enforcement action — meaning all civil monetary penalties arising from the same general pattern of conduct, the same course of violations, or the same Bureau investigation, whether assessed in a single proceeding or in multiple related proceedings arising from the same Bureau investigation — shall not exceed the greater of:
(A) fifteen percent (15%) of the entity's total global annual revenues for the most recent complete fiscal year preceding the date on which the Bureau formally initiates the enforcement action; or
(B) five billion dollars ($5,000,000,000) for entities whose total global annual revenues exceed one hundred billion dollars ($100,000,000,000) for the most recent complete fiscal year.
This per-enforcement-action cap does not apply to, and does not in any way limit:
(1) disgorgement of profits under Sec. 1125, which is assessed separately and independently;
(2) criminal penalties under Sec. 1123;
(3) penalties assessed in enforcement actions arising from new violations committed after the conclusion of the earlier enforcement action; or
(4) the following categories of violation, for which no per-enforcement-action cap applies:
(A) violations involving the compilation, sale, transfer, or provision of access to Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, or Precrime Risk Assessments to any political campaign, political action committee, super PAC, political party, electoral organization, or entity primarily engaged in electoral or political advocacy;
(B) violations involving the sale, transfer, or provision of Covered Personal Data to a Federal Agency or Government Contractor in violation of Sec. 1062;
(C) violations involving the maintenance, reconstitution, or assembly of a Population Coverage Database after mandatory divestiture under Sec. 1051; and
(D) violations involving the transfer of Covered Personal Data to any foreign government, Sensitive Nation-State Actor, or entity controlled by a foreign government. The per-enforcement-action cap does not affect the per-day, per-violation, per-record structure for purposes of determining whether the mandatory deregistration triggers of Sec. 1124 have been met. The Director's rulemaking authority under Sec. 1122(h) to establish differentiated absolute penalty ceilings by violation category operates within and subject to the limits established by this per-enforcement-action cap — meaning the Director may establish ceilings lower than those specified in this subsection for specific violation categories, but may not establish ceilings higher than those specified in this subsection for any violation category subject to this cap.
(f) United States-Directed Entity Penalty Calculation.—For purposes of calculating civil penalties under this subtitle against a United States-Directed Entity as defined in Sec. 1003(16), the percentage-based penalty tiers of subsections (a) through (e) shall be applied against the entity's total worldwide revenues from all business activities, not solely revenues derived from activities involving the data of United States persons.
(g) Individual Officer Liability.—In any Tier 2 or Tier 3 case, the Bureau may assess an additional personal civil penalty of up to $1,000,000 against any officer, director, or employee of the entity who exercised direct supervisory authority over the data collection, processing, transfer, or retention practices that gave rise to the violation, or who had operational responsibility for the compliance program applicable to those practices, and who had actual or constructive knowledge of the violation and failed to prevent or disclose it. Individual civil penalties may not be indemnified by the entity. For purposes of this subsection, constructive knowledge requires that the officer had access to information that would have led a reasonably diligent officer in that position to investigate and discover the violation, or that the officer failed to implement reasonable compliance oversight mechanisms that would have detected the relevant category of violation. Constructive knowledge does not arise solely from an officer's general awareness that the entity operates in a regulated industry or that data compliance obligations exist. The civil constructive knowledge standard of this subsection is distinct from the actual knowledge standard required for criminal liability under Sec. 1123(h); civil penalties under this subsection may be assessed on the basis of constructive knowledge, while criminal liability under Sec. 1123(h)(4) requires proof of actual knowledge.
(h) Per-Record Multiplier and Absolute Penalty Ceilings.—For violations involving individually identifiable persons, the Bureau may multiply the base penalty by the number of individuals affected. The per-record multiplier of this subsection and the per-day continuing violation assessment of subsection (e) may both be applied to the same violation, provided that the combined assessed penalty does not exceed the applicable revenue percentage cap calculated on the entity's total global annual revenues. Notwithstanding the revenue percentage cap, the Bureau Director shall apply differentiated absolute penalty ceilings by violation category, calibrated to preserve maximum deterrence for the most serious violations while providing proportionate predictability for less serious ones. The Director shall establish these ceilings by rule within three hundred sixty-five (365) days after the Director's first day of service, through notice-and-comment rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553, applying the following framework:
(1) violations involving the compilation, sale, or transfer of Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, or Precrime Risk Assessments to any political campaign, electoral organization, or Sensitive Nation-State Actor shall carry no absolute ceiling — the revenue percentage cap is the only limit;
(2) violations involving the sale or transfer of Covered Personal Data to a Federal Agency or Government Contractor in violation of Sec. 1062 shall carry no absolute ceiling;
(3) violations involving Population Coverage Database maintenance or reconstitution after mandatory divestiture shall carry no absolute ceiling;
(4) all other Tier 3 violations shall be subject to an absolute ceiling per enforcement action, set by the Director's rule at a level the Director determines is sufficient to deter the largest regulated entities while avoiding penalties that are grossly disproportionate to the specific harm caused. In setting ceilings under category (4), the Director shall consider the nature of the violation, the number of individuals affected, the entity's compliance history, and whether the violation involved deliberate evasion of this subtitle's requirements.
(i) Director Enforcement Discretion.—The Bureau Director has discretion to decline to assess civil penalties under this subtitle, to assess penalties below the applicable minimums, or to defer enforcement action, upon a written finding that:
(1) assessment of the full penalty would be genuinely uncollectable due to the financial condition of the entity, provided the entity has made good-faith efforts to remediate the violation;
(2) the violation resulted from circumstances genuinely beyond the entity's reasonable control, including documented system failures, third-party breaches, or other events that the entity could not have prevented through reasonable compliance measures, and the entity remediated promptly upon discovery; or
(3) the public interest is better served by a negotiated compliance agreement than by a civil penalty proceeding, where the Director documents with specificity why the compliance agreement will produce greater protection for affected individuals than a penalty proceeding. The Director's exercise of discretion under this subsection shall be documented in a written public finding filed with the relevant congressional oversight committees within thirty (30) days of the decision. The discretion in this subsection does not extend to: mandatory referrals to the Attorney General under Sec. 1123(i); disgorgement of profits under Sec. 1125; or any Tier 3 violation involving sale of prohibited data to a Federal Agency or Sensitive Nation-State Actor, for which civil penalties are mandatory and non-waivable.
SEC. 1123. CRIMINAL OFFENSES.
(a) Willful Sale to Government.—Knowingly and willfully selling, licensing, or providing access to Covered Personal Data or any prohibited compilation to a Federal Agency or Government Contractor, knowing or having reason to know that the recipient is a Federal Agency, a Government Contractor acting on behalf of a Federal Agency, or an entity that the transferor knows or has reason to know will provide such data to a Federal Agency or Government Contractor. The government is not required to prove that the defendant had specific knowledge that the transfer would circumvent constitutional warrant requirements; proof that the defendant knew or had reason to know the recipient was a Federal Agency or Government Contractor acting in that capacity is sufficient to establish this element: felony, up to five (5) years, fine under title 18.
(b) Willful Population Coverage Database Maintenance.—Knowingly maintaining a Population Coverage Database after the mandatory divestiture deadline of Sec. 1051(a)(2), or willfully reconstituting one after divestiture: felony, up to seven (7) years, fine under title 18. The increase in the maximum penalty for reconstitution reflects Congress's finding that reconstitution after completed divestiture is a more deliberate and calculated act of circumvention than failure to meet an initial deadline.
(c) Willful Backup Retention After Certified Deletion.—Knowingly retaining above-threshold data in any backup, cold storage, disaster recovery, or archival system after signing or causing to be signed a destruction certification under Sec. 1051(c): felony, up to seven (7) years, fine under title 18. The severity of this offense reflects Congress's finding that post-certification backup retention is inherently willful and constitutes both obstruction of this subtitle's enforcement and a false statement in a federal filing.
(d) Willful International Transfer to Foreign Adversary.—Knowingly transferring Covered Personal Data or a prohibited compilation to a Sensitive Nation-State Actor: felony, up to ten (10) years, fine under title 18.
(e) False Certification or False Statements in Bureau Filings.—Knowingly making a materially false statement in any document submitted to the Bureau under penalty of perjury pursuant to this subtitle — including annual compliance certifications under Sec. 1113(d), destruction certifications under Sec. 1051(c), divestiture inventories under Sec. 1051(a)(1), and any other filing required by this subtitle to be made under penalty of perjury: felony under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, enhanced to up to five (5) years for annual compliance certifications and up to seven (7) years for destruction certifications and divestiture inventories. For all other Bureau filings made under penalty of perjury, the base penalty of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 applies without enhancement.
(f) Obstruction of Bureau Audit.—Knowingly obstructing a Bureau audit, including by altering, deleting, or concealing data after receiving an audit notice, or after the commencement of an unannounced audit: felony, up to five (5) years, fine under title 18.
(g) Pretextual Surveillance Designation.—The criminal offense, elements, and penalties for pretextual surveillance designation are set forth in Sec. 1074 of this subtitle.
(h) Corporate Officer Criminal Liability.
(1) Primary Liability.—Any officer, director, or employee of an entity who exercised direct supervisory authority over the data practices giving rise to a criminal violation under this subtitle, or who had operational responsibility for the compliance function applicable to those practices, is personally criminally liable under this subtitle where they had actual knowledge of the violation and willfully failed to prevent or disclose it.
(2) Senior Officer Liability — Delegation.—A senior officer — including a Chief Executive Officer, President, or equivalent — who delegated operational responsibility for data compliance to another officer or compliance function is not criminally liable under this subtitle solely by reason of that delegation, provided that:
(A) the delegation was made in good faith to a qualified individual or compliance function with adequate resources to perform the delegated responsibilities; and
(B) the senior officer had no actual knowledge that the delegate was failing to perform their compliance obligations, or that the compliance program was structurally incapable of detecting the relevant category of violation.
(3) Delegation Non-Exculpatory Where Actual Knowledge Exists.—The protections of paragraph (2) do not apply where the senior officer had actual knowledge of the violation or of the delegate's failure — including knowledge communicated through written or electronic communications, formal briefings, compliance reports, audit findings, or any other means by which the violation or the compliance failure was brought to the senior officer's attention. The government may establish actual knowledge through any admissible evidence, including but not limited to written communications, electronic messages, meeting records, and testimony from individuals who communicated relevant information to the senior officer.
(4) No Constructive Knowledge Standard for Criminal Liability. For purposes of this subtitle, criminal liability requires actual knowledge. Constructive knowledge — meaning the officer should have known — is not sufficient for criminal liability under this subtitle, though it may support civil liability under Sec. 1122(g). The distinction between actual and constructive knowledge shall be assessed based on what the officer subjectively knew at the time of the violation, not based on what a reasonable officer in their position would have known. The Bureau shall refer to the Attorney General any matter with credible evidence of criminal violation under this subtitle. The Attorney General shall respond in writing within ninety (90) days of receipt of a referral, indicating whether a criminal investigation has been opened and, if not, providing a written explanation of the basis for the decision not to open an investigation. The Director of the Bureau shall transmit the Attorney General's response — or a written notice of non-response if the Attorney General fails to respond within ninety (90) days — to the relevant congressional oversight committees within ten (10) business days of receipt or of the expiration of the ninety (90) day window, whichever is earlier. Where the Attorney General declines to open a criminal investigation or fails to respond within ninety (90) days, the Bureau may refer the matter independently to any United States Attorney for the district in which the violation occurred or in which the entity is incorporated or primarily operates, for independent consideration. A referral to a United States Attorney under this subsection does not require Attorney General approval and is not subject to DOJ supervisory authority.
Criminal Liability — United States-Directed Entity Officers and Agents. Any officer, director, employee, contractor, or agent of a United States-Directed Entity who knowingly authorizes, executes, facilitates, or conceals a transfer of Covered Personal Data concerning United States persons to any entity knowing or having reason to know that the transfer violates Sec. 1033 of this subtitle shall be subject to the same criminal penalties as a principal offender under this subtitle, regardless of where such individual is located or incorporated.
SEC. 1123A. STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS FOR CRIMINAL OFFENSES.
No person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished for any criminal offense under Sec. 1123 unless the indictment is found or the information is instituted within eight (8) years after: (a) the date on which the Bureau or any federal law enforcement agency first discovers, or reasonably should have discovered, the facts constituting the offense; or (b) the date of the last act constituting the offense, including the last day of any continuing violation; whichever is later. For purposes of this subtitle, a continuing violation — including the ongoing maintenance of a Population Coverage Database after the mandatory divestiture deadline, or the ongoing retention of above-threshold data after a certified deletion date — continues until the violation is remediated or the Bureau issues a final order. Nothing in this subtitle shall be construed to shorten the limitations period otherwise applicable under 18 U.S.C. § 3282 or any other provision of federal law where a longer period applies.
SEC. 1123B. CONSPIRACY, AIDING AND ABETTING, AND ACCESSORY LIABILITY.
(a) Any person who conspires with another to commit any offense under Sec. 1123 is subject to the same criminal penalties as a principal offender under that Section, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 371, provided that where Sec. 1123 specifies a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment, the mandatory minimum applies equally to conviction for conspiracy to commit that offense.
(b) Any person who aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces, or procures the commission of any offense under Sec. 1123 is punishable as a principal offender under 18 U.S.C. § 2, subject to the same penalties specified in Sec. 1123 for the principal offense.
(c) Mandatory Contractual Duty and Chain-Of-Custody Liability.—Every entity that transfers Covered Personal Data to any downstream party — whether through sale, license, API access, data cooperative participation, audience-segment licensing, or any other mechanism — shall include in each such transfer agreement an express, written prohibition on the downstream party's sale, license, transfer, or provision of access to that data to any Federal Agency, Government Contractor acting on behalf of a Federal Agency, or any entity the downstream party has reason to know will provide such data to a Federal Agency or Government Contractor. Failure to include this mandatory prohibition creates strict liability for any government sale that results from the downstream chain, without requirement of proof of actual knowledge. Each entity in a transaction chain that includes this mandatory prohibition in its downstream agreement is not subject to strict liability under this subsection solely by reason of a downstream party's violation of that prohibition, but remains subject to liability under subsections (a) and (b) where it had actual knowledge of the violation. The entity that makes the direct transfer of Covered Personal Data to a Federal Agency or Government Contractor is a principal offender under Sec. 1123(a) regardless of how the transaction is characterized — including as a data sale, platform access license, analytics service, or any other commercial designation — and regardless of whether the entity included a mandatory prohibition in its own upstream agreements.
(d) Nothing in this subtitle limits the independent application of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2 and 371 to conduct regulated by this subtitle.
(e) Data Cartel Criminal Liability.—Any person who knowingly participates in a coordinated arrangement among two or more entities for the purpose of collectively assembling a Population Coverage Database, producing Psychological Profiles, or maintaining an Operational Profile capability in violation of Sec. 1032 of this subtitle — where the individual participant knows or has reason to know that:
(1) the combined data holdings and capabilities of all coordinating entities exceed the applicable threshold; and
(2) the coordination is designed in whole or in part to evade the individual-entity thresholds of this subtitle — is subject to criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 371 as if the participant were a principal offender in a violation of Sec. 1123(b), Sec. 1123(c), or Sec. 1123(a) respectively for the corresponding underlying violation, regardless of whether any single entity in the coordination individually commits a criminal violation under those provisions. For purposes of this subsection, a person has reason to know that the coordination exceeds an applicable threshold where: the person participated in business discussions or technical design meetings at which the combined data holdings or capabilities of the coordinating entities were discussed; the person's professional responsibilities include oversight of the data practices constituting the entity's contribution to the coordination; or the person has access to commercial data industry information sufficient to understand that the combined holdings of the coordinating entities exceed ten million United States persons.
Voluntary Withdrawal Safe Harbor: A participant in prohibited coordination under Sec. 1032 who voluntarily and completely withdraws from the coordinated arrangement before the Bureau has formally initiated an investigation — meaning the participant has permanently ceased all data sharing with coordinating entities, terminated all access arrangements enabling cross-entity data combination, and notified the Bureau in writing of the existence of the coordination, the identity of all participating entities to the extent known, and the technical mechanisms through which coordination was achieved — may not be prosecuted under this subsection for conduct prior to withdrawal, and is entitled to the self-reporting penalty reduction of Sec. 1114(c) as applied to civil penalties arising from prior participation. The voluntary withdrawal safe harbor is not available to the entity or individual that initiated or organized the coordination, or that designed the structural mechanisms through which threshold evasion was achieved.
SEC. 1124. MANDATORY DEREGISTRATION.
The Bureau shall order mandatory deregistration of any Data Broker or Targeting Infrastructure Contractor that:
(1) receives a third civil penalty within any seven (7) year period, where at least one of the three penalties was assessed at the Tier 2 or Tier 3 level; or where the aggregate civil penalties assessed against the entity within any seven (7) year period equal or exceed five percent (5%) of the entity's global annual revenues as of the date of the most recent penalty — whichever condition is satisfied first;
(2) is convicted of a criminal violation under Sec. 1123; or
(3) fails to comply with a final Bureau order after exhaustion of appeals, subject to the cure periods in subsection (c).
A deregistered entity is legally prohibited from operating. Continued operation after a deregistration order becomes effective is criminal contempt subject to a fine of not less than $1,000,000 per day. Deregistration applies to successor entities, reorganized entities, and entities acquiring substantially all of the deregistered entity's assets or business operations. Deregistration attaches to any data asset, database, or data system that was part of the deregistered entity's operations at the time of deregistration. A transferee that acquires such an asset with knowledge of the deregistration order takes it subject to the same prohibition.
(b) Market Exclusion for United States-Directed Entities — Foreign Government Data Transfer. A United States-Directed Entity that transfers, sells, licenses, provides access to, or makes available in any form any Covered Personal Data concerning United States persons to any foreign government, foreign intelligence service, or their knowing agents — whether directly or through intermediary entities — is subject to mandatory market exclusion in addition to all other penalties under this subtitle. Market exclusion means:
(1) the entity's services, applications, platforms, and data processing operations involving United States persons are prohibited from operating within the United States or accessing United States persons' data from any location;
(2) application stores, internet service providers, content delivery networks, and domain registrars operating within United States jurisdiction shall, upon Bureau order, remove or block access to the entity's services within thirty (30) days of the order;
(3) no United States person or entity may enter into any new commercial relationship with the excluded entity with respect to data involving United States persons; and
(4) the market exclusion remains in effect until the Bureau determines, after independent audit and verification, that the prohibited transfer relationship has been completely terminated and all transferred data has been destroyed. Market exclusion under this subsection is mandatory upon a finding of violation — the Bureau has no discretion to impose a lesser remedy for a foreign government data transfer violation by a United States-Directed Entity.
(c) Cure Periods.—The following cure periods apply to the "fails to comply with a final Bureau order" trigger of subsection (a)(3) only; no cure period applies to the criminal conviction trigger of subsection (a)(2) or the repeat-penalty trigger of subsection (a)(1):
(1) Administrative and Procedural Violations.—Where the non-compliance consists of a failure to file a required document, maintain a required registration, rotate an auditor, or satisfy any other administrative or procedural obligation under this subtitle, the entity has thirty (30) days from written Bureau notice of non-compliance to achieve full compliance before a deregistration order may issue.
(2) Technical Violations Requiring System Remediation.—Where the non-compliance requires modification of technical systems, data architectures, or infrastructure, the entity has thirty (30) days from written Bureau notice of non-compliance to submit a Bureau approved remediation plan, and ninety (90) days from Bureau approval of the remediation plan to achieve full compliance before a deregistration order may issue. The Bureau shall approve or reject a submitted remediation plan within fifteen (15) days of receipt; failure to act within fifteen (15) days constitutes approval.
(3) Cure periods are available only once per violation of a given final Bureau order. An entity that fails to achieve compliance within the applicable cure period, or that fails to submit a required remediation plan within the thirty (30) day window of paragraph (2), forfeits the cure period and is subject to immediate deregistration.
Procedural Requirements for Deregistration Orders. Before issuing a mandatory deregistration order under subsection (a), the Bureau shall:
(1) provide the entity with written notice of the grounds for deregistration, specifically identifying which trigger under subsection (a) has been met and the factual basis for that determination;
(2) afford the entity a period of not less than thirty (30) days to respond in writing to the notice, including by presenting evidence that the applicable trigger has not been met or that a cure period applies; and
(3) issue a written order explaining the basis for deregistration, addressing any response filed by the entity.
A deregistration order issued without notice and an opportunity to respond as required by this subsection is without legal effect. Deregistration orders are subject to expedited judicial review in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; the D.C. Circuit shall issue a preliminary ruling within thirty (30) days of the entity's filing and a full merits decision within ninety (90) days. The entity may seek a stay of the deregistration order pending judicial review; the D.C. Circuit shall rule on any stay application within seventy-two (72) hours of filing.
(d) Extended Application to Data-Monetizing Collectors and Data Cooperative Participants. The deregistration triggers of subsection (a) apply to any Tier DM-2 or Tier DM-3 Data-Monetizing Collector and to any entity registered under Sec. 1113 as a participant in a Data Cooperative or Audience-Segment Licensing Arrangement, to the same extent as they apply to Data Brokers and Targeting Infrastructure Contractors. For purposes of this subsection, deregistration of a Tier DM-2 entity means loss of Tier DM-2 status and mandatory reclassification as a Tier DM-3 entity subject to Data Broker treatment under Sec. 1003(7) for a period of not less than five (5) years, rather than prohibition from operation — recognizing that Tier DM-2 entities have direct commercial relationships with consumers that cannot be immediately severed. Where a Tier DM-2 entity that has been reclassified under this subsection subsequently accumulates the repeat-penalty triggers of subsection (a)(1) or is convicted under subsection (a)(2), full deregistration and prohibition from operation shall apply.
(e) Coordination Participant Deregistration.—The mandatory deregistration triggers of subsection (a) apply to any entity found to have participated in prohibited coordination under Sec. 1032 of this subtitle to the same extent as they apply to any entity that individually committed the underlying violation. For purposes of applying the repeat-penalty trigger of subsection (a)(1), civil penalties assessed against any entity in connection with the same prohibited coordination arrangement count toward each participating entity's repeat-penalty trigger, reflecting Congress's finding that all participants in a coordinated violation share responsibility for the enforcement record arising from that coordination.
Reduced Deregistration Period for Non-Organizing Participants: An entity that participated in prohibited coordination but was not the organizer, architect, or primary commercial beneficiary of the coordination, and that cooperated fully with Bureau investigation — including providing complete and timely disclosure of all participating entities, coordination mechanisms, data sharing arrangements, and technical systems enabling cross-entity data combination — may petition the Bureau for a reduced deregistration period of not less than one (1) year rather than the standard deregistration period, upon demonstrating by a preponderance of the evidence that:
(1) the entity's individual data holdings never independently exceeded the applicable threshold absent the coordination;
(2) the entity withdrew from the coordination upon learning or reasonably concluding that it was designed to evade applicable thresholds, or within thirty (30) days of receiving legal advice that the coordination might constitute prohibited conduct; and
(3) the entity has implemented documented technical and operational controls — including permanent termination of all data sharing arrangements connecting it to former coordination participants — certified as complete by a Bureau-approved independent technical auditor as defined in Sec. 1003(25). The reduced deregistration period is not available to the entity that initiated, organized, designed, or served as the clearinghouse or technical hub for the prohibited coordination. The Bureau shall rule on any petition within sixty (60) days of receiving a complete submission. Bureau failure to rule within sixty (60) days does not constitute approval — the standard deregistration period applies until the Bureau issues a written ruling.
SEC. 1125. DISGORGEMENT.
(a) The Bureau may seek disgorgement of all profits, revenues, and financial benefits derived from a violation, including advertising revenue from targeting using prohibited data, proceeds from prohibited data sales, and contract proceeds from prohibited government data arrangements. Disgorgement amounts shall be paid into the Data Surveillance Victim Compensation Fund administered by the Bureau, from which distributions shall be made to affected individuals as determined by Bureau rule.
(b) Limitations Period.—The Bureau may seek disgorgement under this subtitle for violations occurring within five (5) years before the date on which the Bureau opens a formal investigation into the relevant conduct.
(c) Relationship to Civil Penalties.—Disgorgement under this subtitle represents actual profits derived from the specific violation and is in addition to, and not a substitute for, civil penalties under Sec. 1122. The Bureau shall ensure that disgorgement amounts do not overlap with penalty amounts assessed on the same revenue stream.
(d) Insolvency and Inability to Pay.—Where disgorgement assessed under this subtitle equals or exceeds the entity's ability to pay in full:
(1) The Bureau shall prioritize collection of disgorgement amounts for distribution to the Victim Compensation Fund over collection of civil penalties for payment to the Treasury, to the extent required to satisfy the disgorgement obligation;
(2) The Bureau may accept a Bureau-approved installment payment plan, provided that the full disgorgement obligation is satisfied within a period not to exceed five (5) years from the date of the disgorgement order;
(3) The disgorgement judgment constitutes a lien on all assets of the entity from the date of the order, which shall survive any bankruptcy proceeding and may not be discharged in bankruptcy;
(4) The Bureau may assess and collect disgorgement separately against any officer, director, or controlling shareholder who personally received financial benefit from the violation, to the extent of that personal benefit, regardless of the entity's ability to pay.
(e) Victim Compensation Fund Distribution.—The Bureau shall publish rules governing the identification, verification, and distribution process for the Data Surveillance Victim Compensation Fund within three hundred sixty-five (365) days after the Director's first day of service. The Bureau shall make distributions from the Fund on a rolling basis not later than one hundred eighty (180) days after affected individuals have been identified and verified in accordance with the distribution rules applicable to a given enforcement action. No distribution from a completed enforcement action shall be delayed solely because other enforcement actions remain pending.
(f) De Minimis Distributions.—The Bureau's distribution rules shall address how to handle situations where the pro rata share of the Fund attributable to an individual claimant is below the administrative cost of processing their claim, including whether to provide for cy pres distribution to organizations representing the interests of affected individuals, aggregate claims below a threshold into a single distribution mechanism, or establish a minimum claim threshold below which individual distributions are consolidated.
SEC. 1126. INJUNCTIVE RELIEF.
(a) The Bureau may seek preliminary and permanent injunctive relief in federal district court to halt any ongoing or imminent violation, including orders to cease data collection, delete data, terminate transfer relationships, and appoint a court-supervised technical monitor for entities demonstrating a pattern of egregious violations. The Bureau is entitled to a rebuttable presumption of irreparable harm upon a showing of probable cause that a violation of Chapters III, IV, or VI is occurring.
(b) Emergency Ex Parte Relief.—Where the Bureau has credible reason to believe that providing notice to a defendant before seeking preliminary relief would result in the destruction of evidence, the acceleration of prohibited data transfers, or other irreversible harm, the Bureau may apply for a temporary restraining order on an ex parte basis in accordance with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(b).
(c) Pattern of Egregious Violations.—For purposes of this subtitle, a "pattern of egregious violations" means two or more Tier 3 violations within a five (5) year period, or any single violation affecting more than fifty million (50,000,000) individuals.
(d) Asset Freeze in Connection with Deregistration.—Where a mandatory deregistration order has been issued under Sec. 1124 and one or more civil actions under Sec. 1132 are pending against the deregistered entity, the Bureau may seek an asset freeze in federal district court to preserve the deregistered entity's assets for the benefit of private plaintiffs and the Victim Compensation Fund. The court may grant an asset freeze upon a showing that:
(1) a deregistration order has been issued and is effective or is under judicial review; and
(2) there is a credible risk that the entity's assets will be dissipated before final judgment in the pending civil actions.
CHAPTER XIII — CONCURRENT STATE ENFORCEMENT AND PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION
SEC. 1131. CONCURRENT STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ENFORCEMENT.
(a) The attorney general of any State may bring a civil action in any federal district court to enforce this subtitle, seeking the same civil penalties, injunctive relief, disgorgement, and costs available to the Bureau. Thirty (30) days' notice to the Bureau is required before filing. The Bureau may intervene as of right but may not use coordination authority to delay a State action.
(b) Emergency Exception to Notice Requirement.—The thirty (30) day notice requirement of subsection (a) does not apply where the state attorney general certifies to the Bureau in writing that immediate filing is necessary to prevent destruction of evidence or ongoing irreparable harm. In such cases, notice shall be provided to the Bureau simultaneously with filing.
(c) Scope of Preemption.—This subtitle establishes a federal floor for the protection of individual privacy and the prohibition of commercial surveillance data acquisition. Nothing in this subtitle preempts any state or local law that provides greater protections for individual privacy than the protections provided by this subtitle. However, the government acquisition prohibition of Sec. 1062 and the contractor laundering prohibition of Sec. 1063, as extended to state and local governments by Sec. 1063(c), supersede any conflicting state or local law, ordinance, regulation, or policy that purports to authorize the purchase, licensing, or acquisition of Covered Personal Data, Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or Population Coverage Databases from commercial sources by any state or local government entity. No state or local law may authorize what Sec. 1062 and Sec. 1063 prohibit. State and local governments retain full authority to enact stronger privacy protections, but may not rely on state law to authorize commercial data acquisition prohibited under this subtitle.
(d) Multi-State Coordination Council.—The Bureau shall establish a Multi-State Coordination Council through which state attorneys general may share investigative information and submit joint enforcement referrals. The Council shall meet not less than quarterly. The Bureau shall respond in writing within sixty (60) days to any joint enforcement referral submitted by two or more state attorneys general through the Council, either opening a formal investigation or explaining with specificity why a federal investigation is not warranted at that time.
(e) Attorney's Fees.—A State that prevails in a civil action under this subtitle is entitled to an award of reasonable attorney's fees and costs from the defendant.
(f) Penalty Sharing.—Fifteen percent (15%) of all civil penalties collected by the Bureau or by a prevailing State in any enforcement action under this subtitle where a State attorney general's office contributed materially to the investigation or prosecution — as certified by the relevant state attorney general and confirmed by the Bureau — shall be remitted to the consumer protection enforcement fund of the contributing State. The Bureau shall promulgate rules defining "material contribution" within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service.
(g) State Enforcement Standards.—A state attorney general bringing an action under this subtitle shall apply the same tiered penalty structure, good-faith reduction provisions, and proportionality standards as apply to Bureau enforcement under Secs. 1122 and 1114(c), and shall consider whether the entity discovered and self-reported the violation, whether the violation was inadvertent, and whether the entity promptly remediated upon discovery.
SEC. 1132. PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION.
(a) Any United States person suffering harm — including dignitary harm, increased risk of harm, chilling of First Amendment-protected activity, or economic harm — from a violation of this subtitle may bring a civil action in any federal district court. Congress finds that the violations for which this section provides statutory damages without separate proof of harm inflict concrete injuries closely related to harms long recognized at common law, as required by TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413 (2021): the covert collection prohibited by Chapter X — the surreptitious capture of audio, video, keystroke, or biometric data — inflicts the injury historically remedied by the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, which TransUnion identifies as a qualifying harm and which is complete at the moment of intrusion regardless of the individual's awareness of it; and the sale, licensing, or other dissemination of a behavioral profile to a third party inflicts the injury, also identified in TransUnion, of disclosure of private information. These statutory damages redress those concrete injuries and are not imposed for the mere risk of future harm.
(b) Pre-Suit Demand Requirement for Tier 1 Violations.—Before filing a private civil action under this subtitle for conduct that would qualify as a Tier 1 violation under Sec. 1122(a), a plaintiff must provide written notice to the defendant specifically identifying: the specific provision alleged to be violated; the specific data practice alleged to constitute the violation; the approximate time period during which the violation is alleged to have occurred; and the specific relief sought. Written notice must be delivered by a means providing evidence of confirmed receipt — including certified mail with return receipt requested, overnight courier with delivery confirmation, or electronic mail to the entity's designated compliance contact published in its Registry filing under Sec. 1113(d) or on its public website, confirmed by an automated read receipt or equivalent mechanism. The defendant has thirty (30) days from confirmed receipt to cure the violation in full compliance with Sec. 1122(b) of this subtitle. Where the defendant fully completes cure within the thirty (30) day period and provides the plaintiff with written certification of completed cure within five (5) business days of cure completion, no private civil action for that specific violation may be filed by that specific plaintiff based on the same specific violating conduct during the same violation period.
This pre-suit demand requirement does not apply to:
(1) violations qualifying as Tier 2 or Tier 3 under Secs. 1122(d) or (e);
(2) violations involving covert collection under Chapter X;
(3) violations of the absolute prohibition on Psychological Profiles under Sec. 1011(a);
(4) violations affecting individuals who are minors;
(5) any situation where the plaintiff has a specific, documented factual basis to believe that providing pre-suit notice would result in destruction of evidence or obstruction of discovery; or
(6) defendants that have already received a pre-suit demand for the same category of violation from any plaintiff within the preceding twelve (12) months.
A plaintiff who fails to comply with the pre-suit demand requirement where it applies may not recover attorney's fees and costs under subsection (c) for the period prior to filing, but this failure does not bar the underlying civil action or limit any available damages.
The following additional rules govern the pre-suit demand requirement of this subsection:
(7) Classification Uncertainty Safe Harbor — Attorney's Fees.—Where a plaintiff had a reasonable good-faith basis at the time of filing to believe that the conduct alleged would constitute a Tier 2 or Tier 3 violation, the failure to provide pre-suit demand under this subsection shall not result in denial of attorney's fees and costs, even if the court ultimately finds the violation to be a Tier 1 violation. A reasonable good-faith basis exists where:
(A) the Bureau had previously classified the same category of conduct as Tier 2 or Tier 3 in a published enforcement action, formal consent order, or published interpretive guidance; or
(B) the plaintiff alleged knowing conduct and had, at the time of filing, specific articulable facts supporting that allegation. This safe harbor applies to the attorney's fees question only and does not affect any other aspect of the court's adjudication of the underlying civil action.
(8) Defendant Tier Classification Estoppel.—A defendant that has argued before the Bureau or in any prior civil action under this subtitle that the same category of conduct constitutes only a Tier 1 violation is estopped from arguing in any subsequent private civil action that a plaintiff was required to provide pre-suit demand as a precondition to recovering attorney's fees and costs, with respect to the same category of conduct. "Same category of conduct" means the same data collection, processing, retention, or transfer practice, without regard to whether the specific individuals affected or the specific time period at issue are identical.
(9) Demand Letter Standards.—A pre-suit demand letter under this subsection shall be deemed to satisfy the written notice requirement where it:
(A) identifies the specific statutory provision alleged to be violated by section number;
(B) describes the data practice alleged to constitute the violation in sufficient factual detail to enable the defendant to identify the specific practice and take corrective action;
(C) states the approximate time period during which the violation is alleged to have occurred;
(D) identifies the specific relief sought; and
(E) is delivered by a means providing evidence of confirmed receipt.
A deficient demand letter does not trigger the thirty (30) day cure period. A defendant that receives a deficient demand letter shall notify the plaintiff of the specific deficiency within ten (10) business days of receipt, and the plaintiff shall have ten (10) additional business days to transmit a corrected demand letter. A defendant that fails to notify the plaintiff of a deficiency within ten (10) business days waives any objection to the demand letter's sufficiency.
(c) Remedies: actual damages not less than $1,000 per violation; statutory damages of $5,000 to $50,000 per violation without proof of actual harm; punitive damages for willful or reckless violations; injunctive and declaratory relief; and attorney's fees and costs. In any class action maintained under subsection (e) of this subtitle, a court may reduce per-violation statutory damages below the $5,000 minimum under subsection (c) of this subtitle where the aggregate award would be grossly disproportionate to the actual harm caused and to the defendant's culpability. Where the aggregate statutory damages calculated by multiplying the applicable per-violation amount by the number of class members would exceed one percent (1%) of the defendant's total net worth as reported in the most recent audited financial statements available at the time of calculation, the court shall conduct a mandatory proportionality review before entering any final judgment for statutory damages. In conducting any proportionality review under either the discretionary or mandatory standard, the court shall consider: the severity of the violation; the number of individuals affected and the nature of harm to each; whether the violation was knowing, willful, or inadvertent; the defendant's prior enforcement history under this subtitle; the deterrent effect of the aggregate award; and whether the aggregate award would result in effective insolvency without serving the remedial purposes of this subtitle. No proportionality reduction may reduce any individual class member's statutory damages award below five hundred dollars ($500) per violation regardless of the aggregate reduction applied. This proportionality provision applies only to aggregate statutory damages in class actions certified under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 and does not limit individual plaintiff statutory damages in individual actions, actual damages awards, punitive damages for willful or reckless violations, or disgorgement ordered under Sec. 1125 of this subtitle.
(d) Definition of Violation for Statutory Damages.—For purposes of subsection (c), a "violation" means:
(1) for conduct that would constitute a Tier 1 violation under Sec. 1122(a), each discrete act of non-compliant collection, processing, or transfer by the entity; and
(2) for conduct that would constitute a Tier 2 or Tier 3 violation under Sec. 1122(d) or (e), each individual United States person whose Covered Personal Data was collected, processed, retained, or transferred in the non-compliant act. In any class action under subsection (e), a court may reduce the per-violation statutory damages award below the $5,000 minimum where the court finds in writing that the aggregate award would be grossly disproportionate to the actual harm caused and to the defendant's culpability, taking into account the nature of the violation, the defendant's financial condition, and the deterrent purposes of this subtitle.
(e) Actions may be maintained as class actions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. The Bureau shall have the right to appear as amicus curiae in any class action proceeding under this subtitle and to submit written comments to the court regarding the adequacy of any proposed settlement. The court shall consider but is not bound by any Bureau submission. Approval of any proposed settlement shall remain exclusively within the court's authority under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(e).
(f) Parallel Proceedings.—Where a Bureau enforcement proceeding and a private civil action under this subtitle are pending simultaneously against the same defendant for substantially the same conduct, the district court may stay the private action pending resolution of the Bureau proceeding, or may consolidate proceedings where appropriate. A final judgment in a Bureau enforcement proceeding does not preclude a private action for the same conduct, but disgorgement amounts paid to the Victim Compensation Fund shall be credited against any disgorgement or restitution ordered in a private action to prevent double recovery.
(g) Statute of Limitations.—The limitations period for any civil action under this subtitle is five (5) years from discovery. For ongoing violations, the period does not run until the violation has ceased. For violations involving covert collection under Chapter X or any collection conducted without the knowledge of the affected individual, the limitations period runs from the date the individual discovers, or through the exercise of reasonable diligence could have discovered, that the collection occurred. Constructive discovery does not arise solely from a public announcement that an entity generally engages in data collection practices.
(h) Whistleblower Awards.—Any individual providing the Bureau with original information not already known to the Bureau that leads to a successful enforcement action resulting in final civil penalties exceeding one million dollars ($1,000,000) after exhaustion of all appeals shall be entitled to a whistleblower award of ten percent (10%) to thirty percent (30%) of the first one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000) in penalties collected, plus five percent (5%) to fifteen percent (15%) of any penalties above one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000). Before any award is paid, the Bureau shall conduct a procedural review evaluating whether the information was original and not manufactured or embellished; whether the whistleblower participated in the violation; and whether the whistleblower took reasonable steps to report through internal channels before approaching the Bureau, except where internal reporting would have been futile or would have subjected the whistleblower to retaliation. Awards shall be paid from the Supplemental Enforcement Fund. Whistleblowers who knowingly provide false information are subject to civil penalties under Sec. 1122 and criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1001. For purposes of this subsection, information is "original" if it is derived from the whistleblower's independent knowledge or analysis, is not already the subject of a formal Bureau investigation, and materially advances the Bureau's ability to establish the violation. Information is not rendered non-original solely because the general subject matter has been publicly reported, provided the whistleblower's specific information adds material new facts, documentation, or evidence not available in public reporting.
(i) Foreign Direction Disclosure Award.—Any individual who discloses to the Bureau, the FBI, or the JEOS Special Ethics Advocate specific, credible evidence that an organization is subject to Foreign Direction as defined in Sec. 1003(12) shall be entitled to full anti-retaliation protection under the whistleblower standards of this subtitle regardless of whether the disclosure results in a civil penalty enforcement action. Where such disclosure leads to a successful criminal prosecution, the whistleblower shall be entitled to an award from the Supplemental Enforcement Fund of between five percent (5%) and fifteen percent (15%) of any fines collected in the criminal proceeding. This provision explicitly covers disclosures by members or employees of any organization, including political and advocacy organizations, who have direct evidence of foreign government operational direction, material funding, or strategic coordination of that organization's activities.
(j) Anti-Retaliation.—No entity subject to this subtitle shall discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or in any other manner discriminate against any individual in the terms and conditions of employment because the individual filed, instituted, or caused to be filed or instituted a civil action under this subtitle, testified or participated in such an action, or provided information to any attorney or representative in connection with such an action. An individual who suffers retaliation in violation of this subsection may elect either:
(1) reinstatement to their former position with back pay and interest for the period of wrongful termination or demotion, plus compensation for any special damages sustained as a result of the retaliation, including litigation costs and reasonable attorney's fees; or
(2) in lieu of reinstatement, front pay in an amount determined by the court to compensate for the expected future earnings loss resulting from the retaliation, plus compensation for any special damages sustained as a result of the retaliation, including litigation costs and reasonable attorney's fees.
(k) Concurrent State-Court Jurisdiction.—An action under this section may be brought in any State court of competent jurisdiction. Nothing in this section requires a plaintiff in such a court to establish injury beyond that required by the law of the forum.
SEC. 1133. GENERAL RULEMAKING.
The Commission is authorized to promulgate rules under 5 U.S.C. § 553 to carry out this subtitle, including: specifying additional categories of Covered Personal Data and defining thresholds for prohibited compilations as technology evolves; prescribing consent disclosure form and content; establishing technical standards for combination-prohibition isolation; classifying new data types and targeting techniques including under the authority of Sec. 1095(c); establishing standards for Bureau-certified auditors; prescribing disgorgement methodology; administering the Data Surveillance Victim Compensation Fund; and defining "relevant gross revenues" for purposes of the Data-Monetizing Collector tier classifications under Sec. 1003(7). The Commission shall complete initial rulemakings for combination-prohibition isolation technical standards and for disgorgement methodology within three hundred sixty-five (365) days after the date of enactment. Where the Commission determines that a new data type, targeting technique, or collection practice poses an immediate and specific threat to the population protected by this subtitle that cannot await standard notice-and-comment rulemaking, the Commission may issue a written public finding designating the data type, technique, or practice as presumptively prohibited pending completion of rulemaking. Such a preliminary designation:
(1) is not itself a binding rule but creates a strong presumption in any Bureau enforcement proceeding that use of the designated data type, technique, or practice violates this subtitle;
(2) places regulated entities on immediate notice that continued use presents credible enforcement risk;
(3) triggers an expedited rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553 that shall be completed within sixty (60) days of the preliminary designation; and
(4) is subject to judicial review as a final agency action upon completion of the expedited rulemaking. The Commission shall transmit any preliminary designation to the relevant congressional oversight committees within forty-eight (48) hours of publication.
(b) Entity-Type Compliance Guides.
(1) Publication Requirement.—Within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service, the Bureau shall publish separate plain-language compliance guides for each of the following entity categories. Each guide shall specify, in a single document, the complete set of obligations under this subtitle applicable to that entity type, organized to permit compliance without cross-referencing provisions of the statute not cited in the guide:
(A) search engine operators and query-based information retrieval services;
(B) social media platform operators and content recommendation system operators;
(C) e-commerce retailers and direct-to-consumer merchants using first-party transactional data;
(D) data brokers and targeting infrastructure contractors required to register;
(E) small businesses as defined in this subtitle;
(F) nonprofit organizations relying on the nonprofit and civil society organization exemption;
(G) licensed healthcare entities, mental health application operators, and clinical research institutions;
(H) financial institutions relying on the financial, tax, and economic carve-outs; and
(I) news organizations, investigative journalism organizations, and documentary filmmakers relying on the journalism and press exemption.
(2) Guide Contents.—Each guide shall include:
(A) a plain-language summary of all substantive prohibitions applicable to that entity type, written at a reading level no higher than eighth grade as assessed by a standard readability index designated by the Commission by rule;
(B) a compliance checklist identifying each affirmative obligation applicable to that entity type, including registration, audit, certification, consent, retention, and reporting obligations, with the applicable deadline for each;
(C) a decision tree enabling an entity to determine which safe harbors, exemptions, and conditional permissions apply to its specific data practices;
(D) illustrative examples of data practices that are clearly permitted, clearly prohibited, and subject to conditions;
(E) a list of all Bureau rules, Commission rules, and published interpretive guidance specifically applicable to that entity type, with citations and effective dates; and
(F) contact information for the Bureau Compliance Assistance Program.
(3) Update Obligation.—Each guide shall be updated:
(A) within sixty (60) days of any final Bureau or Commission rule that materially affects the obligations of the relevant entity type;
(B) within sixty (60) days of any published enforcement action that materially clarifies the application of any provision to the relevant entity type; and
(C) not less than annually in all events.
(4) Entity-Specific Consultation.—An entity that has reviewed the applicable compliance guide and has a good-faith question about whether a specific data practice is permitted may seek a written determination from the Bureau. The Bureau shall prioritize written determination requests from Small Businesses and from entities that have demonstrated good-faith compliance efforts.
CHAPTER XIV — GOVERNMENT AGENCY CARVE-OUTS AND RELATIONSHIP TO EXISTING FEDERAL LAW
SEC. 1141. GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR GOVERNMENT PROGRAM CARVE-OUTS.
(a) The Population Coverage Database prohibition of Sec. 1041 does not apply to the Federal Government's own data holdings where: the data is held exclusively for the specific statutory function described in this Chapter; the data is technically isolated from all commercial data ecosystems, with isolation verified by annual independent audit; and the data is prohibited from transfer to any commercial entity or to any other Federal Agency outside specific statutory authorization. The Bureau shall have audit authority over all carve-out holders to verify isolation compliance.
(b) The carve-outs in this Chapter are strictly conditional. An agency that transfers carve-out data to a commercial entity, uses it for a purpose outside its statutory function, or fails to maintain technical isolation loses carve-out protection and is subject to the full prohibition of Sec. 1041 and the enforcement provisions of this subtitle. Where the Bureau finds that a Federal Agency has lost carve-out protection under this subsection, the Bureau shall:
(1) transmit a written finding to the relevant congressional oversight committees within thirty (30) days;
(2) require the agency to submit a remediation plan within sixty (60) days; and
(3) refer the matter to the relevant Inspector General for investigation.
Individual agency officials responsible for the violation are subject to personal civil liability under Sec. 1122(g) and, where the violation is willful, personal criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 242.
(c) Audit Authority and Staffing.—The annual independent audit required by subsection (a) shall be conducted by Bureau technical staff authorized under this subsection, with results transmitted to the agency's Inspector General and to the relevant congressional oversight committees within thirty (30) days of completion. To conduct audits of Federal Agency data holdings under this Chapter, the Bureau Director is authorized to:
(1) apply for and maintain a facility security clearance at the TOP SECRET/SCI level;
(2) designate Bureau technical staff for security clearance adjudication at appropriate levels for access to the specific programs being audited; and
(3) enter into memoranda of understanding with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the relevant agency Inspector General where classified program access requires joint oversight arrangements. Where Bureau technical staff do not hold clearances sufficient to audit a specific classified program, the audit of that specific program shall be conducted jointly with the agency's Inspector General and the relevant Intelligence Community Inspector General, with results transmitted to the Bureau in a form consistent with applicable classification requirements.
(d) Interim Inter-Agency Data Sharing.—Existing inter-agency data sharing arrangements authorized by specific federal statute as of the date of enactment are not prohibited by the "specific statutory authorization" requirement of subsection (a) during a transition period ending two hundred seventy (270) days after the date of enactment. During that transition period, the Commission shall publish a notice inviting each Federal Agency holding data under a Chapter XIV carve-out to submit written comments identifying the existing inter-agency data sharing arrangements it relies upon and the statutory authority for each. Not later than two hundred seventy (270) days after the date of enactment, the Commission shall publish guidance identifying which existing inter-agency data sharing arrangements satisfy the "specific statutory authorization" standard of subsection (a), which do not, and the remediation timeline required for non-qualifying arrangements. Until the Commission publishes that guidance, no existing inter-agency data sharing arrangement authorized by specific federal statute shall be deemed a violation of this subtitle solely because it has not yet been reviewed under this provision.
SEC. 1142. HEALTHCARE AND BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION CARVE-OUTS.
(a) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.—CMS may hold health claims and beneficiary data required for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and marketplace administration. Use is limited to program administration, reimbursement, fraud prevention, and public health research conducted under strict data use agreements. Transfer to commercial entities or to law enforcement agencies outside specific statutory authorization is prohibited. Data use agreements under this subsection shall require: (1) that research access is limited to de-identified or pseudonymized data wherever technically feasible; (2) that data not be re-identified or combined with commercial data sources; (3) that data be destroyed upon completion of the research; and (4) that the research institution certify annual compliance. The Bureau, in consultation with HHS, shall publish model data use agreement terms within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service.
(b) Social Security Administration.—SSA may hold earnings, identity, and benefit records required for Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, and Medicare enrollment administration. Use is limited to benefit determination, identity verification for program participation, and legally required reporting. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited. State Disability Determination Services agencies operating under contract with SSA to adjudicate disability claims are covered by this carve-out to the extent they process SSA data strictly for disability determination purposes; their use of SSA data for any commercial purpose, including the sale or licensing of claim data to any third party, is prohibited under this subtitle regardless of state law authorization.
(c) Veterans Affairs.—VA may hold medical, benefits, and service records required for veteran healthcare, benefits administration, and service-related research. Use is limited to veteran service delivery and research conducted under strict data use agreements approved by VA's privacy officer. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(d) Indian Health Service.—IHS may hold health records required for the provision of healthcare services to eligible beneficiaries under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(e) Office of Personnel Management.—OPM may hold personnel records required for federal employment administration under 5 U.S.C. § 1103, and personnel suitability, security, and credentialing records for which it is responsible under applicable law and Executive order. OPM data holdings shall comply with the highest security classification standards applicable to federal personnel records as specified by the Office of Management and Budget in coordination with CISA, updated not less than every two (2) years. Annual penetration testing is required. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(f) Health Resources and Services Administration.—HRSA is covered under Sec. 1145(d) of this Chapter.
(g) Clinical Research and Epidemiological Study Exemption.—The prohibitions of Chapters III, IV, V, and VI of this subtitle do not apply to the collection, processing, and retention of Covered Personal Data in connection with the following research activities, subject to all conditions of this subsection:
(1) clinical trials conducted under an Investigational New Drug Application or Investigational Device Exemption approved by the Food and Drug Administration under 21 C.F.R. Parts 312 or 812, where data collection is governed by the informed consent requirements of 21 C.F.R. Part 50 and the Institutional Review Board requirements of 21 C.F.R. Part 56;
(2) epidemiological research studies approved by an Institutional Review Board constituted and operating under 45 C.F.R. Part 46 and conducted under a written protocol that includes documented human subjects protections; and
(3) post-market surveillance studies required by the Food and Drug Administration under 21 C.F.R. Part 822 or equivalent post-market surveillance authority.
This exemption is subject to all of the following conditions, violation of any of which immediately terminates the exemption:
(A) data is collected only from individuals who have provided informed consent meeting the applicable regulatory standard, specifically identifying what data will be collected, how it will be used, who will have access, and the retention period;
(B) data is used exclusively for the specific research purpose stated in the approved IND, IDE, IRB protocol, or FDA-mandated surveillance requirement, and is not used for commercial advertising targeting, data brokerage, commercial data sale, or any commercial purpose other than regulatory submission and peer-reviewed publication;
(C) data is not sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any Data Broker, Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, commercial advertising platform, political organization, or entity whose primary business involves commercial use of personal data for non-research purposes — transfers to contract research organizations, academic medical centers, and regulatory affairs consultants strictly for regulatory submission and research operations are permitted;
(D) data is retained only for the period required by applicable FDA regulations and Good Clinical Practice guidelines and is permanently deleted upon expiration of the applicable regulatory retention period unless a specific IRB-approved protocol extension requires longer retention for defined scientific purposes; and
(E) this exemption does not extend to any data practice producing a Psychological Profile as defined in Sec. 1003(2) — clinical and epidemiological research may collect detailed health, behavioral, biological, and clinical data under this exemption but may not compile personality scores, emotional vulnerability assessments, or any other output constituting a Psychological Profile, which remains subject to the absolute prohibition of Sec. 1011(a).
SEC. 1143. FINANCIAL, TAX, AND ECONOMIC CARVE-OUTS.
(a) Internal Revenue Service.—The IRS may hold tax records as required for tax administration. Existing confidentiality protections under 26 U.S.C. § 6103 are hereby reinforced. Transfer of tax records to any entity not specifically authorized under § 6103, including any commercial entity, is prohibited. Nothing in this subtitle expands IRS authority to share taxpayer data beyond what § 6103 currently permits. Criminal liability under 26 U.S.C. § 7213 for unauthorized disclosure of tax information by IRS employees and contractors remains fully applicable alongside the penalties of this subtitle and is not superseded or displaced by this subtitle.
(b) FINCEN and BSA Compliance.—Financial institutions, as defined in 31 U.S.C. § 5312, may maintain transaction records required under the Bank Secrecy Act, conduct Customer Due Diligence as required by FinCEN regulations, and file Suspicious Activity Reports and Currency Transaction Reports. These activities are permitted provided that: such data is operated solely within the institution's direct customer relationships; transaction monitoring data and CDD records are not sold, licensed, or transferred to any third party other than FinCEN or a law enforcement agency pursuant to valid legal process; and such data is not used as input to any system producing Psychological Profiles or Precrime Risk Assessments for any purpose other than the institution's own fraud prevention and AML compliance. Transaction monitoring data and Suspicious Activity Report data maintained under this subsection shall not be used for any purpose other than AML compliance, fraud prevention, and legally required regulatory reporting. Such data shall not be used as an input to credit scoring models, behavioral profiling systems, or any system producing outputs beyond the AML/fraud prevention function.
(c) FDIC, NCUA, and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.—These agencies may hold depositor and plan participant records required for their respective resolution and insurance functions. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(d) Fair Credit Reporting Act Coordination.—Consumer reporting agencies, as defined in 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(f), may hold consumer report data as required and authorized by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This carve-out is conditional: it does not apply where a consumer reporting agency sells, licenses, or provides access to its database to any Federal Agency for any purpose other than evaluating a Federal credit application or a background check specifically authorized by statute; participates in any data cooperative, audience-segment licensing arrangement, or commercial data sale outside the consumer reporting relationship; or combines consumer report data with data from non-credit sources to produce outputs beyond the consumer reporting function. Consumer reporting agencies holding Population Coverage Databases shall be subject to the registration requirements of Sec. 1113 and the annual audit requirements of Sec. 1115, but are not required to divest data holdings necessary to fulfill FCRA obligations, provided they demonstrate technical isolation of FCRA data from commercial data operations in annual technical audits. The Commission, in consultation with the CFPB, shall issue rules within three hundred sixty-five (365) days of enactment specifying the technical isolation standards required.
SEC. 1144. STATISTICAL, RESEARCH, AND EDUCATIONAL CARVE-OUTS.
(a) Census Bureau.—The Census Bureau may hold decennial census and American Community Survey data as required by Article I, § 2 of the Constitution and 13 U.S.C. § 141. Existing confidentiality protections under 13 U.S.C. § 9 are hereby reinforced. The 72-year restriction on public release of individual decennial census records, administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, is likewise reinforced. Transfer to any commercial entity or law enforcement agency is prohibited. The Census Bureau may not be compelled by any Federal Agency to provide individually identifiable census data for any law enforcement, immigration enforcement, national security, or commercial purpose. No officer or employee of the Census Bureau shall voluntarily provide, or cause to be provided, individually identifiable census data to any Federal Agency, state or local law enforcement agency, commercial entity, or foreign government for any law enforcement, immigration enforcement, national security, or commercial purpose, regardless of whether compulsion has been applied. Violation of this prohibition constitutes a criminal offense under 13 U.S.C. § 214. Nothing in this subsection limits existing exceptions under 13 U.S.C. § 8 or any other provision of law that specifically authorizes disclosure in connection with criminal proceedings.
(b) Statistical Agencies.—The Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Center for Health Statistics, Bureau of Justice Statistics, and National Agricultural Statistics Service may hold individual-level survey data required for their respective statistical missions. Such data shall be used exclusively for statistical purposes, shall not be transferred to law enforcement agencies or commercial entities, and shall comply with the statistical confidentiality standards of the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act, 44 U.S.C. § 3561 et seq.
(c) Department of Education.—The Department of Education may hold Federal Student Aid records, FAFSA data, and National Student Loan Data System records required for federal student aid administration under the Higher Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1001 et seq. Transfer to commercial entities for any purpose other than financial institution loan servicing under written contract with mandatory data use limitations is prohibited. Mandatory data use limitations under this subsection shall include at minimum: prohibition on use of transferred data for any purpose other than loan servicing; prohibition on sale or transfer to any third party; prohibition on use for marketing, profiling, or advertising; and requirement to destroy data within ninety (90) days of the conclusion of the servicer's servicing relationship.
(d) National Center for Education Statistics.—NCES may hold longitudinal student survey data required for education research under 20 U.S.C. § 9543. Existing confidentiality protections under the Education Sciences Reform Act, 20 U.S.C. § 9573, are reinforced. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
SEC. 1145. PUBLIC HEALTH, EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, AND HEALTHCARE WORKFORCE CARVE-OUTS.
(a) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.—CDC may hold disease surveillance data required for public health monitoring and response under 42 U.S.C. § 264. Use is limited to disease surveillance, epidemiological research, and public health emergency response. Transfer to commercial entities or law enforcement agencies is prohibited. CDC may not transfer disease surveillance data, vaccination records, or testing records to any law enforcement agency or immigration enforcement agency for any purpose. Nothing in this subsection limits the authority of a detention facility's medical staff or a treating provider to access or share an individual detainee's own medical records as necessary for direct medical care, or as required by applicable law governing medical care in detention facilities; CDC disease surveillance data held under this carve-out does not constitute individual clinical records and is not the source of health information to be used in individual detention or deportation proceedings.
(b) Food and Drug Administration.—FDA may hold drug adverse event reporting system data and medical device reporting data required for post-market safety surveillance. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(c) Federal Emergency Management Agency.—FEMA may hold disaster assistance recipient records required for disaster relief administration under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. Use is limited to disaster assistance administration. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(d) Health Resources and Services Administration.—HRSA may hold healthcare workforce and patient data required for administration of health programs under its statutory mandate, including programs administered under the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, federally qualified health center programs, and rural health programs. Use is limited to program administration and statutory health workforce functions. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited. Patient data held by federally qualified health centers operating under HRSA programs is subject to the same protections as this subsection and may not be transferred to any commercial entity, law enforcement agency, or immigration enforcement agency.
SEC. 1146. TRANSPORTATION AND BORDER ENFORCEMENT CARVE-OUTS.
(a) Federal Aviation Administration.—The FAA may hold pilot certification, aircraft registration, and air traffic control records required for aviation safety regulation under 49 U.S.C. § 40103. Transfer to commercial entities beyond what is expressly required for aviation safety purposes is prohibited.
(b) Transportation Security Administration.—The TSA may hold Secure Flight passenger prescreening data and PreCheck enrollment data required for aviation security screening under 49 U.S.C. § 44901. Use is strictly limited to aviation security screening functions. TSA data shall not be used for general law enforcement purposes, immigration enforcement, or shared with commercial entities.
(c) Customs and Border Protection — Narrow Carve-Out.—CBP may hold traveler entry records, manifest data, and targeting system data strictly necessary to perform its statutory functions of: preventing the entry of contraband, including narcotics and weapons; identifying individuals subject to active federal arrest warrants; screening for individuals on terrorism watchlists maintained under legally authorized and court-supervised programs; and identifying victims of human trafficking and sex trafficking through its anti-trafficking programs. This carve-out is narrow and conditional. CBP may not: use its data holdings to conduct general immigration enforcement beyond identifying individuals with valid removal orders who are encountered at ports of entry; share data with commercial entities; build Psychological Profiles or Operational Profiles on travelers; or use data for any domestic law enforcement purpose unrelated to CBP's border security and customs functions. CBP's data holdings shall be subject to annual Bureau audit to verify compliance with this narrow carve-out. The Automated Targeting System shall be reviewed by the Bureau within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment to assess compliance with this subtitle. Where the Bureau's review finds that the Automated Targeting System incorporates commercially purchased Covered Personal Data prohibited under Sec. 1062, CBP shall submit a remediation plan to the Bureau within sixty (60) days of the Bureau's finding and shall remove the non-compliant commercial data inputs from the ATS within one hundred eighty (180) days of the finding, replacing them with data sources constituting Constitutionally Equivalent Collection. The core ATS functions — screening travelers against terrorism watchlists, customs violations, and anti-trafficking programs — shall continue during and after remediation; only the non-compliant commercially-purchased data components shall be excised. The Bureau shall transmit its ATS review findings to the relevant congressional oversight committees within thirty (30) days of completion.
(d) USCIS.—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may hold immigration application and status records required for immigration benefit adjudication under 8 U.S.C. § 1103. Use is limited to immigration benefit processing and status verification. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited. USCIS data shall not be shared with ICE for enforcement purposes except pursuant to a warrant or court order issued in connection with a criminal investigation or prosecution by a court of competent criminal jurisdiction. A civil order of removal alone does not constitute authorization for data sharing under this subsection, except as provided in the following sentence. Notwithstanding the foregoing, USCIS may share with ICE the minimum data necessary to confirm the identity and immigration status of a specific named individual who is the subject of a final judicial order of removal issued by an immigration court of competent jurisdiction, solely for the purpose of effectuating that specific, identified order of removal. Data shared under this sentence:
(1) is strictly limited to the named individual identified in the removal order;
(2) may not be used to identify, locate, surveil, or initiate enforcement action against any individual other than the named subject of the order;
(3) may not be combined with any commercially acquired Covered Personal Data; and
(4) may not be retained by ICE beyond the completion of the specific removal proceeding for which it was shared. A final judicial order of removal issued by an immigration court of competent jurisdiction constitutes authorization for data sharing under this sentence; an administrative order of removal that has not received judicial confirmation does not.
(e) ICE — Strictly Narrow Carve-Out.—Immigration and Customs Enforcement may hold records strictly necessary for civil immigration enforcement pursuant to final judicial orders of removal and criminal enforcement of federal immigration crimes. ICE may not purchase, license, or access any Covered Personal Data from commercial sources, including from data brokers, location data providers, or commercial surveillance platforms. ICE's data acquisition is limited to Constitutionally Equivalent Collection — warrant, subpoena, or consent. ICE's use of fusion center data, commercial location data, and social media monitoring tools that constitute Operational Profiles or Psychological Profiles is prohibited under the government acquisition prohibition of Sec. 1062 and no carve-out under this Chapter exempts ICE from that prohibition.
SEC. 1147. LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE CARVE-OUTS.
(a) FBI Criminal Justice Information Services.—The FBI's CJIS division may hold fingerprint databases, criminal history records, and background check systems required for criminal justice purposes under 28 U.S.C. § 534. This carve-out is conditional: CJIS data shall not be combined with commercial data sources to produce Operational Profiles or Psychological Profiles; CJIS records shall not be sold or licensed to commercial entities; and the CJIS Next Generation Identification biometric database shall not be used for commercial identity verification or commercial surveillance applications. CJIS operations shall be subject to annual Bureau audit to verify compliance.
(b) Drug Enforcement Administration — Narrow Carve-Out.—DEA may hold records strictly necessary for criminal investigation and prosecution of federal drug offenses, including records derived from DEA's own investigation activities, confidential informant relationships, court-authorized interceptions, and foreign law enforcement cooperation. Pending the Bureau's review under this subsection, DEA shall not enter into any new contracts for commercial Covered Personal Data or expand the scope of any existing commercial data contract. DEA's DICE and DARTS databases shall be reviewed by the Bureau within one hundred eighty (180) days of enactment to assess compliance with the government acquisition prohibition of Sec. 1062. Any DEA data program that is found to rely on commercially purchased Covered Personal Data must terminate within one hundred eighty (180) days of the Bureau's review. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this subsection limits DEA's authority to: conduct investigations through court-authorized wiretaps under Title III; operate through DEA attaché offices in foreign countries under applicable foreign law and bilateral law enforcement treaties; cooperate with foreign law enforcement and intelligence services through the Special Operations Division or equivalent programs; or use data obtained through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection in domestic and international drug trafficking investigations. The carve-out restriction applies only to the bulk commercial purchase of Covered Personal Data about United States persons from domestic commercial data brokers and surveillance platforms.
(c) Bureau of Prisons.—BOP may hold inmate records required for correctional administration. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(d) United States Marshals Service.—The USMS may hold fugitive tracking records and Witness Security Program records strictly necessary for its statutory functions under 28 U.S.C. §§ 561-569 and 18 U.S.C. § 3521. Fugitive tracking records may be used solely for the apprehension of individuals subject to active federal warrants. Witness Security Program records are classified and may not be transferred to any agency, commercial entity, or foreign government under any circumstances. USMS data shall not be combined with commercial data sources or used to produce Psychological Profiles. Nothing in this subsection prohibits the USMS from disclosing a participant's identity to medical providers in a genuine medical emergency, or from disclosing identity to prosecutors in a criminal proceeding against the participant, in accordance with 18 U.S.C. § 3521 and established USMS program protocols. Such disclosures are not "transfers" within the meaning of this subtitle.
SEC. 1148. HOUSING, AGRICULTURE, AND OTHER PROGRAM CARVE-OUTS.
(a) HUD.—The Department of Housing and Urban Development may hold assisted housing program records required for administration of housing assistance programs. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(b) USDA Farm Programs.—The Farm Service Agency and Rural Development offices may hold farm operator and loan recipient records required for administration of agricultural support programs. Transfer to commercial entities is prohibited.
(c) VA Housing Programs.—VA housing loan guaranty and housing assistance programs are covered under the carve-out of Sec. 1142(c) to the extent the relevant data is held within the direct veteran service delivery relationship. Data held solely for VA housing loan guaranty or housing assistance administration that is not otherwise covered by Sec. 1142(c) is subject to the same conditions: use limited to the specific housing program function; transfer to commercial entities prohibited.
(d) United States Postal Service — Mail Isolation Control and Tracking.—The United States Postal Service may continue to operate the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program and any successor exterior mail imaging program as required for mail processing, security, and law enforcement cooperation, subject to the following conditions: MICT imagery and associated metadata may be used solely for: mail processing and delivery operations; responding to specific law enforcement requests supported by a court order, warrant, or grand jury subpoena directed to a specific named individual or a specific identified investigation; and USPS security investigations involving suspected mail fraud, mail theft, or threats to postal infrastructure. MICT imagery and metadata may not be: transferred to or accessed by any Federal Agency, state or local law enforcement agency, or any other entity absent a specific court order, warrant, or grand jury subpoena; used to build behavioral profiles, track the associations or activities of political organizations, or monitor communications patterns of journalists, activists, or political figures; sold, licensed, or transferred to any commercial entity under any circumstances; retained for any individual piece of mail beyond one hundred eighty (180) days from the date of imaging absent a court order requiring preservation for a specific ongoing investigation; or aggregated into any database constituting an Operational Profile or Population Coverage Database as defined in this subtitle. The MICT program shall be subject to annual audit by the Postal Service Inspector General, with results transmitted to the relevant congressional oversight committees. Abuse of MICT data outside the conditions of this subsection constitutes a violation of this subtitle and, where committed by a government official, criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 242.
SEC. 1149. VOLUNTARILY PROVIDED PUBLIC PARTICIPATION DATA.
Any information voluntarily submitted by an individual to a Federal Agency in the individual's own name for the purpose of participating in a legally established government process, program, or proceeding — including Federal Register comment submissions, FOIA requests, permit applications, rulemaking participation, public hearing testimony, benefit applications, and request for comment submissions — is permitted to be held by the receiving agency for the purpose of that specific process. Such data: may not be aggregated into a behavioral profile; may not be combined with data from other sources to produce Covered Personal Data compilations beyond what is directly relevant to the specific proceeding; may not be transferred to any commercial entity; and may not be used for any law enforcement, immigration enforcement, or national security purpose absent specific judicial authorization. Citizens' participation in government processes shall not be used against them. Retention of such data beyond the close of the relevant proceeding is governed by applicable Federal Records Act schedules and is not affected by this subtitle.
CHAPTER XV — RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER LAW AND IMPLEMENTATION
SEC. 1151. JEOS ARCHIVE EXEMPTION.
(a) The JEOS monitoring application installed on enrolled personal devices of Covered Officials is exempt from the prohibitions of Secs. 1101, 1102, 1103, and 1104 pursuant to Sec. 1225 of subtitle B of this Act, which is the operative carve-out provision for the JEOS monitoring application. Communications archives maintained by JEOS are additionally exempt from the Operational Profile prohibition of Sec. 1031 and the Population Coverage Database prohibition of Sec. 1041, to the extent that such archives are maintained exclusively for the oversight functions authorized by subtitle B of this Act and subject to the Minimization Procedures and retention framework of that Section.
(b) This exemption is strictly conditional. JEOS communications archives may not be: queried, analyzed, or disclosed for any purpose other than the review procedures specified in subtitle B; sold, licensed, or transferred to any Federal Agency, commercial entity, or foreign government; used to produce Psychological Profiles, Precrime Risk Assessments, or commercial Operational Profiles concerning any Covered Official; or retained beyond the periods specified in the Minimization Procedures of subtitle B.
(c) JEOS technical infrastructure shall be audited annually by the Comptroller General to verify compliance with the conditions of subsection (b). Any use of JEOS archives outside the conditions of subsection (b) constitutes a violation of this subtitle subject to the Tier 3 civil penalty, and where committed by a government official, criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 242.
ASPPEA Statutory Implementation Schedule Relationship to Chapter XIV Government Agency Carve-Outs. Nothing in this subtitle or in Chapter XIV of this subtitle creates any conflict between the JEOS monitoring framework of subtitle B (EAJOA) and the government agency carve-outs of Chapter XIV. JEOS data collected from Covered Officials who work at agencies holding carve-out data under Chapter XIV flows exclusively to the JEOS classified judicial archive under subtitle B (EAJOA) and is not subject to the data isolation or transfer restrictions of Chapter XIV. The carve-outs in Chapter XIV govern the agency's own data holdings and do not limit or expand the scope of JEOS monitoring of individual Covered Officials working at those agencies.
SEC. 1152. ASPPEA IMPLEMENTATION MILESTONES.
The following milestones govern implementation of subtitle A (ASPPEA). These milestones are separate from and independent of the JEOS implementation schedule in subtitle B (EAJOA). Milestones running from the date of enactment may not be extended under any circumstances except by Act of Congress. Milestones running from the Director's first day of service may not be extended except by Act of Congress, provided that if the Director appointment is delayed beyond two hundred ten (210) days after enactment for any reason, the Director-dependent milestones shall run from the actual first day of service without adjustment to the enactment-based milestones.
(1) Date of Enactment: Government acquisition prohibition (Sec. 1062) takes effect; international transfer prohibition (Sec. 1033) takes effect; contractor laundering prohibition as extended to state and local governments (Sec. 1063) takes effect; the audio, video, keystroke, and real-time biometric identification prohibitions of Chapter X take effect; the JEOS Archive Exemption (Sec. 1151) takes effect; the political campaign data prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) takes effect; Bureau of Consumer Protection assumes interim enforcement authority pending Bureau establishment; OPM begins compilation of inaugural Director candidate pool under Sec. 1111(a)(1).
(2) 90 Days After Enactment: All entities holding Population Coverage Databases shall submit certified divestiture inventories to the Bureau of Consumer Protection, acting as interim enforcement authority, under Sec. 1051(a)(1). Bureau of Consumer Protection publishes interim enforcement policy and complaint portal; interim combination-prohibition and advertising Tier 2 guidance published; Registry portal goes live in beta under Bureau of Consumer Protection interim administration; OPM transmits certified inaugural Director candidate pool to the President under Sec. 1111(a)(1).
(3) 120 Days After Enactment: President nominates inaugural Director from pool, or transmits written explanation to Congress and OPM if no candidate in the pool is deemed suitable, triggering the second pool process under Sec. 1111(a)(2).
(4) 135 Days After Enactment: Population Coverage Database mandatory destruction complete under Sec. 1051(a)(2); certified destruction reports due within five (5) business days of completion; Federal Agency contract inventories due to Comptroller General and relevant congressional oversight committees under Sec. 1062(d).
(5) 180 Days After Enactment: Existing federal government data broker contracts terminated (Sec. 1062(c)); existing state and local government commercial data contracts terminated (Sec. 1063(c)); CBP and DEA data program reviews initiated; Commission publishes proposed rule defining "relevant gross revenues" for Data-Monetizing Collector tiers; Commission publishes proposed rule defining eligible compliance costs for the Structured Compliance Credit under Sec. 1041(d).
(6) 210 Days After Enactment: Senate confirmation vote on inaugural Director, or deemed confirmation by operation of law if Senate has not acted within ninety (90) days of nomination. Director begins service. Bureau formally established. FTC Chair designates inaugural Bureau leadership team. Not later than three hundred sixty-five (365) days after enactment, regardless of pool process status, the most qualified candidate in the then-current pool as determined by the technical review panel's published ranking shall be deemed nominated and confirmed by operation of law if no Director has yet begun service — no presidential rejection or Senate inaction shall delay Bureau establishment beyond this outer deadline.
(7) 270 Days After Enactment: Bureau publishes final rules on FCRA carve-out technical isolation standards in consultation with CFPB under Sec. 1143(d); Commission publishes final rule defining "relevant gross revenues."
(8) 180 Days After Director's First Day of Service (approximately 390 days after enactment if appointment proceeds on schedule): Advertising data taxonomy (Chapter IX) takes effect; triggered registration window opens; Bureau technical audit division operational with minimum fifty (50) technical staff; Bureau publishes mandatory audit methodology standards under Sec. 1116(a); Bureau publishes Registry technical specifications under Sec. 1113(d); Bureau publishes rulemaking on 72-hour notification content standards under Sec. 1114(a); Bureau publishes algorithmic testing standards framework under Sec. 1117(h); Bureau publishes interim guidance on government agency carve-out technical isolation requirements (Sec. 1141); Commission publishes guidance on prohibited advertising data combinations under Sec. 1095(b).
(9) 240 Days After Director's First Day of Service: Commission publishes final rules specifying consent disclosure format, content structure, and readability index under Sec. 1121; entities have ninety (90) days from publication to bring new consent disclosures into compliance.
(10) 365 Days After Director's First Day of Service (approximately 575 days after enactment if appointment proceeds on schedule): All triggered-registration entities must be registered under Sec. 1113; final rules on consent standards, annual certification, and audit requirements published; Bureau-certified auditor program operational under Sec. 1116(c); Bureau reaches 150 FTE minimum; first proactive audit cohort eligible.
(11) 730 Days After Director's First Day of Service (approximately 940 days after enactment if appointment proceeds on schedule): Data-Monetizing Collector registration complete; first Annual Surveillance Ecosystem Report published under Sec. 1118; algorithmic audit program operational; independent annual audit requirement takes effect for all Data Brokers, Targeting Infrastructure Contractors, and Tier DM-2 and DM-3 Data Monetizing Collectors under Sec. 1115; Bureau reaches 300 FTE minimum.
(12) Year 3 — 1,095 Days After Enactment: Full ASPPEA enforcement regime operational; first enforcement action report published; Data Surveillance Victim Compensation Fund makes first distribution to affected individuals; Bureau staffing scales to 500 FTE floor if Registry enrollment thresholds under Sec. 1112(a) are met.
SEC. 1153. AMENDMENT TO THE ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS PRIVACY ACT.
Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2522, is hereby amended by adding at the end the following new section:
"§ 2524. Judicial Executive Oversight System — Authorized Interception.
(a) Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, the interception of Official Communications by the automated screening system of the Judicial Executive Oversight System established under the Executive Accountability and Judicial Oversight Act does not constitute an unlawful interception under section 2511 of this title, because:
(1) such interception is expressly authorized by statute;
(2) such interception is conducted by and under the authority of an Article III judicial body, not a law enforcement agency; and
(3) Covered Officials, as a condition of holding their positions, have been provided written notice that Official Communications on Approved Communications Systems and on enrolled personal devices are subject to JEOS monitoring, which constitutes consent within the meaning of section 2511(2)(d) of this title.
(b) Official Communications stored in JEOS archives do not constitute stored communications subject to the access restrictions of chapter 121 of this title with respect to JEOS access to those archives for purposes authorized under the Executive Accountability and Judicial Oversight Act, because JEOS is the lawful judicial custodian of such communications.
(c) The collection of metadata from Official Communications by JEOS does not constitute the installation or use of a pen register or trap and trace device within the meaning of chapter 206 of this title, because JEOS metadata collection is conducted pursuant to this section's statutory authorization and under Article III judicial authority."
SEC. 1154. CFAA IMMUNITY FOR AUTHORIZED AUDITORS AND INVESTIGATORS.
No person who accesses, examines, copies, or retains information from a computer, computer system, electronic communications system, or stored data while conducting an authorized audit, investigation, or technical examination under this subtitle shall be subject to liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1030, provided that such access is conducted within the scope of the authorized activity and in accordance with the procedures specified in this subtitle. This immunity applies to:
(1) Bureau employees and contractors conducting proactive, noticed, and unannounced audits under Sec. 1117;
(2) Bureau-certified independent technical auditors conducting annual third-party audits under Sec. 1115, acting within the scope of their Bureau certification; and
(3) state attorneys general and their designated technical investigators conducting enforcement actions under Sec. 1131, where such access is pursuant to a civil investigative demand, administrative subpoena, or court order issued in connection with a state enforcement action under this subtitle. This immunity does not extend to access that exceeds the scope of the authorized audit, to access conducted in bad faith or for purposes unrelated to the authorized enforcement activity, or to the retention or use of accessed information beyond what is necessary for the authorized purpose.
SEC. 1155. RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER FEDERAL PRIVACY AND CONSUMER PROTECTION LAW.
This subtitle supplements and does not displace existing federal privacy and consumer protection law. Entities remain subject to all applicable obligations under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 6801-6809, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1692-1692p, and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 6501-6506. Where this subtitle imposes more restrictive requirements than those statutes, this subtitle controls. Nothing in those statutes excuses non-compliance with this subtitle.
SEC. 1156. RELATIONSHIP TO PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT AND FEDERAL RECORDS ACT.
(a) JEOS communications archives maintained under subtitle B of this Act do not satisfy the preservation obligations of the Presidential Records Act, 44 U.S.C. §§ 2201-2209, or the Federal Records Act, 44 U.S.C. §§ 3101-3107. Covered Officials and their agencies remain subject to all PRA and FRA obligations independently of this subtitle.
(b) Where a communication is simultaneously subject to JEOS archiving under subtitle B and preservation obligations under the PRA or FRA, both obligations apply independently. JEOS custody does not constitute FRA or PRA-compliant preservation, and FRA or PRA-compliant preservation does not substitute for JEOS archiving.
SEC. 1157. FINDINGS REGARDING LESS RESTRICTIVE ALTERNATIVES TO ADVERTISING DATA PROHIBITIONS.
Congress finds that the following less restrictive regulatory approaches to the harms identified in Sec. 1002 were considered and are insufficient:
(1) Consent-based targeting is insufficient. The power asymmetry between platforms that control essential infrastructure and individual users makes genuine, informed consent unattainable at scale; terms-of-service "consent" is a contract of adhesion, not meaningful choice; and because manipulation of this kind, to the extent it is effective, operates precisely when its target is unaware, consent to data collection is not consent to cognitive exploitation, and disclosure does not by itself dispel the risk of such exploitation.
(2) Purpose limitation — restricting political but permitting commercial use — is insufficient because a psychographic profile built for commercial advertising is technically and functionally identical to one repurposed for political targeting; the same model and data serve both, and the resulting commercial-to-political pipeline cannot be reliably policed.
(3) Transparency is insufficient for the same reason consent is: manipulation of this kind, where effective, depends on the target's unawareness, and after-the-fact disclosure neither undoes any effects of prior exposure nor deters the assembly of the targeting infrastructure.
(4) Algorithmic auditing is a complementary enforcement tool, not a substitute for prohibition. This subtitle requires extensive auditing, but auditing detects violations only after they occur; for the irreversible harm of cognitive manipulation, a prophylactic prohibition is the only adequate remedy.
(5) Data-security requirements are insufficient because the harms identified in Sec. 1002 arise from the intended, authorized use of lawfully held data, not primarily from breaches. Stronger security around a Population Coverage Database does not address the harm that the database exists and can be queried, sold, transferred to foreign governments, or purchased by government agencies without a warrant; security is necessary but does not substitute for the structural prohibition of Sec. 1041.
(6) A prohibition limited to foreign-government access is insufficient because the databases that enable foreign exploitation are the same databases that, as Sec. 1002 documents, domestic agencies and commercial actors have used to undermine constitutional rights — through the FBI's COINTELPRO program, the circumvention of Fourth Amendment warrant requirements by commercial data purchase, and enforcement profiling of political organizations, journalists, and activists. A foreign-access-only rule would leave that infrastructure intact; the structural prohibition of Sec. 1041 is necessary to protect United States persons against both foreign exploitation and domestic authorized-use harms of the kind documented throughout this subtitle's findings.
SEC. 1158. RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.
Nothing in this subtitle shall be construed to prohibit a Federal Agency from: acquiring Covered Personal Data directly from an individual with that individual's informed consent; accessing information genuinely in the public domain not compiled through the operation of a Data Broker; acquiring Covered Personal Data through constitutionally valid warrant, subpoena, or court order directed to the original holder; or conducting lawful foreign signals intelligence collection under chapter 36 of title 50, United States Code, subject to all applicable minimization requirements.
Nothing in this subtitle shall be construed to prohibit a law enforcement agency from:
(1) assembling an Operational Profile of a specific named criminal suspect using location, communications, or behavioral data obtained exclusively through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection — meaning each data point was obtained through warrant, subpoena, court order, or the explicit consent of the data subject — where such assembly is for the purpose of investigating a specific criminal offense and is limited in scope and duration to the specific investigation;
(2) using location data, communications records, financial records, or other data obtained through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection in a specific criminal investigation, even if the aggregate of such data constitutes an Operational Profile of the suspect; or
(3) sharing intelligence obtained through Constitutionally Equivalent Collection with other law enforcement agencies for specific, identified law enforcement purposes.
(a) Artificial Intelligence Training and Public Content.—Nothing in this subtitle prohibits the collection, retention, or use of publicly available content — including text, images, audio, or other media posted publicly on the internet — as training data for machine learning or artificial intelligence systems, or for search and retrieval by machine learning or artificial intelligence systems. Such collection and use is permitted where the content is retained in association with a user's self-selected pseudonymous identifier or platform-assigned account identifier, provided that the system does not link, infer, or derive the real-world identity of the individual behind that identifier — meaning the system does not associate the pseudonymous or platform identifier with any name, government-issued identification, physical address, biometric data, or other information identifying the specific natural person who controls that account — and does not combine the content or associated identifiers with Covered Personal Data in a manner that produces or is capable of producing a Psychological Profile, Operational Profile, or Precrime Risk Assessment concerning any identified or identifiable United States person. The use of public content as a language or model corpus, with or without pseudonymous identifiers, is not regulated by this subtitle provided that no linkage to real-world identity is established and no prohibited profile is produced. For purposes of this subtitle, a pseudonymous identifier that a user has themselves associated with their real-world identity — through public disclosure on the same platform or elsewhere — does not thereby become Covered Personal Data solely by reason of that self-disclosure; the prohibition is on the system establishing or inferring that linkage, not on a user voluntarily making it.
(b) Impersonation Adjudication Carve-Out.—Nothing in subsection (a) prohibits a platform operator from undertaking a targeted identity verification process for the sole purpose of adjudicating a specific, formally submitted impersonation complaint — meaning a complaint submitted by or on behalf of a specific named individual alleging that an account is falsely representing itself as that individual. In conducting such a process, the platform operator may collect, retain, and use identity verification information solely to determine whether the account in question is operated by the claimed individual or by an impersonator, and to take action on the account consistent with that determination. Identity information collected under this subsection:
(1) may be used only for the specific impersonation adjudication for which it was collected and for no other purpose, including advertising targeting, behavioral profiling, or any other commercial purpose;
(2) may not be retained beyond the conclusion of the adjudication process and any associated appeals or legal proceedings;
(3) may not be shared with any third party, data broker, government entity, or advertising platform; and
(4) may not be used to retroactively link the account's prior content or behavioral history to the verified real-world identity for any purpose other than the impersonation proceeding itself. A platform that conducts identity verification under this subsection and subsequently uses the verified identity information for any purpose other than the impersonation adjudication commits a violation of Chapter III of this subtitle.
(c) Academic Research.—Nothing in this subtitle shall be construed to prohibit academic research conducted under and in strict compliance with the Academic Research Carve-Out of Sec. 1011(c), including the analysis, processing, or retention of Psychological Profile data authorized under that carve-out.
SEC. 1159. EFFECTIVE DATE.
Except as otherwise specified in Sec. 1152, this subtitle takes effect one hundred eighty (180) days after the date of enactment. The government acquisition prohibition, international transfer prohibition, contractor-laundering prohibition, and covert collection prohibitions take effect on the date of enactment. References to the Director's first day of service in this subtitle and in Sec. 1152 refer to the date on which the inaugural Bureau Director begins service under Sec. 1111(a), which is expected to occur not later than two hundred ten (210) days after enactment but is subject to the appointment process and outer deadline provisions of Sec. 1111(a). The outer hard deadline of three hundred sixty-five (365) days after enactment established in Sec. 1111(a)(1) ensures that the Director's first day of service — and therefore the commencement of every Director-dependent milestone — occurs no later than that date, regardless of appointment process outcomes.
CHAPTER XVI — EXEMPTIONS FOR SPECIFIC ENTITY TYPES
SEC. 1161. SMALL BUSINESS EXEMPTION.
(a) General Exemption.—Notwithstanding Sec. 1113(a) and Sec. 1113(d), a Small Business as defined in Sec. 1003(23) is exempt from:
(1) the registration obligation of Sec. 1113, including the per se Tier 2 violation for operating without registration under Sec. 1113(d), which does not apply to any entity qualifying as a Small Business under Sec. 1003(23);
(2) the mandatory independent technical audit requirement of Sec. 1115;
(3) the proactive Bureau audit authority of Sec. 1117(a), provided that the Bureau retains full discretionary audit authority under Sec. 1117(i) upon receipt of a credible complaint or credible evidence of violation; and
(4) Data-Monetizing Collector tier classification under Sec. 1003(7), meaning a Small Business is not classified as Tier DM-1, DM-2, or DM-3 solely by reason of its data transfer activities provided it satisfies all three threshold criteria of Sec. 1003(23).
(b) Substantive Prohibitions Apply Without Exception.—The procedural exemption of this subtitle does not exempt any Small Business from any substantive prohibition of this subtitle. A Small Business remains fully subject to: the absolute prohibition on Psychological Profiles under Sec. 1011(a); the prohibition on Precrime Risk Assessments under Sec. 1021; the prohibition on Operational Profile assembly under Sec. 1031; the coordinated data arrangement prohibition under Sec. 1032; the international transfer prohibition under Sec. 1033; the Population Coverage Database prohibition under Sec. 1041 and the mandatory divestiture requirement of Sec. 1051; the government acquisition prohibition of Sec. 1062 and contractor laundering prohibition of Sec. 1063; the general prohibition standard of Sec. 1091 and all provisions of Chapter IX; the covert collection prohibitions of Chapter X; and all consent standards of Sec. 1121.
(c) Permitted Data Transfers.—A Small Business that transfers Covered Personal Data to a third party for commercial purposes is not in violation of the substantive prohibitions of this subtitle solely by reason of that transfer, provided all of the following conditions are satisfied:
(1) the transferred data consists solely of contact information — names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers — assembled from the direct commercial or subscriber relationship between the Small Business and the individuals whose contact information is transferred, and does not include any sensitive data category listed in Sec. 1091(a) or any other Covered Personal Data beyond those four contact data elements;
(2) the Small Business does not transfer contact information concerning individuals who have opted out of such transfers, maintains a current suppression list, and applies it to all transfers;
(3) the Small Business does not knowingly transfer data to any Data Broker, Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, entity registered under Sec. 1113, or entity the Small Business has reason to know will combine the transferred data with Covered Personal Data from other sources to produce Psychological Profiles, Operational Profiles, or Population Coverage Databases; and
(4) the total number of individuals whose contact information is transferred in any calendar year does not exceed two hundred thousand (200,000). Contact information transferred in compliance with conditions (1) through (4) of this subsection does not, by reason of the transfer alone, violate the general prohibition standard of Sec. 1091(a), because contact information consisting solely of names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers does not individually or in combination enable the assessment of psychological state, emotional condition, cognitive vulnerabilities, susceptibility to persuasion, political belief, religious belief, health condition, sexual orientation, or financial distress within the meaning of Sec. 1091(a). Nothing in this paragraph limits the application of Sec. 1091 to the downstream recipient's use of transferred contact data.
(d) Loss of Exemption.—A Small Business that exceeds any threshold of Sec. 1003(23) in any calendar year loses exemption status as of January 1 of the following calendar year and must register under Sec. 1113 within sixty (60) days. Loss of exemption is prospective.
(e) Anti-Structuring.—No entity or combination of entities shall structure, reorganize, or contractually arrange their data holdings or corporate relationships for the purpose of causing any entity to fall below a threshold of this subtitle that would otherwise be exceeded. Deliberate structuring in violation of this subsection is a per se Tier 2 violation.
(f) Bureau Guidance.—The Bureau shall publish plain-language guidance within one hundred eighty (180) days after the Director's first day of service addressing the application of this subtitle to common Small Business data practices, written at a reading level accessible to business owners without legal counsel, and updated not less than annually.
(g) Self-Assessment Safe Harbor.—A Small Business that completes the Bureau's published Small Business Self-Assessment Checklist and retains a copy with supporting documentation shall not be subject to civil penalty for misclassification as a Small Business or for failure to register, provided that:
(1) the answers provided were truthful and complete to the best of the entity's knowledge and belief at the time of completion;
(2) the entity did not have actual knowledge of facts that, if accurately reported, would have caused the checklist to produce a non-qualifying result;
(3) the entity completes and retains an updated checklist annually, not later than January 31 of each calendar year; and
(4) upon any material change in the entity's data practices, commercial relationships, revenues, or data holdings that may affect its qualification as a Small Business, the entity completes and retains an updated checklist within thirty (30) days of the material change. This safe harbor applies to procedural obligations of registration, audit, and tier classification only and does not exempt any Small Business from any substantive prohibition of this subtitle.
SEC. 1162. EMPLOYEE AND APPLICANT DATA CARVE-OUT.
(a) Scope.—This section governs the collection, processing, retention, and use of Covered Personal Data concerning employees, independent contractors, and job applicants by employers acting in their capacity as employers. This section does not exempt any employer from the substantive prohibitions specified in subsection (e).
(b) Permitted Uses Without Separate Consent.—An employer may collect, process, retain, and use Employee Data for Employment Purposes without obtaining separate consent under Sec. 1121, where "Employee Data" means Covered Personal Data collected by an employer from or about an individual in connection with the employment relationship and where "Employment Purpose" means any use directly and reasonably necessary for: hiring and onboarding; payroll, benefits, and tax compliance; performance management, evaluation, and workforce planning; workplace safety monitoring and compliance; compliance with applicable legal obligations; internal investigation of workplace misconduct; and termination and separation administration, provided:
(1) the employer provides clear written notice to employees and applicants before or at the time data collection begins of what categories of Employee Data are collected, the specific Employment Purposes for which each category is used, how long each category is retained, and with whom Employee Data is shared, updated within thirty (30) days of any material change;
(2) Employee Data is not used for any purpose other than an Employment Purpose and is not combined with data from any external commercial source for any non-employment purpose;
(3) Employee Data is not sold, licensed, transferred, or made accessible to any third party other than: service providers performing Employment Purposes under a written data processing agreement; government agencies as required by applicable law; and benefits administrators and insurers as necessary to administer specific employment benefits;
(4) health and medical Employee Data is maintained in a system technically and operationally separate from general HR data, with access limited to personnel with a specific Employment Purpose need; and
(5) Employee Data is retained only for the period reasonably necessary for the Employment Purpose for which it was collected, and in no event longer than the applicable mandatory retention period under federal or state law plus a reasonable additional period not to exceed three (3) years for potential litigation.
(c) Permitted Workplace Monitoring.—The following monitoring practices are permitted notwithstanding Chapters III, IV, V, X, and Sec. 1091, subject to the conditions of subsection (b) and a mandatory prior written disclosure requirement: the employer must provide written notice to each affected employee before implementing any monitoring practice, specifically identifying the systems in use, categories of data collected, who has access, how long data is retained, and the Employment Purposes for which it is used, acknowledged in writing by each affected employee before monitoring commences. Monitoring without this notice constitutes a violation of Chapters III and X regardless of other compliance with this subtitle. Permitted monitoring practices:
(1) monitoring of employer-owned devices, employer-provided email and communication accounts, and employer-operated network infrastructure for data security, regulatory compliance, productivity management, and workplace misconduct investigation;
(2) time and attendance tracking at employer premises, provided location data is recorded only at start and end of work periods and is not used to track employee location continuously or outside employer premises without separate written consent;
(3) workplace safety monitoring systems operated in compliance with applicable OSHA requirements; and
(4) productivity and performance monitoring for employees whose work output is directly measurable and where monitoring is directly tied to performance evaluation, provided monitoring scope and metrics are disclosed in advance.
(d) Absolute Prohibitions — No Employment Exception.—The following prohibitions apply to Employee Data without exception:
(1) No employer shall compile, derive, produce, purchase, or use a Psychological Profile as defined in Sec. 1003(2) concerning any employee or applicant for any purpose, including hiring, promotion, performance evaluation, or workforce management. Pre-employment assessments, personality inventories, emotional intelligence evaluations, organizational fit scores, or any evaluation tool producing outputs falling within the definition of Sec. 1003(2) are prohibited Psychological Profiles regardless of commercial designation;
(2) No employer shall compile, derive, produce, or use a Precrime Risk Assessment as defined in Sec. 1003(5) concerning any employee or applicant, including any workplace violence risk score, insider threat algorithmic score, or behavioral prediction tool designed to predict future employee conduct based on demographic or population-level data;
(3) No employer shall activate, access, monitor, collect data from, or install monitoring software on any device that is the personal property of an employee or applicant under any circumstances — monitoring authorized by this subtitle applies exclusively to employer-owned devices, employer-provided equipment, and employer-operated systems;
(4) No employer shall transfer Employee Data to any foreign government, Sensitive Nation-State Actor as defined in Sec. 1003(15), or entity controlled by a foreign government; and
(5) No employer shall use Employee Data as an input to, or in connection with, any Population Coverage Database, Data Cooperative, Audience-Segment Licensing Arrangement, or commercial advertising targeting system.
(e) Applicant Data.—Applicant data must be permanently deleted within two (2) years of the conclusion of the application process for applicants who are not hired, unless a longer retention period is specifically required by applicable law.
(f) Employee Labor Rights.—Nothing in this subtitle limits any employee's rights under applicable federal or state labor law, including the right to organize, bargain collectively, and engage in concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. §§ 151-169. No employer may use any monitoring practice permitted by this subtitle to surveil, interfere with, retaliate against, or chill employees' exercise of rights under the National Labor Relations Act or any other applicable labor statute.
SEC. 1163. JOURNALISM AND PRESS EXEMPTION.
(a) Permitted Journalistic Data Collection.—Nothing in this subtitle prohibits the collection, processing, retention, or use of Covered Personal Data — including data that would otherwise constitute an Operational Profile by reason of comprehensive individual information assembled in the course of an investigation — by a journalist, news organization, nonprofit accountability organization, or documentary filmmaker for the purpose of newsgathering, investigation, and publication of news, information, or documentary content on matters of genuine public concern, subject to all conditions of this subtitle. This exemption applies to:
(1) journalists and reporters employed by or regularly contributing to news organizations, regardless of commercial or nonprofit status;
(2) freelance journalists working on specific accountability or investigative projects for publication in identified news outlets;
(3) nonprofit investigative journalism organizations whose primary mission and primary operational activities consist of newsgathering, investigation, and publication on matters of public concern; and
(4) documentary filmmakers engaged in production of documentary content addressing matters of public concern, government accountability, corporate conduct, or social issues.
(b) Conditions.—The exemption applies only where:
(1) the Covered Personal Data is collected, processed, and retained exclusively for newsgathering, investigation, or publication purposes and is not used for commercial advertising targeting, data brokerage, data sale, or any commercial purpose other than journalism;
(2) the Covered Personal Data is not transferred to any Data Broker, Targeting Infrastructure Contractor, or commercial advertising platform;
(3) the collection does not involve covert audio collection in violation of Sec. 1101, covert video collection in violation of Sec. 1102, or real-time biometric identification in violation of Sec. 1104 — those provisions apply to journalists without exception; and
(4) the Covered Personal Data is retained only for the period reasonably necessary for the specific newsgathering or publication purpose and is permanently deleted upon conclusion of the specific investigation or project, except where subject to a legal hold for pending or reasonably anticipated litigation.
(c) Absolute Prohibitions Apply.—This exemption does not exempt any journalist or news organization from:
(1) the absolute prohibition on Psychological Profiles under Sec. 1011(a);
(2) the covert audio and video collection prohibitions of Secs. 1101 and 1102 as applied in private spaces;
(3) the real-time biometric identification prohibition of Sec. 1104; or
(4) the international transfer prohibition of Sec. 1033.
(d) Commercial Operations.—This exemption applies solely to newsgathering, investigation, and publication activities. It does not exempt news organizations from this subtitle's requirements with respect to advertising targeting practices governed by Chapter IX, subscriber data practices governed by Secs. 1081 and 1121, or any data practices conducted in a commercial operational capacity rather than an editorial and newsgathering capacity.
SEC. 1164. NONPROFIT AND CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATION EXEMPTION.
(a) Nonprofit Membership and Donor Data.—A nonprofit organization exempt from federal income tax under 26 U.S.C. § 501(c) may share Covered Personal Data consisting of member and donor contact information with affiliated organizations, chapters, locals, or allied organizations engaged in substantially similar missions, without triggering Data-Monetizing Collector classification under Sec. 1003(7) or Data Broker classification under Sec. 1003(6), provided:
(1) the transfer is for the purpose of furthering the nonprofit's stated organizational mission and not primarily for commercial revenue generation;
(2) the transferred data consists solely of contact information — names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers;
(3) the nonprofit provides members and donors with notice of such sharing practices and a functional opt-out mechanism taking effect within thirty (30) days, maintains a current suppression list, and applies it to all transfers; and
(4) the recipient organization does not use the transferred contact data for commercial advertising targeting, commercial data brokerage, or any purpose inconsistent with the shared mission.
(b) Political Party and Candidate Campaign Data.—Nothing in this subtitle prohibits a political party, candidate committee, political action committee, or ballot initiative committee from: maintaining voter contact lists assembled from publicly available voter registration records in accordance with applicable state law; sharing voter contact data — consisting of names, addresses, and telephone numbers from public voter registration records — with affiliated candidate committees, party committees, and allied political organizations for voter outreach and electoral advocacy; or using first-party supporter contact data collected through direct supporter relationships for electoral outreach and fundraising. This exemption does not exempt any political organization from:
(A) the absolute prohibition on Psychological Profiles under Sec. 1011(a), including the express prohibition on selling or providing Psychological Profiles or Operational Profiles to any political campaign, political action committee, super PAC, or electoral organization; or
(B) the prohibition on Operational Profiles under Sec. 1031.
(c) Labor Organizations.—A labor organization as defined in 29 U.S.C. § 152(5) may maintain and share member contact data with affiliated locals, joint boards, regional councils, international unions, state labor federations, and labor coalition partners for the purpose of union organizing, collective bargaining support, solidarity activities, and labor advocacy, without triggering Data-Monetizing Collector or Data Broker classification, provided all conditions of subsection (a)(1) through (4) are satisfied.
(d) Absolute Prohibitions Apply Without Exception.—The exemptions of this subtitle do not exempt any organization from:
(1) the absolute prohibition on Psychological Profiles under Sec. 1011(a);
(2) the prohibition on Operational Profile assembly under Sec. 1031;
(3) the Population Coverage Database prohibition under Sec. 1041 and the mandatory divestiture requirement of Sec. 1051;
(4) the covert collection prohibitions of Chapter X;
(5) the consent standards of Sec. 1121; and
(6) the international transfer prohibition of Sec. 1033.
SEC. 1165. GOOD-FAITH RELIANCE ON BUREAU GUIDANCE.
(a) Right-Based Reliance Defense.—An entity that acts in good-faith reliance on any of the following is not subject to civil penalty under Sec. 1122 for conduct that was in compliance with the relied-upon authority at the time of the conduct, provided the conditions of subsection (b) are satisfied:
(1) a published final rule or regulation promulgated by the Bureau through completed notice-and-comment rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553;
(2) a published final rule or regulation promulgated by the Commission through completed notice-and-comment rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553 with respect to Chapter IX of this subtitle; or
(3) a written determination issued by the Bureau specifically to the requesting entity in response to a petition or inquiry under subsection (d). This defense is a right — it is not subject to the Director's discretion under Sec. 1122(i) and is distinct from and in addition to the penalty reduction available under Sec. 1114(c) and the Director's enforcement discretion under Sec. 1122(i). Where more than one of these provisions applies to the same violation, the entity may invoke the most favorable provision but may not receive cumulative benefit from multiple provisions with respect to the same penalty amount.
(b) Conditions.—The reliance defense applies only where:
(1) the reliance was reasonable — meaning a sophisticated actor in the regulated space would reasonably have understood the guidance or determination to authorize the conduct, and the entity did not have actual knowledge of facts suggesting that the guidance was incorrect, had been superseded, or did not apply to the entity's specific practices; and
(2) the entity brought its practices into compliance with any superseding rule or determination within ninety (90) days of the Bureau publishing notice that prior guidance is no longer operative.
(c) Informal Guidance.—Published informal guidance of the Bureau or Commission — including guidance documents, FAQ publications, compliance guides, and website publications that do not constitute final rules — provides a complete reliance defense in Bureau civil enforcement proceedings and state attorney general enforcement actions under Sec. 1131, on the same terms as subsections (a) and (b). Informal guidance does not provide a complete reliance defense in private civil actions under Sec. 1132, but an entity that relied in good faith on informal guidance is not liable for attorney's fees and costs for the period prior to the filing of the action, and the court shall consider the reliance in assessing statutory damages.
(d) Written Determinations.—An entity may petition the Bureau for a written determination on whether specific data practices comply with this subtitle. The Bureau shall respond in writing within ninety (90) days of receipt of a complete petition. A written Bureau determination issued to a specific entity provides a complete reliance defense in Bureau civil enforcement proceedings, state attorney general enforcement actions, and private civil actions under Sec. 1132, on the terms of subsections (a) and (b), and is binding on the Bureau with respect to the specific practices described in the petition as long as the entity's practices remain materially consistent with the petition's description.
(e) Absolute Limits — No Reliance Defense.—The reliance defense does not apply to:
(1) violations of the absolute prohibition of Sec. 1011(a) on Psychological Profiles; or
(2) violations of Sec. 1033 involving transfer of data to foreign governments or Sensitive Nation-State Actors.
(f) Bureau Publication Obligations.—The Bureau shall:
(1) within ninety (90) days of the Director's first day of service, publish on its public website a plain-language summary of the categories of conduct that are clearly prohibited, clearly permitted, and subject to ongoing classification proceedings, updated not less than quarterly; and
(2) where informal guidance is superseded, corrected, or withdrawn, publish prominent notice on its public website and transmit written notice to all entities that have requested written determinations based on the superseded guidance within thirty (30) days of the change.
SEC. 1166. SEVERABILITY.
If any provision of this subtitle, or its application to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remainder shall not be affected thereby. Each provision shall be given effect to the maximum extent consistent with any constitutional ruling. In furtherance of this section, Congress specifically intends that: if the limitation on removal of the Director in Sec. 1111(a)(4) is held invalid, that limitation shall be severed and the Director shall be removable at will, with the Bureau and all of its prior and subsequent actions continuing in full force and effect; if any application of the advertising-data provisions of Chapter IX is held invalid as applied to particular expression, those provisions shall continue to apply to the conduct of collecting, combining, and inferring Covered Personal Data to the fullest extent consistent with the First Amendment; and Congress would have enacted the remainder of this subtitle irrespective of the invalidity of any single provision, mechanism, or application.
Subtitle B — EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY AND JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT ACT (EAJOA) — ESTABLISHMENT OF THE JUDICIAL EXECUTIVE OVERSIGHT SYSTEM (JEOS)
CHAPTER I — GENERAL PROVISIONS
SEC. 1201. SHORT TITLE.
This subtitle may be cited as the "Executive Accountability and Judicial Oversight Act" or "EAJOA."
SEC. 1202. CONGRESSIONAL FINDINGS.
The Congress finds the following:
(1) The separation of powers established by the Constitution of the United States requires that the executive branch be subject to meaningful oversight by the legislative and judicial branches. The Framers specifically designed the judiciary as the branch to check executive overreach, as demonstrated by the warrant requirement, habeas corpus, judicial review established in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), and the entire architecture of Article III. JEOS is not a novel intrusion on executive power — it is the realization of the constitutional design in the digital communications era, where the executive's ability to conceal official conduct through encrypted personal devices has created a de facto exemption from judicial oversight that the Framers did not contemplate.
(2) Existing oversight mechanisms — including Offices of Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Government Ethics, congressional oversight processes, and criminal investigation by the Department of Justice — are reactive in nature, subject to political interference, and structurally unable to detect and deter violations of law and the Constitution in real time.
(3) Executive branch officials have repeatedly used unofficial, unarchived, encrypted, and ephemeral communication channels — including commercially available applications not approved for official use — to conduct official government business in deliberate circumvention of the Presidential Records Act, the Federal Records Act, and lawful oversight processes. Documented examples of this practice include the use of consumer messaging platforms — including, without limitation, platforms such as TeleMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram — for official communications in ways that render those communications invisible to the oversight mechanisms the Constitution requires. These examples are illustrative of a systematic practice and do not limit the scope of this subtitle to those specific platforms. Congress further finds, with respect to the designation of TeleMessage and its successor and derivative products on the Prohibited Platform List under Sec. 1223(a)(1), that TeleMessage's message-archiving operations are conducted from, and the contents and metadata of the communications it archives are accessible within, the State of Israel — a foreign jurisdiction whose legal process may compel their disclosure — and that a modified Signal-based messaging application derived from TeleMessage and used by senior executive branch officials for official communications suffered, as publicly reported, a compromise in 2025 that exposed the contents, metadata, and access credentials of those communications. These findings support that designation independent of the platform's current ownership and operate in addition to the functional criterion of Sec. 1223(a)(1). This subtitle addresses the structural oversight gap identified in this finding through comprehensive device-layer monitoring of Covered Officials' enrolled devices, which captures communications content regardless of the encryption or ephemerality features of the platform used.
(4) Congress establishes JEOS as a specialized Article III judicial body exercising continuous warrant authority over official executive communications, analogous to the FISA Court's authority under 50 U.S.C. § 1803. JEOS exercises Article III judicial power in the form of continuous warrant authorization and evidence review. The automated screening system is a triage mechanism that presents probable cause determinations to Article III judges for judicial action, in the same manner that wiretap applications present intercepted communications to judges for review. This structure is consistent with Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361 (1989), and the adversarial challenge mechanism of Sec. 1212(f) ensures that the case-or-controversy requirement is continuously satisfied.
(5) JEOS does not punish, sanction, arrest, or take direct action against any Covered Official. Its authority is strictly limited to monitoring, review, and referral. All executive action based on JEOS referrals must proceed through the normal constitutional channels of DOJ prosecution, congressional oversight, or impeachment. This purely observational and referral function is consistent with the constitutional role of courts as fact-finders and law-appliers, not as enforcement actors.
(6) Individuals who voluntarily seek and assume positions of extraordinary public trust — including the office of President and all Senate-confirmed executive positions — accept as a condition of that trust a reduced expectation of privacy in all communications relating to the exercise of the powers of those offices, regardless of the device or channel through which such communications are conducted. This principle is established in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), and is consistent with existing requirements of financial disclosure, background investigation, security clearance adjudication, and records preservation to which all executive officials are already subject. Congress requires that communications on personal devices be subject to JEOS monitoring as a condition of holding covered positions, just as it requires financial disclosures as a condition of office and records preservation as a condition of conducting government business. Officials who find this condition unacceptable retain the freedom not to seek or hold covered positions.
(7) The comprehensive device-layer monitoring established by this subtitle operates on two parallel and mutually reinforcing constitutional foundations. First, the automated collection layer does not constitute a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant at the moment of collection, for two independent reasons:
(A) No human accesses any collected content until the automated system generates a flag and a JEOS Panel judge authorizes access through the tiered key authorization process of Sec. 1222(4); whether automated processing that exposes no content to human review constitutes a Fourth Amendment "search" is unsettled, and JEOS does not depend on its resolution. Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), establishes that information conveyed to third parties and processed by automated equipment does not, by virtue of that automation, acquire Fourth Amendment protection; and
(B) Covered Officials have affirmatively consented to comprehensive monitoring through written notice and device enrollment as a prerequisite to holding their positions.
The Court's analysis in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018) — which emphasized the absence of statutory authorization, judicial supervision, and minimization requirements as drivers of Fourth Amendment concern — is addressed directly by JEOS: comprehensive collection here occurs under explicit statutory authorization, continuous Article III judicial supervision, and the Review Surfacing Procedures of Sec. 1241. The tiered collection structure reinforces that minimization: the modalities that most directly capture the physical environment and the speech of third parties — ambient and voice-activated audio capture and video capture — are not part of baseline collection and may be activated against a Covered Official only upon a JEOS Investigative Order issued under Sec. 1232, on an individualized probable-cause determination. Second, and independently, Covered Officials hold a reduced expectation of privacy in their official conduct under Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977). The judicial probable cause determination that precedes any human review of collected content satisfies the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement to the extent it applies. The combination of automated collection without human review, affirmative consent through enrollment, reduced official privacy expectations, and judicial authorization before any content is accessed by a human provides robust constitutional footing for the JEOS monitoring architecture.
(8) United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), established that executive privilege, while constitutionally rooted, is not absolute and must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in criminal proceedings. The Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), framework, particularly Justice Jackson's concurrence, supports the constitutionality of JEOS: Congress has legislated pursuant to its Article I powers to structure accountability for the executive branch, and an executive official who evades the oversight Congress has thereby mandated acts, in Jackson's terms, at the lowest ebb of constitutional authority. JEOS represents Congress and the Article III judiciary exercising their respective constitutional powers to enforce limits on executive power.
(9) It is the sense of Congress that a prospective, court-supervised system of executive communications monitoring — covering both official and personal communications used for government business, automated at the triage stage, reviewed by human judges only upon probable cause, subject to strict minimization, and vested in an independent Article III judicial body — is both constitutionally permissible and structurally necessary to preserve the integrity of constitutional governance and the balance of powers among the three branches.
(10) The Framers' system of checks and balances assumed the three branches would have roughly comparable access to information about the exercise of governmental power. That assumption no longer holds, and the asymmetry is structural. The signals-intelligence capabilities of the National Security Agency, the global collection architecture of the Intelligence Community, and a classification system generating tens of millions of decisions annually together operate largely beyond the informational reach of the other two branches. Courts can evaluate only the evidence the executive presents, often in classified ex parte proceedings under the state-secrets privilege of United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953); Congress can subpoena records it knows exist but cannot reliably compel disclosure of programs whose very existence is concealed. The NSA's bulk domestic metadata program — classified, briefed to only a few members, and unknown to the full Congress and the public until its 2013 disclosure — illustrates the vulnerability; the Church Committee's 1975-76 findings of systematic surveillance of domestic political activity, and the Iran-Contra affair's off-books covert foreign policy conducted to evade appropriations limits, show it is a recurring pattern, not an aberration; and the recent use of consumer encrypted-messaging applications for official business confirms it persists. Classification, covert-action authority under 50 U.S.C. § 3093, the state-secrets privilege, and the Intelligence Community's capabilities together render traditional oversight ineffective — not because those mechanisms are legally inadequate, but because they operate on information the executive controls. JEOS addresses this asymmetry directly, through contemporaneous, automated monitoring of official communications by an independent Article III body. This finding is narrow: it concerns only individuals who have voluntarily assumed extraordinary governmental power and reduced privacy expectations under Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977). It supports no monitoring of the legislative or judicial branches, of private citizens, or of executive employees who are not Covered Officials; its purpose is to restore the informational preconditions of the separation of powers, not to expand legislative or judicial power.
SEC. 1203. DEFINITIONS.
As used in this subtitle:
(1) "Covered Official" means any person who:
(A) serves in any position in the executive branch appointed by the President, with or without Senate confirmation, including all Cabinet-level officers, sub-Cabinet appointees, employees at the GS-15 level or above including all employees in the Senior Executive Service, and all members of the White House Office and Executive Office of the President;
(B) holds a position requiring a security clearance at the TS/SCI level or above and exercises one or more of the following authorities: authority to direct intelligence collection operations; authority to obligate government funds in excess of one million dollars ($1,000,000); authority to issue legally binding regulations, orders, or directives affecting persons outside the executive branch; direct supervisory authority over fifty (50) or more executive branch employees; or authority over the classification, declassification, or withholding of government information from Congress or the public. Officials whose TS/SCI clearance relates solely to access to classified information in a purely technical or scientific domain, who do not receive intelligence assessments or policy deliberations, and who have no authority over any of the criteria listed in this subparagraph, are not Covered Officials under this subparagraph unless specifically designated by the Director of JEOS pursuant to a documented individualized determination. Operational intelligence officers whose primary duties consist of foreign intelligence collection, human intelligence operations, counterintelligence operations, or signals intelligence collection — including CIA case officers, Defense Intelligence Agency defense attachés and case officers, National Security Agency collection operators, and equivalent personnel in other Intelligence Community elements — and who do not independently exercise any of the authorities listed in this subparagraph, are not Covered Officials by reason of their TS/SCI clearance alone. Such officers may be individually designated under subparagraph (C) only upon a specific, documented determination by the Director of JEOS that the individual exercises meaningful policymaking, financial, or supervisory authority beyond their operational intelligence collection duties; or
(C) is designated by the Director of JEOS based on a reasonable, articulable basis that the individual exercises significant policymaking, contracting, or enforcement authority on behalf of the executive branch.
(2) "Official Communications" means any communication, in any form or medium, that:
(A) is made by or to a Covered Official in official capacity;
(B) concerns the exercise of governmental authority, the administration of law, the expenditure or impoundment of appropriated funds, the award or administration of contracts, the formulation of policy, or the supervision of executive branch personnel or operations; or
(C) is transmitted using government-furnished equipment, government-assigned accounts, or Approved Communications Systems.
(3) "Non-Clandestine Communication" means any Official Communication other than a communication classified as a covert action under 50 U.S.C. § 3093 or constituting a Controlled Access Program communication under applicable executive order, provided that such classification is not applied for the purpose of avoiding oversight under this subtitle.
(4) "Approved Communications System" means a communications platform, device, or system certified by the Director of JEOS and the relevant agency Chief Information Officer as compliant with the technical, archival, and monitoring requirements of this subtitle. Approved Communications Systems shall be the exclusive lawful medium for Official Communications.
(5) "Prohibited Device or Platform" means any device, application, platform, or service that: provides end-to-end encryption without a court-accessible distributed key escrow mechanism; includes automatic message deletion, self-destruct, ephemeral messaging, or message recall preventing preservation; is not operated by a Federal Agency, authorized government contractor, or entity with a JEOS Compliance Agreement; is commercially operated primarily for consumer use and not contractually obligated to comply with government records requirements; or is specifically identified on the Prohibited Platform List under Sec. 1223.
(6) "Triggering Violation" means a communication constituting probable cause to believe a Covered Official has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a violation of: any provision of chapters 11 (bribery and graft) or 73 (obstruction of justice) of title 18; the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. §§ 1341-1351; the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 792-799; chapter 19 of title 18 (conspiracy); sections 201-209 of title 18 (conflicts of interest and ethics violations); the Emoluments Clauses of Article I, § 9, cl. 8 and Article II, § 1, cl. 7; Article III, § 3 of the Constitution (treason); the Business-Connected Relative disclosure requirement of Sec. 1211A(j); or any other federal criminal statute designated by the JEOS Full Panel by two-thirds vote.
(7) "JEOS" means the Judicial Executive Oversight System.
(8) "Director of JEOS" means the supervising Article III judge appointed under Sec. 1212.
(9) "JEOS Panel" means the panel of Article III judges authorized to review flagged communications under Sec. 1231.
(10) "JEOS Covered Officials Roster" means the certified, continuously maintained list of all individuals currently holding covered positions subject to this subtitle, compiled and maintained by the JEOS Secretariat based on agency-transmitted rosters under Sec. 1211A.
(11) "Covered Relative" means, with respect to a Covered Official, any individual who is a relative of the Covered Official within the meaning of section 3110(a)(3) of title 5, United States Code, or any other member of the Covered Official's household.
(12) "Qualifying Business Relationship" means any relationship in which a Covered Relative owns, co-owns, controls, manages, is employed by, or holds a financial or operational interest in a commercial enterprise or activity, where either—
(A) the Covered Official also holds, directly or indirectly, an ownership, financial, or management interest in that enterprise or activity; or
(B) the enterprise or activity could be meaningfully advantaged by the Covered Official's position in the executive branch or by the exercise of the powers of that position, including through the award or administration of contracts, grants, or licenses, regulatory action or forbearance, dealings with a foreign government, or other official action.
(13) "Business-Connected Relative" means a Covered Relative who has a Qualifying Business Relationship.
CHAPTER II — ESTABLISHMENT AND ORGANIZATION OF JEOS
SEC. 1211. ESTABLISHMENT.
(a) There is hereby established within the judicial branch of the Federal Government, as a specialized Article III division of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a body to be known as the Judicial Executive Oversight System. Congress establishes JEOS pursuant to its authority under Article I, § 8 and § 9 of the Constitution, its power to define and punish offenses against the laws of the United States, and its authority over the structure and accountability of the executive branch, in conjunction with the judicial power vested in Article III courts.
(b) JEOS Shall Be Independent of the Executive Branch.—No officer or employee of any Federal Agency shall exercise supervisory authority over JEOS or any member of its staff.
(c) JEOS shall have a Secretariat staffed by career civil servants, including technologists, legal analysts, and communications specialists, none of whom shall be politically appointed or subject to removal at the direction of any executive branch official. All JEOS Secretariat positions are hereby designated as permanent career civil service positions. No JEOS Secretariat position may be reclassified, eliminated, or redesignated under Schedule F, Schedule C, or any equivalent excepted service schedule through executive order, presidential directive, or executive reorganization authority. Any attempt to reclassify, eliminate, or reorganize JEOS Secretariat positions through executive authority shall be without legal effect and any Secretariat employee so affected shall be entitled to immediate reinstatement by order of the JEOS Director.
(d) JEOS Funding Independence.—JEOS appropriations are hereby designated as mandatory appropriations not subject to the impoundment, deferral, or rescission authority of the President under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 or any other executive authority. Any presidential attempt to impound, defer, or rescind JEOS appropriations is without legal effect. The Director of JEOS may seek enforcement of this provision through original action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which shall have jurisdiction to issue emergency injunctive relief within seventy-two (72) hours of filing.
(e) Capital Appropriation for System Development.—Congress hereby appropriates, as a mandatory one-time capital appropriation not subject to annual appropriations processes or executive impoundment, not less than two billion dollars ($2,000,000,000) for the design, procurement, development, testing, and deployment of the JEOS technical monitoring system, infrastructure, and enrolled device management architecture. This appropriation is in addition to the ongoing operational appropriations of JEOS and shall be available until expended. The JEOS Director shall transmit a capital expenditure plan to Congress within ninety (90) days of the Director's designation under Sec. 1212(a) — approximately one hundred eighty (180) days after enactment.
(f) Ongoing Operational Appropriations.—In addition to the capital appropriation under subsection (e), Congress hereby authorizes to be appropriated, and there are hereby appropriated out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, mandatory annual appropriations for the ongoing operation of JEOS as follows:
(1) From the date the pilot monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(11) through the date the full monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(12): not less than two hundred million dollars ($200,000,000) per fiscal year.
(2) From the date the full monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(12) and for each fiscal year thereafter: not less than three hundred million dollars ($300,000,000) per fiscal year, adjusted annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the fiscal year in which the full system becomes operational as the base year.
(3) Scaling Adjustment. Where the JEOS Covered Officials Roster exceeds five thousand (5,000) enrolled individuals at any point during a fiscal year, the annual appropriations floor for the following fiscal year shall increase by at least ten percent (10%) above the otherwise applicable floor. Where the Roster exceeds ten thousand (10,000) enrolled individuals, the floor shall increase by at least twenty percent (20%). These scaling adjustments are cumulative with inflation adjustments under paragraph (2).
(4) The mandatory appropriations floors in this subsection are not subject to rescission, impoundment, deferral, or continuing resolution reduction below the applicable floor. The JEOS Director may seek enforcement of the mandatory appropriations floor through emergency action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which shall have jurisdiction to issue injunctive relief within seventy-two (72) hours of filing.
(5) The JEOS Director shall include in each annual report under Sec. 1242 a detailed accounting of operational expenditures, projected needs for the following fiscal year, and a justification for any request for appropriations above the mandatory floor. These funds shall cover Secretariat staffing and personnel costs; system maintenance, security patching, and cryptographic updates; classified archive storage and management; Panel and Special Ethics Advocate operational support; ongoing red team security testing not less than annually; and all other costs of JEOS operations not covered by the capital appropriation under subsection (e).
(g) Agency Cooperation Obligation.—Every Federal Agency shall provide full, timely, and unimpeded technical cooperation to JEOS, including: providing and maintaining the communications feeds required for the monitoring system under Sec. 1231; maintaining and operating Approved Communications Systems; responding to JEOS Secretariat requests for technical access; and complying with all JEOS Panel orders. Any Federal Agency official who orders, directs, or causes the withholding, delay, or degradation of technical cooperation with JEOS, or who directs agency staff to refuse cooperation with JEOS, commits a Triggering Violation subject to the full review process of Sec. 1231 and, where done with intent to obstruct oversight, a criminal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 1505.
(h) JEOS Chief Technology Officer.—The JEOS Secretariat shall include a Chief Technology Officer appointed simultaneously with the inaugural Director pursuant to Sec. 1212(c). The CTO bears primary responsibility for supervising the design, procurement, development, and operation of the JEOS technical monitoring system. CTO qualifications, appointment process, and succession are governed by Sec. 1212(c).
(i) IC-To-JEOS Transition Restriction.—Any individual transitioning from any Intelligence Community element as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3003(4), or from any element of the Department of Defense whose primary mission includes signals intelligence, cyber operations, electronic warfare, or communications infrastructure including United States Cyber Command and the Defense Information Systems Agency, to any position within the JEOS Secretariat, must have been continuously employed within such element since before January 20, 2025. Individuals hired by, contracted to, or significantly promoted within such elements on or after January 20, 2025 are not eligible for JEOS Secretariat positions regardless of their qualifications. This restriction applies to all JEOS Secretariat positions and does not apply to individuals transitioning from non-IC federal agencies, the federal judiciary, cleared academic institutions, or national laboratories.
(j) Government Infrastructure and Expertise.—Congress directs that, in building the JEOS technical monitoring system, the JEOS Director and CTO shall prioritize use of existing government-owned infrastructure and personnel from across the federal government, consistent with the workforce restrictions of Sec. 1211(k). Federal agencies — including but not limited to the General Services Administration, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency, and the Administrative Office of the United States Courts — shall cooperate with the JEOS Secretariat in identifying available government-owned infrastructure, technical personnel, and existing procurement vehicles that may accelerate system development. No infrastructure transfer from any Intelligence Community element to JEOS Secretariat ownership and control is authorized by this subtitle. Before the JEOS monitoring system goes operational, an independent security verification must be conducted by a red team composed exclusively of cleared engineers who:
(A) hold security clearances at the appropriate level;
(B) are drawn from federal agencies, federal laboratories, national laboratories, cleared academic institutions, or any other non-IC federal entity — provided no member of the red team is employed by or assigned to any Intelligence Community element or Department of Defense signals or cyber element on or after January 20, 2025; and
(C) have no role in the JEOS system build or design and no financial interest in any JEOS contractor. No NSA employee, IC element employee, or executive branch employee involved in any phase of JEOS system design, build, or procurement may participate in red team verification.
(k) Workforce Restrictions on System Development.—The following restrictions apply to all phases of JEOS system development:
(1) Core Architecture and Security Design — government employees only, no contractors. The decisions governing how the system is structured, what data flows where, how the key escrow works, where security boundaries are drawn, and how the monitoring infrastructure is segmented may only be made by government employees who are JEOS Secretariat staff or pre-January 20, 2025 IC or DOD personnel subject to the restrictions of subsection (j). No contractor may participate in core architecture or security design decisions at any stage;
(2) System Build and Integration — contractors are permitted subject to all of the following conditions: cleared to TS/SCI level; working exclusively on government-owned, airgapped infrastructure; technically incapable of exfiltrating code, data, or system design documentation from the build environment; not permitted to subcontract any portion of their JEOS work to any third party; and, where the contractor has been primarily assigned to an IC element or DOD signals or cyber element as defined in subsection (i), continuously employed in that assignment since before January 20, 2025;
(3) AI Model Development — Government Employees Only, No Contractors.—The model weights, training data, flagging logic, behavioral anomaly detection algorithms, and pattern analysis criteria of the automated screening system shall be developed, trained, tested, and controlled exclusively by JEOS Secretariat government employees. No contractor may access, modify, or influence the AI model at any stage of its development or operation. A contractor who participates in the system build would have knowledge of the system architecture that could be used to evade detection; the AI model itself must therefore remain entirely government-controlled; and
(4) Ongoing Operations — Government Employees Only After Deployment.—No contractor shall have operational access to the running JEOS monitoring system, the JEOS archive, or any data processed by the system after it goes operational.
(l) Independent Procurement Authority.—The JEOS Director shall have independent contracting authority for all JEOS procurements, modeled on the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' procurement authority but with the security classification requirements of Intelligence Community procurements. No executive branch official, OMB, DNI, or any other executive branch entity shall have any review, approval, or veto authority over JEOS procurement decisions. JEOS may utilize IC-vetted contractor pools and security clearance frameworks without being subject to executive branch procurement oversight. All JEOS contracts shall be classified at the appropriate level and administered exclusively by JEOS Secretariat contracting officers.
(m) Maintenance of Adequate Staffing; Congressional Recourse.—The Director shall maintain the JEOS Secretariat at staffing adequate to perform the functions of JEOS and at no less than any minimum staffing required by this subtitle. Where the Special Ethics Advocate or the JEOS Full Panel determines that JEOS is staffed below such a minimum, or is otherwise inadequately staffed to perform its functions, the Special Ethics Advocate or the Full Panel may, independently of the Director, petition the congressional oversight committees and the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives — in classified or unclassified form — to address the deficiency, and shall describe the deficiency and any response in the next report under Sec. 1242.
SEC. 1211A. COVERED OFFICIALS ROSTER, NOTIFICATION, AGENCY REPORTING, AND ENROLLMENT.
(a) Government-Wide Notification and Interpretive Guidance.
(1) OPM Notification.—Not later than seven (7) days after the date of enactment, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management shall transmit a formal written notification to the head of every Federal Agency, the agency's Chief Human Capital Officer, and the agency's General Counsel, informing them of: the enactment of this subtitle; the full text of the Covered Official definition under Sec. 1203(1) and its three subparagraphs; the roster compilation timeline established in subsection (b); the obligation to transmit the completed roster to the JEOS Director on the first business day following designation; the requirement to designate a JEOS Liaison Officer by day twenty-one (21); and the personal civil liability of agency heads for failure to comply. OPM shall maintain a publicly available list of all Federal Agencies to which this notification was transmitted and the date of transmission.
(2) OLC Interpretive Guidance.—Not later than twenty-one (21) days after the date of enactment, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel shall publish a government-wide guidance document interpreting the Covered Official definition under Sec. 1203(1), providing illustrative examples of positions that do and do not qualify under each subparagraph — sufficient to guide agency compliance without limiting the Director's authority to make final determinations under subsection (a)(5) — and addressing the application of the TS/SCI qualifying authority criteria of subparagraph (B) to common agency organizational structures. This guidance shall serve as the working interpretation for all Federal Agencies for purposes of their initial roster compilation, subject to review and supersession by the JEOS Director under subsection (a)(4). Roster compilation shall not begin before OLC guidance is published.
(3) Agency Designation of JEOS Liaison.—Not later than twenty-one (21) days after the date of enactment, each Federal Agency head shall designate a JEOS Liaison Officer — a senior official with legal or compliance expertise — who shall be responsible for: coordinating roster compilation within the agency; transmitting the initial roster and all monthly updates to the JEOS Director or Secretariat; receiving notifications from the JEOS Secretariat regarding individual Covered Officials; and serving as the agency's primary point of contact for all JEOS-related compliance matters. The identity of each agency's JEOS Liaison Officer shall be transmitted to OPM within twenty-one (21) days of enactment, and to the JEOS Director on the first business day following designation.
(4) Director Review and Supersession of OLC Guidance.—Not later than ten (10) business days following designation, the JEOS Director shall review OLC's interpretive guidance issued under subsection (a)(2) and determine whether it accurately and completely identifies the population of Covered Officials consistent with the definition in Sec. 1203(1). If the Director determines that OLC's guidance is improperly narrow, improperly broad, or otherwise inconsistent with the statutory definition, the Director shall issue a superseding interpretation that is immediately binding on all Federal Agencies in lieu of OLC's guidance. The Director's interpretation is final and not subject to review or revision by any executive branch entity. Where the Director's superseding interpretation expands the covered population beyond OLC's guidance, agencies shall have ten (10) business days from the date of the superseding interpretation to identify and add newly covered individuals to their rosters and certify that the roster is complete.
(5) Director Interpretive Authority — Ongoing.—Upon designation, the JEOS Director shall have final authority to determine whether any specific individual qualifies as a Covered Official under any subparagraph of Sec. 1203(1). Any agency may submit a request for determination to the JEOS Director regarding a specific position or individual at any time. The Director shall respond within ten (10) business days. The Director's determination is final and binding on the agency.
(b) Initial Roster Compilation and Submission.
(1) Compilation Window.—Roster compilation shall begin not earlier than twenty-one (21) days after enactment, once OLC interpretive guidance has been published under subsection (a)(2) and JEOS Liaison Officers have been designated under subsection (a)(3). Each Federal Agency shall complete its certified initial roster not later than eighty-nine (89) days after the date of enactment — providing a thirty-nine (39) day compilation window from the availability of OLC guidance — and shall hold the completed, certified roster in a state ready for immediate transmission until the JEOS Director is designated.
(2) Roster Contents.—The roster shall include for each individual: full legal name; position title; agency and component; the subparagraph of Sec. 1203(1) under which the individual qualifies as a Covered Official; date of appointment or assumption of covered duties; official government email address; personal email address on file with the agency where available; contact information for the agency's designated JEOS Liaison Officer; and each Business-Connected Relative self-disclosed by the individual under subsection (j), with the nature of each Qualifying Business Relationship.
(3) Certification.—The initial roster shall be certified under penalty of perjury by both the agency head and the designated JEOS Liaison Officer, attesting that: the roster reflects a good-faith application of the OLC interpretive guidance and the statutory definition; no individual qualifying as a Covered Official under the statutory definition has been knowingly omitted; and the agency has made reasonable inquiry within its personnel records to identify all qualifying individuals. Where the agency head and the JEOS Liaison Officer disagree about whether a specific individual qualifies as a Covered Official, neither party is required to certify the roster as to that individual pending resolution. The agency shall submit the disputed individual's position description and relevant authority information to the JEOS Director for a binding determination under subsection (a)(5) within five (5) business days of identifying the disagreement. The JEOS Director shall respond within ten (10) business days. The disputed individual shall be treated as a Covered Official for all purposes — including pre-enrollment notification under subsection (e) — from the date the dispute is submitted to the Director until the Director issues a contrary determination. The certified roster shall be transmitted on the required deadline with a notation identifying any individuals whose status is under Director review; the roster shall be updated within three (3) business days of the Director's determination.
(4) Transmission.—Not later than the first (1st) business day following the designation of the JEOS Director under Sec. 1212(a) — which designation shall occur no later than ninety (90) days after enactment — the head of each Federal Agency shall transmit its certified roster to the JEOS Director.
(5) Director Custody.—The JEOS Director shall hold all initial rosters securely until the JEOS Secretariat is sufficiently staffed to formally intake them, at which point the Director shall transfer all rosters to the Secretariat. The Director shall maintain a written log of all rosters received, the date of receipt, and the agency head who certified each roster.
(6) Roster Updates Following Director Guidance Review.—Where the JEOS Director issues a superseding interpretation under subsection (a)(4) that expands the covered population, agencies shall transmit a supplemental certified roster update to the Director within ten (10) business days of the superseding interpretation, identifying all newly covered individuals. The Director shall integrate all supplemental updates before transferring rosters to the Secretariat.
(7) Liability.—An agency head who fails to have a roster ready within eighty-nine (89) days of enactment, or who fails to transmit it to the Director on the first business day following designation, is subject to personal civil liability under Sec. 1251(a) of subtitle B of this Act. An agency head who knowingly omits a Covered Official from the initial roster or from any subsequent update, where such omission was intended to shield the individual from JEOS monitoring, is subject to criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1505.
(c) Monthly Updates.
(1) Ongoing Reporting.—Each Federal Agency shall transmit to the JEOS Secretariat — or to the JEOS Director where the Secretariat has not yet assumed roster intake responsibility under Sec. 1263(b)(9) of subtitle B — a certified update to its roster not later than the fifth (5th) business day of each calendar month, reflecting any additions or departures during the preceding month.
(2) Immediate Notification.—Whenever a new individual assumes a covered position or an existing Covered Official departs, the agency shall transmit an immediate notification to the JEOS Secretariat within five (5) business days of that event, without waiting for the monthly update cycle. The immediate notification shall include all roster contents specified in subsection (b)(2) for the relevant individual.
(3) Certification.—Monthly updates and immediate notifications shall be certified by the agency's designated JEOS Liaison Officer under penalty of perjury.
(d) JEOS Secretariat Roster Maintenance.—The JEOS Secretariat shall compile, maintain, and continuously update the JEOS Covered Officials Roster based on agency submissions under subsections (b) and (c). The Roster is a classified document. The JEOS Director shall certify to Congress annually that the Roster is complete and current to the best of the Director's knowledge based on agency submissions and independent verification. The JEOS Director may independently verify roster accuracy by cross-referencing publicly available appointment records, Senate confirmation records, and other government personnel databases, and shall request correction from the relevant agency head within ten (10) business days of identifying any discrepancy. An agency head who fails to correct a discrepancy within ten (10) business days of receiving a correction request from the Director is subject to personal civil liability under Sec. 1251(a).
(e) Pre-Enrollment Notification to Individuals.—Upon adding any individual to the JEOS Covered Officials Roster, the JEOS Secretariat shall transmit written notification to that individual within five (5) business days, informing them of:
(1) the fact that they hold a covered position subject to JEOS monitoring under this subtitle;
(2) the nature of the monitoring — that their Official Communications on Approved Communications Systems and, upon enrollment, their personal devices are subject to automated monitoring as a condition of holding their position; that the automated system does not involve human review of communications unless a flag is generated; and that non-flagged communications are retained in the active archive for two hundred sixty (260) days — or three hundred sixty-five (365) days for Official Nexus Category data, including all communications with a Business-Connected Relative — subject to automated contextual re-analysis, after which Personal Category data is deleted and Official Nexus Category data transfers to the classified judicial archive;
(3) the device enrollment requirement and applicable deadline under subsection (f);
(4) the prohibition on use of Prohibited Devices or Platforms for Official Communications and the civil and criminal penalties under Sec. 1251 of subtitle B; and
(5) the right to challenge JEOS monitoring before the JEOS Panel under Sec. 1212(f) of subtitle B; and
(6) the distinction between initiating or knowingly continuing use of a Prohibited Device or Platform, which constitutes a violation subject to civil and administrative penalties under Sec. 1251, and receiving an unsolicited communication through such a device or platform, which triggers a reporting obligation only and does not constitute a violation. The notification shall direct the Covered Official to the Covered Official's Communications Compliance Handbook published under Sec. 1221(e) for complete guidance on these requirements. Notification shall be transmitted to the individual at both their official government email address and their personal email address on file with their agency. For individuals in the initial roster cohort — those already in covered positions on the date of enactment — the JEOS Secretariat shall transmit pre-enrollment notifications not later than ten (10) business days after the initial roster and any Director-ordered supplemental updates are received and integrated.
(f) Device Enrollment Deadlines.
(1) Pilot Cohort — Cabinet Secretaries and White House Senior Staff.—Individuals in the pilot cohort — defined as the heads of the executive departments listed in 5 U.S.C. § 101, other officers of Cabinet rank, and all members of the White House Office holding positions at the GS-15 level or above or equivalent — shall complete enrollment of all personal devices not later than the date the pilot monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(11) of subtitle B — five hundred forty (540) days after enactment.
(2) All Other Current Covered Officials. Individuals currently serving in covered positions on the date of enactment who are not in the pilot cohort, and individuals who assume covered positions between enactment and the full system operational date, shall complete enrollment of all personal devices not later than thirty (30) days after the full monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(12) of subtitle B — approximately seven hundred sixty (760) days after enactment.
(3) New Appointees After Full System Is Operational.—Individuals who assume covered positions after the full monitoring system has become operational shall complete enrollment not later than five (5) business days of receiving pre-enrollment notification under subsection (e).
(4) Penalties.—Failure to complete device enrollment within the applicable deadline is an independent violation of this subtitle subject to civil penalty under Sec. 1251(a). Failure to enroll with intent to evade JEOS monitoring is a criminal offense under Sec. 1251(b).
(g) Departure and Unenrollment.—When a Covered Official departs a covered position, the agency shall notify the JEOS Secretariat within five (5) business days. Upon receipt of departure notification, the JEOS Secretariat shall: remove the individual from the Roster; direct that JEOS monitoring of that individual's personal devices cease immediately; and unenroll the individual's personal devices from JEOS device management within forty-eight (48) hours of departure notification. The individual shall receive written confirmation of their unenrollment within five (5) business days of unenrollment. Communications collected prior to departure remain in the JEOS archive and classified judicial archive subject to the retention and access rules of this subtitle.
(h) Post-Service Monitoring Prohibition.—JEOS monitoring does not extend beyond the period of covered service. Any individual who was a Covered Official and who departs a covered position shall be unenrolled and their devices shall cease to be monitored as specified in subsection (g), regardless of the reason for departure.
(i) Contested Designation.—An individual who disputes their designation as a Covered Official under Sec. 1203(1)(C) may file a written challenge with the JEOS Full Panel within ten (10) business days of receiving pre-enrollment notification under subsection (e). The Panel shall rule on the challenge within fifteen (15) business days of receipt. Enrollment is stayed during the pendency of the challenge. The Panel's ruling is final within JEOS proceedings but is subject to appeal to the D.C. Circuit under Sec. 1261(d).
(j) Business-Connected Relative Disclosure.
(1) Each Covered Official shall disclose to the JEOS Secretariat, for inclusion in the Roster, each Business-Connected Relative as defined in Sec. 1203(13) and the nature of each Qualifying Business Relationship, not later than the device-enrollment deadline applicable to that official under subsection (f), and shall update the disclosure within thirty (30) days of any change. The disclosure shall be certified by the Covered Official under penalty of perjury.
(2) Knowing failure to disclose, or knowing concealment of, a Business-Connected Relative is a false certification subject to the penalties of Sec. 1251 and constitutes a Triggering Violation within the meaning of Sec. 1203(6).
(3) Where the JEOS Secretariat determines that a Covered Official has an undisclosed Qualifying Business Relationship, it shall reclassify all communications between the Covered Official and that Business-Connected Relative that remain retained in any JEOS system to the Official Nexus Category under Sec. 1225(c).
(4) Financial-Disclosure Cross-Check.—Before the expiration of the 260-day active window for any Covered Official, the JEOS Secretariat shall cross-reference that official's disclosure under paragraph (1) against the official's financial-disclosure reports filed under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (5 U.S.C. § 13101 et seq.) and other government records reasonably available to it, to identify any undisclosed Qualifying Business Relationship. Communications potentially affected by an undisclosed relationship so identified shall be preserved beyond the 260-day active window pending resolution and reclassified as provided in paragraph (3).
SEC. 1212. COMPOSITION, APPOINTMENT, SUCCESSION, AND ADVERSARIAL CHALLENGE MECHANISM.
(a) Initial Appointment — Director.—The Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shall simultaneously designate the inaugural JEOS Director and the inaugural JEOS Chief Technology Officer within ninety (90) days of the date of enactment. The Director shall be one active Article III circuit judge of a United States court of appeals other than the Federal Circuit. The Director shall begin work immediately upon designation and shall serve a non-renewable term of seven (7) years. No Senate confirmation is required for the inaugural Director appointment because the Director is an active Article III circuit judge receiving an additional supervisory designation within the judicial branch — not a new appointment of a principal officer within the meaning of the Appointments Clause of Article II, § 2, cl. 2. This designation is analogous to the Chief Justice's designation of the Presiding Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court under 50 U.S.C. § 1803(a), which has not been understood to require Senate confirmation.
(b) Succession — Subsequent Directors.—Not later than one hundred eighty (180) days before the expiration of a Director's term, the outgoing Director shall refer a single candidate to the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for review.
(1) D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Review. The D.C. Circuit Chief Judge shall within thirty (30) days either approve the referral for Senate consideration or return it to the outgoing Director with written reasons. A candidate approved by the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge is immediately transmitted to the Senate for confirmation under paragraph (3).
(2) Judicial Conference Escalation.—Where the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge returns a referral or fails to act within thirty (30) days, the matter escalates automatically to the full Judicial Conference of the United States. The Judicial Conference shall convene within thirty (30) days of escalation and determine by majority vote whether to: approve the outgoing Director's original referral for Senate consideration; or designate a different candidate for Senate consideration. Whatever candidate the Judicial Conference approves is immediately transmitted to the Senate for confirmation under paragraph (3). The Judicial Conference's determination is final and not subject to further review within the judicial branch.
(3) Senate Confirmation.—The Senate shall vote on the candidate transmitted under paragraph (1) or (2) within ninety (90) days of receipt. Confirmation requires the affirmative vote of sixty (60) Senators. If the Senate fails to act within ninety (90) days, the candidate is deemed confirmed by operation of law and shall begin service as Director immediately. If the deemed confirmation mechanism of this paragraph is held unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable, the candidate shall serve in an acting capacity with full statutory authority pending Senate action. Acting service under this paragraph shall not exceed 540 days. If the Senate has not acted within 540 days, the outgoing Director or the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge shall initiate a new succession process under this subsection. All actions taken by an acting Director during their service are valid and binding regardless of any subsequent challenge to this paragraph. Congress finds that the designation of a successor Director under this subsection is constitutionally grounded on two independent bases. First, where the Director is an active Article III circuit judge receiving an additional supervisory designation within the judicial branch, the designation is analogous to the Chief Justice's designation of FISA Court judges under 50 U.S.C. § 1803(a), which has not required Senate confirmation, and does not constitute the appointment of a new principal officer within the meaning of the Appointments Clause of Article II, § 2, cl. 2. Second, and independently, the Senate confirmation requirement of paragraph (3) of this subsection satisfies the Appointments Clause in all events — if a court determines that the Director is a principal officer requiring Senate confirmation, the Senate confirmation process established here provides that confirmation. The deemed-confirmation mechanism of paragraph (3) — providing that Senate inaction for ninety (90) days constitutes confirmation by operation of law — provides procedural certainty for the judicial designation process. Congress finds the deemed-confirmation mechanism is constitutionally justified by the same institutional necessity that supports recess appointments: the constitutional structure cannot function if Senate inaction can permanently prevent the establishment of an essential oversight institution. Nothing in this subsection limits the right of any party to seek judicial review of the Director's appointment under the Appointments Clause.
(4) Vacancy.—If a Director leaves office before the expiration of their term, the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge shall designate an acting Director from among the JEOS Panel judges within ten (10) business days of the vacancy. The acting Director shall serve until a successor is confirmed under the succession process of this subsection, which the outgoing Director shall initiate before departure where reasonably practicable, or which the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge shall initiate within thirty (30) days of the vacancy where the departure was not anticipated.
(5) Director Eligibility.—No individual who has served in any political appointment in the executive branch within ten (10) years of designation, or who has a spouse, parent, child, or sibling currently serving in a Senate-confirmed executive branch position, is eligible to serve as JEOS Director. No individual who was employed by or assigned to any Intelligence Community element or Department of Defense signals or cyber element after January 20, 2025 is eligible to serve as JEOS Director.
(c) CTO Candidate Pool and Simultaneous Appointment.
(1) Pool Compilation Process.—Beginning on the date of enactment, the Office of Personnel Management shall manage the administrative process of compiling a qualified CTO candidate pool, including: publishing notice of the pool process to eligible federal government personnel and cleared defense contractors; receiving and processing applications; verifying each applicant's employment continuity and security clearance eligibility requirements under paragraph (2); and maintaining the pool. OPM shall not make substantive qualification judgments — that function is reserved to the technical review panel under paragraph (3).
(2) Pool Eligibility Requirements.—To qualify for inclusion in the CTO candidate pool, an individual must: hold a security clearance at the TS/SCI level or above, held continuously since before January 20, 2025; have been continuously employed in a relevant technical role within the federal government, the federal judiciary, a national laboratory, or a cleared defense contractor since before January 20, 2025, in a capacity not subject to direction, removal, or significant influence by political appointees of the administration beginning January 20, 2025; and not have been employed by or primarily assigned to any Intelligence Community element or Department of Defense signals or cyber element at any time after January 20, 2025.
(3) Technical Qualification Review Panel.—A technical review panel, constituted by the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge, shall assess the substantive qualifications of administratively eligible candidates identified by OPM. The panel shall consist of qualified technical experts, none of whom is a political appointee, and shall draw on expertise from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, or comparable sources. No member of the technical review panel shall be employed by or assigned to any Intelligence Community element or any Department of Defense element whose primary mission includes signals intelligence, cyber operations, electronic warfare, or communications infrastructure. The panel shall assess each candidate's expertise in classified systems architecture, artificial intelligence or machine learning systems, and cybersecurity, and shall certify which candidates meet the technical qualification standard.
(4) Pool Size, Certification, and Transmission.—OPM shall compile a pool of not fewer than five (5) and not more than ten (10) candidates who satisfy both the administrative eligibility requirements of paragraph (2) and the technical qualification standard certified by the panel under paragraph (3), ensuring institutional and geographic diversity where possible. OPM shall transmit the certified pool to the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge in time to permit adequate review before the simultaneous designation under subsection (a).
(5) Simultaneous Appointment.—The D.C. Circuit Chief Judge shall designate both the inaugural JEOS Director and the JEOS Chief Technology Officer simultaneously within ninety (90) days of enactment, selecting the CTO from the qualified pool certified under paragraph (4). The Director and CTO shall begin work on the same date. Neither appointment is effective without the other — both must be made simultaneously as a single act of designation.
(6) CTO Duties and Authority.—The CTO shall bear primary responsibility for: overseeing the design, procurement, development, testing, and operation of the JEOS technical monitoring system; managing the procurement solicitation process under Sec. 1211(l); supervising all system build and integration contractors in accordance with the workforce restrictions of Sec. 1211(k); ensuring AI model development remains exclusively under government employee control under Sec. 1211(k)(3); and certifying to the Director that the system meets all applicable NIST standards before any operational milestone under Sec. 1263(b).
(7) CTO Succession.—If the CTO leaves their position, OPM shall compile a new qualified pool under the same process within forty-five (45) days. The Director shall appoint a replacement CTO from the new pool within sixty (60) days of the vacancy. During any vacancy the Director shall designate an acting CTO from among the JEOS Secretariat's senior technical staff.
(d) JEOS Panel.—The Director shall constitute a panel of not fewer than nine (9) and not more than fifteen (15) active Article III judges serving staggered five-year terms, ineligible for reappointment for five (5) years following service.
(e) Panel Disqualification.—No judge who has served in a political executive appointment within ten (10) years of designation, or who has a spouse, parent, child, or sibling currently serving in a Senate-confirmed executive position, shall serve on the JEOS Panel during such period.
(f) Special Ethics Advocate and Adversarial Challenge Mechanism.—The Director of JEOS shall appoint an independent Special Ethics Advocate — a member of the bar with expertise in constitutional, administrative, or government ethics law — to represent the public interest in all proceedings. The Special Ethics Advocate shall have access to all JEOS systems, filings, and materials; standing to challenge any order, declination, or ruling of the Panel; and authority to bring motions before the Panel on the Special Ethics Advocate's own initiative. Any Covered Official who believes their communications are being improperly retained or reviewed may petition the JEOS Full Panel for relief, and JEOS Panel orders are directly appealable to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This adversarial challenge mechanism ensures that the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III is continuously satisfied.
(g) D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Vacancy. Where the position of Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is vacant at the time a designation or review obligation arises under this subtitle, such obligation shall be performed by the most senior active judge of that court by length of service.
CHAPTER III — APPROVED COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS AND PROHIBITED PLATFORMS
SEC. 1221. MANDATORY USE OF APPROVED COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS.
(a) All Official Communications shall be conducted exclusively through Approved Communications Systems. No Covered Official shall conduct Official Communications through any other medium.
(b) No Covered Official shall use a personally owned device, personally managed account, or commercially operated consumer application to conduct Official Communications. For purposes of this subtitle and Sec. 1251, "use" means initiating or knowingly continuing a communication through a Prohibited Device or Platform. A Covered Official who receives an unsolicited communication through a Prohibited Device or Platform has not violated this subsection solely by reason of that receipt, provided the Official does not respond through the prohibited channel and complies with the reporting obligation of subsection (c).
(c) Where a Covered Official receives an Official Communication through a non-approved channel, the Covered Official shall: immediately decline to substantively respond; copy or transcribe the communication into the Approved Communications System; and report to the JEOS Secretariat within twenty-four (24) hours. The Covered Official shall not delete, alter, or destroy the original communication from the non-approved channel or device. The original shall be preserved pending JEOS Secretariat guidance on retention and shall be treated as a record subject to the preservation obligations of the Federal Records Act and, where applicable, the Presidential Records Act.
(d) Each agency head shall certify annually that all Covered Officials have completed mandatory training on Approved Communications System requirements. Mandatory training shall cover at minimum:
(1) the identity of all platforms on the current Prohibited Platform List and the basis for their prohibition;
(2) the distinction between initiating or continuing a communication through a Prohibited Device or Platform, which constitutes a violation subject to the penalty track of Sec. 1251, and receiving an unsolicited communication through such a platform, which triggers a reporting obligation only;
(3) the twenty-four (24) hour reporting obligation for received prohibited-channel communications under subsection (c);
(4) the forty-eight (48) hour self-reporting safe harbor under Sec. 1251(e) and the conditions for obtaining a complete civil fine waiver; and
(5) the financial hardship waiver process under Sec. 1251(f). The agency head certification shall attest that each of these topics was covered in the training provided during the certification period.
(e) Communications Compliance Handbook.—Not later than ninety (90) days after the Director's designation under Sec. 1212(a), the JEOS Secretariat shall publish a plain-language Covered Official's Communications Compliance Handbook. The handbook shall be distributed to every Covered Official upon enrollment and whenever materially updated. The handbook shall cover at minimum: the complete Prohibited Platform List and the reasons for each platform's prohibition; the definition of Official Communications and how to identify whether a communication qualifies; the distinction between initiating and receiving prohibited-channel communications and the different consequences of each; step-by-step reporting procedures for received prohibited-channel communications; step-by-step procedures for invoking the self-reporting safe harbor under Sec. 1251(e); the financial hardship waiver process under Sec. 1251(f); the penalty track for initiated violations and the third-offense removal threshold; and contact information for the JEOS Secretariat compliance assistance line. The handbook shall be updated not less than annually and within thirty (30) days of any material change to the Prohibited Platform List or the penalty structure of Sec. 1251.
(f) Enrolled Device Platform Permission.—A Covered Official using an enrolled personal device for Official Communications does not violate this subtitle solely by reason of using a communications application that is not designated as an Approved Communications System, provided the device is currently enrolled in JEOS monitoring and the communication is captured by the JEOS monitoring application. The records preservation obligations of this subtitle and the Federal Records Act apply to all Official Communications regardless of the platform used.
SEC. 1222. APPROVED COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM STANDARDS.
The Director of JEOS, in consultation with NIST and CISA, shall publish technical standards requiring at minimum:
(1) complete, tamper-evident archiving of all communications content and metadata in a government-controlled repository retained for the active window established under Sec. 1225(c) subject to the tiered review framework of Sec. 1231;
(2) no automatic deletion or recall without prior judicial authorization from the JEOS Panel;
(3) automatic transcription of all voice and video communications using government-operated transcription infrastructure — no commercial speech-to-text API or cloud transcription service may be used at any stage. Transcripts shall be entered into the JEOS archive as the primary searchable record. Raw audio and video are retained as source material alongside the transcript. The transcription engine must be operated on air-gapped government infrastructure and must meet the same TS/SCI security standards as the monitoring system itself;
(4) end-to-end encryption meeting or exceeding current FIPS 140-3 Level 3 requirements, implemented using a distributed multi-party key escrow architecture with tiered access controls as follows:
(A) Automated Screening Tier: the automated screening system shall operate within a hardware-secured trusted execution environment — implemented using hardware-based trusted-execution or memory-encryption technology meeting the trusted-execution and hardware-security requirements the Director shall designate, in consultation with NIST, and update as the technology evolves — where computation occurs in encrypted memory inaccessible to system operators. The AI model processes content within the enclave but no plaintext is accessible outside the enclave environment. System-level key authorization for the automated screening tier requires the concurrent authorization of at least two (2) custodians at the time of system deployment and reauthorization not less than every ninety (90) days — this is a system-level authorization, not a per-communication authorization;
(B) Single-Judge Initial Review Tier: where a JEOS Panel judge reviews a flagged communication under Sec. 1231(b), decryption of the specific flagged communication requires the independent authorization of at least two (2) key custodians — the JEOS Secretariat representative and one of the other two custodians — within four (4) hours of the judge's access request. This two-custodian requirement enables timely judicial review without the operational delay of full three-custodian convening for initial probable cause determinations;
(C) Sub-Panel Full Review Tier: where a three-judge sub-panel conducts a full Investigative Order review under Sec. 1232, decryption of all preserved communications requires the independent authorization of all three (3) key custodians — the JEOS Secretariat representative, the relevant agency Inspector General representative, and the Comptroller General representative — before any sub-panel member may access communication content;
(D) Key custodian requirements: key custodians shall include at minimum one representative of the JEOS Secretariat, one representative of the relevant agency's Inspector General, and one representative of the Comptroller General's office; key material shall be stored in air-gapped hardware security modules physically located in geographically separated secure facilities; any key access event shall generate an immutable, independently stored audit log entry that cannot be modified or deleted by any single system administrator; and the architecture shall be designed such that compromise of any single key custodian, facility, or system component does not expose any decryption capability;
(5) post-quantum cryptographic agility: the system shall be designed and implemented to support cryptographic algorithm agility, meaning the ability to replace cryptographic primitives with post-quantum algorithms compliant with NIST FIPS 203, 204, and 205 or their successors without architectural redesign. No system that does not support cryptographic algorithm agility shall be certified as an Approved Communications System;
(6) multi-factor authentication and device verification for all enrolled personal devices and Approved Communications Systems;
(7) prohibition on export to non-approved systems;
(8) comprehensive, immutable audit logs of all access, export, and modification; and
(9) real-time feed to JEOS monitoring infrastructure on air-gapped government-owned infrastructure, subject to Minimization Procedures.
AI System Requirements. The automated screening system shall:
(A) be developed, trained, tested, operated, and controlled exclusively by JEOS Secretariat government employees subject to the workforce restrictions of Sec. 1211(k)(3);
(B) be operated on air-gapped, government-owned infrastructure with no connection to any commercial network, commercial cloud service, or commercial AI platform — no portion of the automated screening function may be processed by any commercial AI service including but not limited to commercial large language model APIs;
(C) operate within a trusted execution environment as specified in the key escrow standards above;
(D) be procured through JEOS's independent contracting authority under Sec. 1211(l) using IC-vetted contractor pools for system build and integration only, with the AI model itself remaining exclusively government-developed under Sec. 1211(k)(3); and
(E) be subject to the red team security verification requirement of Sec. 1211(j)(3) before going operational.
The encryption standards of this subtitle apply to the transmission of JEOS-collected data from enrolled devices to JEOS Secretariat infrastructure through dedicated government-controlled encrypted channels, and to data at rest within JEOS storage and processing systems. They do not apply to communications between Covered Officials on their enrolled devices — such communications are collected at the device layer prior to any application-level encryption by the communications platform used, and the platform's own encryption is not relevant to JEOS collection. NIST shall publish a JEOS-specific cryptographic implementation guidance document within sixty (60) days of enactment. This document shall designate the applicable existing FIPS standards — including FIPS 140-3, NIST SP 800-57 Part 1 Rev. 5, and FIPS 203, 204, and 205 for post-quantum agility — and specify how those existing standards apply to the specific requirements of Approved Communications Systems and the tiered key escrow architecture. NIST is not required to create new cryptographic standards for this purpose; it is required to publish a designation and implementation guidance document applying current standards to JEOS requirements. NIST shall review and update this guidance not less than every six (6) months and may update it between scheduled reviews at any time without a waiting period. CISA shall certify each Approved Communications System before deployment as meeting current NIST guidance. The Director of JEOS shall certify annually that all deployed systems remain in compliance.
For purposes of this subtitle and all provisions of this subtitle referring to air-gapped JEOS infrastructure, "air-gapped" means physically isolated from all commercial internet infrastructure, with no network connection to any commercial network, no wireless communication except between enrolled devices and JEOS infrastructure through JEOS-controlled encrypted channels operating on dedicated government-controlled spectrum, and no use of commercial cloud infrastructure, commercial DNS resolution, or commercial routing at any layer of the system architecture. The Director shall publish a degraded operations protocol within one hundred eighty (180) days after system deployment specifying the procedures applicable during monitoring system outages, including: minimum archival requirements that Covered Officials must maintain independently during outages; the timeline for restoring full monitoring capability; and the notification obligations to Congress when an outage exceeds twenty-four (24) hours.
SEC. 1223. PROHIBITED PLATFORM LIST.
(a) The Director of JEOS shall maintain a publicly available Prohibited Platform List. The following categories of platform are hereby designated prohibited for Official Communications:
(1) Foreign-Controlled Platforms.—Any platform operated, controlled, or capable of being compelled to produce records, provide access, or share data by any foreign government, Sensitive Nation-State Actor, or their known agents — whether directly or through legal process, ownership, or operational authority. The following are hereby specifically designated:
(A) TeleMessage and any successor products, white-label variants, or products derived from TeleMessage's codebase;
(B) any messaging application operated, controlled, or capable of being compelled to produce records by any foreign government or Sensitive Nation-State Actor as defined in Sec. 1003(15) of subtitle A of this Act.
(2) Capture-Evasion Platforms.—Any platform that: uses hardware-level or OS-level flags to prevent screen capture on enrolled devices; actively defeats keystroke logging; employs counter-surveillance or anti-forensic techniques that would materially impair JEOS device-layer collection on an enrolled device; or includes automatic message deletion, self-destruct, ephemeral messaging, or message recall that cannot be administratively disabled and cryptographically verified by JEOS.
(3) Enrolled Device Exception.—Platforms listed in subsection (a)(1) remain prohibited on enrolled devices. Platforms that would otherwise fall within subsection (a)(2) solely because of deletion or ephemerality features are not prohibited on enrolled JEOS devices where those features have been administratively disabled and cryptographically verified by JEOS. Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Google Messages are not prohibited on enrolled JEOS devices, provided JEOS device-layer collection is active and verified. These platforms remain prohibited on any device not enrolled in JEOS monitoring that is used for Official Communications.
(b) The Director may add or remove platforms by rule under 5 U.S.C. § 553. Emergency additions may take immediate effect with notice to congressional intelligence and judiciary committees, subject to notice-and-comment within thirty (30) days. The list shall be reviewed and updated not less than annually.
(c) Foreign Acquisition Automatic Prohibition.—Any platform currently permitted under this subtitle shall be automatically designated prohibited upon any change in ownership, control, or operational jurisdiction that results in a foreign government, Sensitive Nation-State Actor, or their known agents acquiring a controlling interest or operational authority over the platform. The Director shall monitor platform ownership and shall issue an emergency designation within five (5) business days of becoming aware of any such change.
SEC. 1224. SCOPE OF COMMUNICATIONS SUBJECT TO JEOS MONITORING.
(a) General Scope — Approved Systems.—JEOS automated monitoring shall apply to all Non-Clandestine Official Communications transmitted through Approved Communications Systems by or to Covered Officials, including: electronic mail through government-issued accounts; text and instant messages through Approved Systems; voice and video communications, which shall be automatically transcribed by government-operated transcription infrastructure built into the JEOS system and entered into the archive as the monitored record, with raw audio and video retained as source material; documents and attachments; calendar and scheduling communications; official social media posts; and any other Official Communication transmitted digitally through a government system or network. Transcription is a mandatory system capability, not a conditional feature; the JEOS system procurement specifications shall require a government-operated, air-gapped automatic transcription engine as a core component.
(b) Personal Device Monitoring — Full Coverage During Term of Office.—JEOS automated monitoring shall additionally apply to all communications on personally owned devices and personal accounts of Covered Officials during the period in which they hold covered positions, where those communications concern Official Communications as defined in Sec. 1203(2). Congress finds that individuals who voluntarily seek and assume positions of extraordinary public trust accept, as a condition of that trust, a reduced expectation of privacy in all communications relating to the exercise of the powers of those offices, regardless of the device or channel through which such communications are conducted. Oversight of the exercise of public power is not an intrusion on privacy — it is the constitutional condition of public power itself. The use of personal devices to conduct government business while evading oversight mechanisms has been documented extensively and constitutes a structural evasion that renders official oversight meaningless unless addressed at its source. This subsection does not authorize the use of personal devices as a substitute for Approved Communications Systems — the prohibition on personal device use for Official Communications in Sec. 1221(b) remains in full effect. The monitoring authorized by this subsection captures Official Communications that may occur on personal devices in violation of Sec. 1221(b), precisely because such violations are a primary vector for evading oversight.
(c) Device Enrollment Requirement.—As a condition of assuming any covered position, every Covered Official shall enroll all personally owned devices — including smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and any other communications-capable device — in JEOS device management. Device enrollment authorizes JEOS automated monitoring of communications on those devices that meet the content criteria for Official Communications. Device enrollment authorizes comprehensive monitoring of all communications on enrolled devices. The Review Surfacing Procedures under Sec. 1241 establish the criteria by which the automated system identifies communications containing indicators of Official Communications content for Tier 1 analysis. All communications on enrolled devices are collected regardless of whether they contain such indicators. A Covered Official who acquires a new personal device during their term of office shall enroll that device within forty-eight (48) hours of acquisition. Failure to enroll a device is an independent violation of this subtitle subject to civil penalty under Sec. 1251(a) and, where done with intent to evade monitoring, criminal penalty under Sec. 1251(b).
(d) Automated System as Reasonableness Basis.—The automated monitoring system established by this subtitle does not constitute a human search of the content of Official Communications within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment until the point at which a judge reviews a flagged communication. The automated pattern analysis and flagging process — which identifies communications for judicial review without any human access to content — is analogous to the pen-register and metadata analysis addressed in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), which held that automated processing of information conveyed to a third party does not by virtue of that automation acquire Fourth Amendment protection. The judicial probable cause determination that precedes any human review of communication content satisfies the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement with respect to the content of flagged communications. The reduced expectation of privacy of Covered Officials in their official conduct — established in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), and confirmed by Congress's existing records preservation requirements — provides independent justification for the monitoring architecture applied to Official Communications on both official and personal devices.
(e) Minimization of Personal Communications.—The Review Surfacing Procedures under Sec. 1241 shall specifically address personal device monitoring, requiring: real-time automated exclusion from the human-review queue of communications that do not contain indicators of Official Communications content; and the permanent deletion, in accordance with the retention framework of Sec. 1225(c), of communications classified in the Personal Category upon expiration of the 260-day active window. Communications between the Covered Official and a Business-Connected Relative are not Personal Category communications and are retained and analyzed on the Official Nexus Category schedule under Sec. 1225(c). A Covered Official who believes personal communications have been improperly retained may seek immediate relief from the JEOS Panel under the adversarial challenge mechanism of Sec. 1212(f).
(f) Exclusions.—The following categories of communication are excluded from JEOS monitoring regardless of device: classified Controlled Access Program communications where the DNI certifies in writing that JEOS monitoring of specific communications would compromise specific sources and methods — this certification may not be made as a blanket exclusion covering any individual, agency, or program, may not be used to shield non-operational communications that merely discuss classified matters, and must be renewed annually for each specific program thread; communications between a Covered Official and an attorney that are clearly identifiable as protected by attorney-client privilege under applicable federal law, provided that communications involving potential crime-fraud exception scenarios shall be flagged for judicial review rather than discarded. Attorney-client privileged communications on enrolled devices are likely to be collected and archived under this subtitle but shall not be surfaced to human review by the automated screening system. Where the automated system generates a flag that may include attorney-client privileged content, the JEOS Panel judge reviewing the flag shall identify any privileged material before the sub-panel reviews it, and shall exclude it from the sub-panel review record unless the Special Ethics Advocate demonstrates that the crime-fraud exception applies.
(g) No Retroactive Gap. A Covered Official may not claim an exclusion on the basis of intentional use of a Prohibited Device or Platform or on the basis of deliberate failure to enroll a personal device. Communications conducted through unenrolled or prohibited channels are subject to judicial compulsion through the JEOS Panel's contempt and subpoena powers, and the deliberate use of unenrolled devices constitutes a criminal offense under Sec. 1251(b).
(h) DNI Authority Limitation.—Nothing in 50 U.S.C. § 3024, or in any other provision of law governing the Director of National Intelligence's authority over the Intelligence Community, shall be construed to authorize the DNI to exempt any Covered Official from JEOS monitoring on the basis of that official's employment within an Intelligence Community element, their possession of a security clearance, or any other executive branch classification or designation. JEOS monitoring authority derives from Article III judicial power and this subtitle; it is not subject to executive branch modification.
(i) Third-Party Notice.—The JEOS Secretariat shall publish a public notice — accessible on its website and provided to all Covered Officials for distribution — informing the public that communications with Covered Officials on enrolled personal devices may be collected by the JEOS monitoring system. This notice does not constitute a consent requirement for third parties, but serves the Fourth Amendment purpose of reducing the reasonable expectation of privacy in communications directed to a known Covered Official on a known enrolled device.
SEC. 1225. JEOS MONITORING APPLICATION — COMPREHENSIVE DEVICE-LAYER COLLECTION.
(a) Congressional Finding.—Congress finds that individuals who voluntarily seek and assume positions of extraordinary public trust and governmental power accept, as a condition of that trust, comprehensive monitoring of their enrolled devices — both government-furnished and personally owned — during their term of office. This monitoring is the constitutional condition of public power itself, realized through the only branch of government that the Framers designed as a check on executive overreach. The commercial surveillance protections of Chapter X of subtitle A (ASPPEA) are designed to protect ordinary citizens from non-consensual corporate surveillance and government overreach through commercial data collection. They are not the appropriate framework for JEOS monitoring of individuals who have voluntarily accepted oversight as a condition of holding extraordinary governmental authority. The scope of collection authorized by this subtitle reflects the scope of that accepted condition, not an intrusion upon it.
(b) Scope of Collection.—The prohibitions of Secs. 1101, 1102, 1103, and 1104 of subtitle A (ASPPEA) do not apply to JEOS monitoring of Covered Officials conducted pursuant to this section and this subtitle. The JEOS monitoring application is authorized to collect the following from all enrolled devices of Covered Officials — both government-furnished and personally owned — during their term of office:
(1) Screen Capture.—Capture of all screen content on enrolled devices. Screen capture may operate continuously or may be agentically selected — meaning the JEOS monitoring application or an authorized on-device agentic process may determine, using automated criteria established by the JEOS Director, which screen states are captured and transmitted based on content indicators, application context, communication patterns, or other Director-specified parameters. The Director shall specify the operative screen capture mode in the classified operational directives maintained under subsection (b)(6).
(2) Keystroke and Input Data.—All keystrokes, text input, voice input, and gesture input across all applications on enrolled devices, including draft text deleted before submission and input made in any application regardless of whether it is in active foreground use. Text deleted before submission constitutes a potential record of official deliberation and is not excluded from JEOS collection under Sec. 1103(d) of subtitle A — that provision applies to commercial actors and does not govern JEOS. The foreground limitation applicable to commercial surveillance under Chapter X of subtitle A does not apply to JEOS collection under this section.
(3) Location.—Precise geolocation data collected continuously at intervals sufficient to maintain an accurate, uninterrupted location record throughout the Covered Official's term of office.
(4) Power State and Device Activity.—Logging of all device power-on and power-off events, screen lock and unlock events, and application activity records identifying which applications are open, active, or running in the background and when.
(5) Communications Metadata.—All metadata associated with any communication transmitted from or received by enrolled devices, including sender, recipient, timestamp, duration, application used, device identifiers, network identifiers, and any routing or relay information. This applies to all communications regardless of the platform or application used.
(6) Audio.—Audio collection from enrolled devices operates under rules established and maintained by the JEOS Director in classified operational directives. The Director may propose any combination of the following audio collection modes, subject to affirmative authorization by the JEOS Full Panel by majority vote. The Director may not modify authorized audio collection modes except upon the same Full Panel authorization process. All authorized audio collection mode designations shall be transmitted to the JEOS Full Panel quarterly in classified operational directives:
(A) ambient collection — continuous audio capture from enrolled device microphones regardless of device activity, application state, or user speech;
(B) voice-activated collection — audio capture triggered automatically whenever the enrolled device's microphone detects human speech, capturing the full duration of detected speech and a configurable buffer period before and after detection;
(C) location-triggered collection — audio capture activated automatically when the enrolled device is at or within a defined proximity of locations designated by the Director, including foreign diplomatic facilities, foreign consulates, locations associated with known or suspected foreign intelligence operatives, or any other location the Director designates.
Ambient collection under subparagraph (A) and voice-activated collection under subparagraph (B) are not part of baseline continuous collection and are authorized only upon the issuance of a JEOS Investigative Order under Sec. 1232 with respect to the subject Covered Official, in the same manner as video collection under subsection (b)(7); location-triggered collection under subparagraph (C) may operate as part of baseline collection, subject to the Full Panel authorization required by this paragraph. Audio is automatically transcribed by JEOS government-operated transcription infrastructure and entered into the JEOS archive as the primary searchable record, with raw audio retained as source material. The Director shall maintain a classified log of all active audio collection mode designations and location triggers, transmitted to the JEOS Full Panel quarterly.
(7) Video.—Video capture from enrolled devices is authorized upon the issuance of a JEOS Investigative Order under Sec. 1232 with respect to the subject Covered Official. Video capture is not part of baseline continuous collection but activates as part of the full subpanel review authorized by the Investigative Order.
(8) Agentic On-Device Search and Selection.—The JEOS Director is authorized to deploy autonomous agentic tooling on enrolled devices for the purpose of on-device search, identification, and selective return of Official Communications content and related materials to JEOS Secretariat infrastructure. Such agentic tooling shall:
(A) operate on-device, applying Director-established search parameters to identify communications, documents, files, or records bearing indicators of Official Communications content or Triggering Violation indicators;
(B) return selected content and associated metadata to JEOS infrastructure through the dedicated government-controlled encrypted channel specified in subsection (d);
(C) operate without any intermediate commercial cloud relay, commercial infrastructure involvement, or transmission to any non-JEOS system at any stage.
The Director shall maintain classified operational specifications for all deployed agentic tooling, transmitted to the JEOS Full Panel. Congress directs that the JEOS Secretariat shall explore and develop autonomous agentic on-device tooling capabilities as a core component of the JEOS technical architecture, to be incorporated into the system design specifications under Sec. 1211(l) and evaluated as part of the red team security verification under Sec. 1263(b)(11) and (12).
(9) New Device Acquisition.—A Covered Official who acquires any new communications-capable device after initial enrollment shall enroll that device with the JEOS Secretariat within forty-eight (48) hours of acquisition. Failure to enroll a newly acquired device within forty-eight (48) hours is an independent violation subject to the penalty provisions of Sec. 1251. This enrollment obligation does not apply to devices used exclusively for authorized clandestine intelligence operations under a Controlled Access Program designation certified in writing by the Director of National Intelligence under Sec. 1224(f), provided such devices are not used for any Official Communication outside the scope of that specific clandestine operation and are not used to conduct, coordinate, or plan any activity constituting a Triggering Violation under Sec. 1203(6).
(c) Retention — Tiered Framework.
(1) Active Window.—All data collected under subsection (b) is retained in the active JEOS archive for an initial active window of two hundred sixty (260) days from the date of collection, subject to extension for Official Nexus Category data under paragraph (2)(A), and subject to continuous automated analysis under the tiered review framework of Sec. 1231. During the active window, all collected data is treated equally regardless of content — the automated system applies Tier 1 real-time screening and Tier 2 contextual re-analysis across the full dataset without distinction between Official Communications content and personal content.
(2) Post-260-Day Automated Classification.—Upon expiration of the active window, the automated system shall apply a final classification pass to all collected data not currently subject to an active Investigative Order or legal hold. The automated system shall classify each communication or data record into one of two categories:
(A) Official Nexus Category — any communication or data record that: contains indicators of Official Communications content as defined in Sec. 1203(2) of subtitle B; contains indicators of a Triggering Violation under Sec. 1203(6) of subtitle B; is connected to any completed, pending, or dismissed Investigative Order; is subject to any legal hold, congressional subpoena, or court order; is a communication between the Covered Official and a Business-Connected Relative as defined in Sec. 1203(13), regardless of content; or cannot be affirmatively classified by the automated system as having no official nexus. All communications in this category remain in the active archive for continued Tier 2 analysis through three hundred sixty-five (365) days from the date of collection and then transfer to the twenty-five (25) year classified judicial archive under paragraph (3). Where the automated system cannot make an affirmative determination, the default is continued retention and archival transfer, not deletion.
(B) Personal Category — any communication or data record that the automated system affirmatively determines contains no Official Communications indicators, no Triggering Violation indicators, no connection to any Investigative Order, and no connection to any legal hold or outstanding subpoena, and that is not a communication between the Covered Official and a Business-Connected Relative. The automated system's affirmative determination must satisfy a high confidence threshold established by the JEOS Director in consultation with NIST and published in unclassified summary form.
(3) Twenty-Five Year Classified Judicial Archive.—All data in the Official Nexus Category transfers to the classified judicial archive with retention for twenty-five (25) years. Archived data may not be accessed except through the tiered key authorization process of Sec. 1222(4) in connection with a JEOS Investigative Order, a congressional subpoena processed under Sec. 1243(d) of this subtitle, or a court order. JEOS data in the classified judicial archive may not be destroyed, purged, or transferred outside the archive except pursuant to a JEOS Panel order under paragraph (5).
(4) Authorized Deletion of Personal Category Data.—Data classified in the Personal Category under paragraph (2)(B) is subject to deletion rather than archival transfer, subject to the following:
(A) The automated system shall generate a deletion authorization report identifying the communications and data records classified in the Personal Category, the basis for each classification, and the automated system's confidence level. No human reviews the content of communications identified in this report.
(B) A single JEOS Panel judge shall review the deletion authorization report — not the underlying content — and shall authorize deletion if satisfied that the automated classification methodology was properly applied and that no identified record is subject to a legal hold or outstanding subpoena. The judge's review is of the automated system's process and output, not of the communications themselves.
(C) Upon judicial authorization, the identified data is permanently and irreversibly deleted from all JEOS systems. Deletion shall be certified to the JEOS Full Panel and logged in the JEOS audit record.
(D) The deletion authorization process shall be completed not later than thirty (30) days after the expiration of the active window for the relevant data.
(5) Panel-Ordered Deletion from the Classified Archive.—The JEOS Full Panel may order deletion of data from the classified judicial archive only on the following grounds:
(A) the data has been affirmatively determined by the automated system to fall within the Personal Category under paragraph (2)(B) but was transferred to the archive due to a processing error; or
(B) the data constitutes communications protected by a recognized legal privilege — including attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege — and the Special Ethics Advocate has confirmed that no crime-fraud exception or other exception to the privilege applies and that the data has no connection to any completed, pending, or dismissed Investigative Order. Panel-ordered deletion is not available for any data that: was the basis of a Criminal Referral; is subject to a congressional subpoena or court order; or is connected to any completed, pending, or dismissed Investigative Order. Deletion of any such data would constitute obstruction and is categorically prohibited regardless of any Panel order.
(6) Retention Framework Governs Over Chapter X.—The retention framework of this section — not the shorter retention periods applicable to commercial actors under Chapter X of subtitle A — governs all JEOS-collected data. The twenty-five year archive period reflects the congressional finding that records of official conduct may have evidentiary, historical, and accountability value that cannot be assessed at the time of collection.
(d) Transmission and Infrastructure.—Enrolled devices transmit JEOS-collected data to JEOS Secretariat infrastructure exclusively through dedicated government-controlled encrypted channels operating on government-controlled infrastructure, with no routing through commercial internet infrastructure, commercial cloud services, or non-government relay points at any stage of transmission. JEOS Secretariat storage and processing infrastructure is physically isolated from all commercial networks — receiving data only through the dedicated government-controlled channels described in this subsection — and is operated exclusively on government-owned, government-controlled hardware. No commercial cloud infrastructure, commercial DNS resolution, or commercial routing is used at any layer of the storage or processing architecture.
(e) Use Limitations.—All collection under this section is subject exclusively to the JEOS oversight framework of this subtitle, the Review Surfacing Procedures of Sec. 1241, and the tiered review framework of Sec. 1231. JEOS-collected data may not be used for any purpose other than determining whether a Triggering Violation has occurred and, where one has, facilitating the referral process of Sec. 1232(c). JEOS data may not be shared with any commercial entity, used to produce any Psychological Profile or Operational Profile, or used for any purpose unrelated to the review of potential Triggering Violations by Covered Officials. Unauthorized use of JEOS-collected data constitutes a Tier 3 violation of subtitle A and, where committed by a government official, criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 242.
(f) Termination.—Collection under this subtitle terminates immediately and automatically upon the Covered Official leaving their covered position. All collection shall cease and devices shall be unenrolled within forty-eight (48) hours of departure. Data collected prior to departure remains in the JEOS archive and is not subject to deletion upon departure, remaining accessible under the retention and access rules of this section.
(g) Audio Collection Severability.—If any audio collection mode authorized by subsection (b)(6) is held unconstitutional as applied to any category of person, location, or circumstance, the remaining audio collection modes and all other collection authorities of this section continue in full force and effect as applied to all categories of person, location, and circumstance not affected by that holding.
(h) Location Collection Severability and Fallback.—If the continuous collection of location data under subsection (b)(3) is held invalid as applied to any category of person, location, or circumstance: (1) that holding shall not affect the remaining collection authorities of this section, which continue in full force and effect; and (2) location collection as to the affected category shall be preserved to the maximum extent consistent with the holding, including, if continuous suspicionless collection is held impermissible, the collection of location data upon the issuance of a JEOS Investigative Order under Sec. 1232 with respect to the subject Covered Official, in the same manner as video collection under subsection (b)(7).
CHAPTER IV — MONITORING AND REVIEW
SEC. 1231. AUTOMATED MONITORING, TIERED REVIEW, AND JUDICIAL FLAGGING.
(a) JEOS shall operate an automated screening system that: receives a real-time feed of all communications subject to monitoring under Sec. 1224; applies language evaluation models, natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools for sentiment and intent analysis, pattern analysis, keyword detection, behavioral pattern recognition, anomaly detection algorithms, and any other analytical tools or methods the JEOS determines necessary to fulfill its screening and analysis functions under this subtitle — operating within a trusted execution environment as specified in Sec. 1222 — to identify communications potentially evidencing a Triggering Violation; generates a flag record for each such communication; and operates exclusively on air-gapped, government-owned infrastructure with no connection to any commercial network or service.
(b) Tiered Review Framework.—The automated screening system operates in three tiers:
(1) Tier 1 — Real-Time Screening: the automated system screens all incoming communications in real time. Communications generating a high-confidence flag indicating probable cause of a Triggering Violation are immediately referred to a JEOS Panel judge for review under subsection (c). All communications — whether flagged at Tier 1 or not — are retained in the JEOS archive for the active window established under Sec. 1225(c) for Tier 2 contextual analysis.
(2) Tier 2 — Contextual Re-Analysis: retained communications are periodically re-analyzed throughout the active window established under Sec. 1225(c) against the full context of the Covered Official's communication pattern over that period. A communication that appeared innocuous in isolation may flag when analyzed alongside communications with the same actor over time, revealing patterns of coordination, repeated contact, or evolving conduct that no single communication would reveal. The automated system shall run full contextual batch analysis not less than every thirty (30) days across all retained communications. Communications that flag at Tier 2 are referred to a JEOS Panel judge under subsection (c) regardless of whether they were flagged at Tier 1. Upon expiration of the applicable active window under Sec. 1225(c), all communications that have not resulted in an active Investigative Order are classified and dispositioned under Sec. 1225(c).
(3) Tier 3 — Human Judicial Review: triggered exclusively when Tier 1 or Tier 2 generates a flag. No human reviews any communication content until a flag has been generated by the automated system. The judge reviews the flagged communication, the algorithmic basis for the flag, and available contextual communications, and makes a probable cause determination under subsection (c).
(c) Judicial Review of Flags.—Each flag generated at Tier 1 or Tier 2 shall be reviewed within seventy-two (72) hours by a single JEOS Panel judge using two-custodian key authorization as specified in Sec. 1222(4)(B), who shall: determine whether the flagged communication, considered in the context of other available communications from the applicable active window under Sec. 1225(c), provides probable cause to believe a Triggering Violation has occurred, is occurring, or is about to occur; if probable cause is found, issue a JEOS Investigative Order under Sec. 1232; and if probable cause is not found, issue a written declination. A declination does not result in immediate deletion — the communication remains in the active archive subject to continued Tier 2 contextual re-analysis and may be retrieved and reconsidered if subsequent communications provide additional context. The communication is classified and dispositioned under Sec. 1225(c) at the conclusion of the applicable active window.
(d) The JEOS Full Panel may designate additional Triggering Violation categories by two-thirds vote and retire designated categories by majority vote, subject to Federal Register publication and congressional notification.
(e) False Positive Rate.—The Director shall, in consultation with NIST, establish a maximum acceptable false positive rate for the automated screening system as part of the procurement specifications under Sec. 1211(l). For purposes of this subtitle, a "false positive" means a Tier 1 or Tier 2 flag that is dismissed at judicial review under subsection (c) and that does not subsequently become the basis for an Investigative Order. Congress recognizes that a communication flagged at Tier 1 and initially dismissed at judicial review may be appropriately re-flagged at Tier 2 upon contextual re-analysis revealing a pattern of coordinated conduct that no single communication disclosed; such subsequent Tier 2 flags on previously reviewed communications are not false positives for purposes of this subtitle but are instead evidence of the system operating as designed — the purpose of the tiered architecture is precisely to permit pattern recognition across the active window established under Sec. 1225(c) that real-time review cannot provide. The maximum false positive rate established under this subsection shall apply to flags that are dismissed and never subsequently result in an Investigative Order across the full active window established under Sec. 1225(c). This rate shall be published in unclassified form. The annual report under Sec. 1242 shall include the actual false positive rate measured during the reporting period and whether it complied with the established maximum.
(f) Synthetic Media Countermeasures.—The JEOS Director shall develop and maintain countermeasures against the use of AI-generated synthetic media — including synthetic text, audio, video, and manipulated communications — to evade, deceive, or overwhelm the automated screening system. The Director shall ensure that the automated screening system is capable of detecting communications that bear indicators of synthetic generation or manipulation, including communications designed to trigger false positives for the purpose of degrading screening effectiveness and communications designed to make genuine corrupt communications appear innocuous through synthetic obfuscation. The independent red team security verification required under Sec. 1263(b)(11) and (b)(12) shall include specific testing for synthetic media evasion attack vectors, and the JEOS system shall not be certified as operational until the red team confirms that the system's synthetic media detection capabilities meet standards established by the Director in consultation with NIST. The Director shall update synthetic media countermeasures not less than annually and shall report on the current state of synthetic media threats to the JEOS monitoring system in each annual report under Sec. 1242.
(g) Continuous Algorithm Refinement and Evasion Countermeasures.—The JEOS Director, in coordination with the Chief Technology Officer, shall establish and maintain a program of continuous refinement of the automated screening system to ensure that detection capabilities keep pace with evolving evasion methods, including:
(1) regular updates to language evaluation models, natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools for sentiment and intent analysis, behavioral pattern recognition, anomaly detection algorithms, and any other analytical tools or methods the JEOS determines necessary to fulfill its screening and analysis functions under this subtitle, in order to identify evolving communication patterns, code words, steganographic techniques, and other methods by which Covered Officials may attempt to circumvent or defeat monitoring;
(2) development and continuous updating of collusion detection capabilities, including pattern analysis designed to identify coordinated use of coded language, intermediary communications through non-Covered persons, prearranged signal systems, and structured use of non-monitored channels by multiple Covered Officials acting in concert;
(3) quarterly review and update of flagging criteria in consultation with the JEOS Panel, incorporating lessons learned from completed Investigative Orders, dismissed flags, confirmed evasion attempts, and intelligence regarding new circumvention tactics;
(4) annual independent red team testing of the screening system's detection capabilities against simulated evasion scenarios, including simulated code word systems, collusion networks, and novel communication obfuscation techniques, with results reported to the JEOS Full Panel and summarized in the annual report under Sec. 1242(a); and
(5) maintenance of a classified Evasion Tactics Library documenting known and anticipated circumvention methods, updated not less frequently than quarterly and accessible to all JEOS Secretariat personnel with appropriate clearances.
All algorithm refinements and model updates under this subsection shall comply with the workforce restrictions of Sec. 1211(k) and shall be subject to the red team verification requirements of Sec. 1263(d).
SEC. 1232. JEOS INVESTIGATIVE ORDERS, FINAL DISPOSITION, AND CLASSIFIED JUDICIAL ARCHIVE.
(a) A JEOS Investigative Order shall: identify the Covered Official or officials under investigation; identify the specific Triggering Violation; authorize preservation and full sub-panel review of relevant communications from the archive using three-custodian key authorization as specified in Sec. 1222(4)(C); designate a three-judge sub-panel; and notify the Special Ethics Advocate.
(b) The sub-panel shall review all preserved communications with the Special Ethics Advocate's participation, apply the probable cause standard, and issue a Final Disposition within forty-five (45) days.
(c) Final Disposition shall either: dismiss, in which case preserved communications are transferred to the classified judicial archive under subsection (e) within thirty (30) days of the Final Disposition; or, upon finding probable cause: issue a Criminal Referral to the Attorney General; transmit concurrent notice to relevant congressional oversight committees; notify the Comptroller General for appropriations violations; authorize emergency preservation measures where evidence is at risk; and, in cases involving probable cause of treason, coup, insurrection, or systemic use of executive power to subvert the constitutional order, refer the matter to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for mandatory expedited review. The D.C. Circuit shall convene a panel of three judges within seventy-two (72) hours of receiving a JEOS referral, shall issue a decision within thirty (30) days, and shall have authority to affirm the criminal referral, issue emergency preservation orders, direct the Attorney General to open a criminal investigation, or certify the matter to the Supreme Court on an expedited basis. For any D.C. Circuit panel convened under this subparagraph, no judge nominated by the President whose administration or whose former or current officials are the subject of the JEOS referral shall sit on that panel. Where recusal would leave fewer than three eligible D.C. Circuit judges, replacement judges shall be drawn by random selection from all active Article III circuit judges nationally, excluding judges nominated by the same President. Congress hereby creates a new category of mandatory D.C. Circuit jurisdiction for JEOS referrals under this subparagraph, invoked by the filing of a JEOS referral without requiring any party's petition or consent.
(d) The Attorney General shall respond in writing within thirty (30) days of receiving a Criminal Referral, indicating whether a criminal investigation has been opened. The Director of JEOS shall transmit this response to congressional oversight committees.
(e) The JEOS Secretariat shall maintain a classified judicial archive for communications that have completed the applicable active review window under Sec. 1225(c) without resulting in an active Investigative Order, and for communications from dismissed Investigative Orders. Communications in the classified judicial archive shall: be retained for twenty-five (25) years from the date of transfer; be accessible only pursuant to a new JEOS Panel order based on new evidence, new context, or a new Investigative Order involving the same Covered Official; not be accessible to any executive branch entity, congressional body, or member of the public except pursuant to such a JEOS Panel order; and at the conclusion of the 25-year retention period, be subject to disposition under the Federal Records Act as judicial records, with JEOS Director consultation with NARA archivists regarding permanent preservation of records of historical significance.
(f) Discretionary Pre-Referral Notice.—Within forty-eight (48) hours of the sub-panel reaching a probable cause finding, the JEOS Director may, in the Director's discretion, notify the Covered Official that a Final Disposition is imminent and afford the Official a period of not more than five (5) business days to submit a written statement to the sub-panel. The sub-panel shall consider but is not required to act on any such statement. This discretionary notification shall not be available where the Director finds that notification would risk destruction of evidence or obstruction of a pending criminal investigation.
(g) Adjustment of Retention Parameters.—The JEOS Full Panel may, at any time and by two-thirds vote, adjust the following operational parameters:
(1) the duration of the active windows established under Sec. 1225(c), none of which shall be reduced below one hundred eighty (180) days nor extended beyond five hundred forty (540) days;
(2) the duration of retention in the classified judicial archive established under subsection (e), which shall not be reduced below fifteen (15) years;
(3) the classification criteria governing the post-active-window automated classification under the retention framework of Sec. 1225(c), including the thresholds for assignment to the Official Nexus Category and the Personal Category; and
(4) the deletion authorization procedures under Sec. 1225(c)(4), including the scope of judicial review of deletion reports. Any adjustment under this subsection shall be transmitted to the congressional intelligence committees and the Committees on the Judiciary of the Senate and House of Representatives and shall take effect sixty (60) days after transmission unless Congress enacts a joint resolution of disapproval. The Director shall include in each annual report under Sec. 1242(a) a summary of any retention parameter reviews conducted and any adjustments made or considered during the reporting period.
SEC. 1233. NOTIFICATION TO COVERED OFFICIALS.
A Covered Official who is the subject of an Investigative Order shall be notified within thirty (30) days of the Final Disposition, unless the JEOS Full Panel determines by majority vote that earlier notification would obstruct a pending investigation or destroy evidence. A Covered Official whose investigation resulted in dismissal shall receive written confirmation that no referral was made and that preserved communications have been transferred to the classified judicial archive. The notification obligation of this subtitle applies to former Covered Officials who have departed their covered position after the issuance of an Investigative Order but before the Final Disposition. Former officials shall be notified at their personal email address on file with the JEOS Secretariat at the time of their departure.
CHAPTER V — MINIMIZATION AND OVERSIGHT OF JEOS
SEC. 1241. REVIEW SURFACING PROCEDURES.
JEOS shall adopt and publish mandatory Review Surfacing Procedures governing what the automated screening system flags for human review. These procedures govern surfacing to human attention, not collection — all communications, screen content, keystrokes, audio, and metadata collected under Sec. 1224 and Sec. 1225 are logged in full in the JEOS archive regardless of whether they are flagged. The Review Surfacing Procedures shall govern: the criteria by which the automated system generates a Tier 1 or Tier 2 flag for human judicial review; the prohibition on any human accessing archive content except through the tiered judicial review process triggered by a flag or an Investigative Order; strict limitation of access to flagged and archived content to the reviewing judge, sub-panel, and Special Ethics Advocate, using the tiered key authorization levels of Sec. 1222(4); prohibition on use of archived content for any purpose other than determining whether a Triggering Violation occurred; transfer of non-Investigative Order communications to the classified judicial archive within the applicable active window under Sec. 1225(c); transfer of dismissed Investigative Order communications to the classified judicial archive within thirty (30) days of Final Disposition; and quarterly audit logging review by the Special Ethics Advocate. The Review Surfacing Procedures shall specifically address real-time automated exclusion from the human-review queue of communications bearing characteristics of attorney-client privilege, including communications between a Covered Official and a member of the bar in a legal representation context; such communications shall require a JEOS Panel judge to determine, on application by the Special Ethics Advocate, that the crime-fraud exception applies before they are surfaced to the sub-panel. Communications reviewed under this subtitle may not be shared with any executive branch entity except as part of a criminal referral, and then only through a protective order.
SEC. 1242. ANNUAL REPORTING AND OVERSIGHT OF JEOS.
(a) The Director of JEOS shall transmit an annual report to Congress in classified and unclassified forms describing: communications screened; flags generated at Tier 1 and Tier 2; flags sustained or dismissed at judicial review; Investigative Orders issued; Criminal Referrals and disposition; identified deficiencies in the automated screening system; communications system violations; and the volume of communications transferred to the classified judicial archive.
(b) JEOS shall be subject to Comptroller General audit not less than every three (3) years. The Special Ethics Advocate shall submit an independent annual report to Congress addressing minimization compliance and any operational concerns.
(c) The Director shall simultaneously publish an unclassified public summary of the annual report containing at minimum: the aggregate number of Covered Officials enrolled during the reporting period; the total number of communications screened; the number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 flags generated; the number of flags sustained and dismissed at judicial review; and the number of Criminal Referrals transmitted. The public summary shall not include any information identifying specific Covered Officials, specific communications, or specific Triggering Violations under investigation.
SEC. 1243. JEOS ARCHIVE DISCLOSURE PROCEDURES, CONGRESSIONAL SUBPOENA PROCESSING, AND INSPECTOR GENERAL COORDINATION.
(a) JEOS Archives Are Judicial Records Not Subject to FOIA.—Communications archived in JEOS systems are records of the judicial branch held by an Article III court. They are not "agency records" within the meaning of 5 U.S.C. § 552(f)(1) and are not subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. No FOIA request directed to any executive agency, and no FOIA request directed to JEOS, shall compel the production of any communication from a JEOS archive.
(b) Preservation of Existing FOIA Rights.—Nothing in this subtitle limits, restricts, or modifies the rights of any person to request records from any executive agency under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552. The fact that a communication has been captured by JEOS monitoring, reviewed by a JEOS judge, or is the subject of a JEOS Investigative Order does not affect the discoverability of that communication through a FOIA request directed to the executive agency that originally generated or holds a copy of that communication, subject to all applicable FOIA exemptions that would otherwise apply.
(c) Active Investigative Order — Notification to JEOS Director.—Where a specific communication preserved in a JEOS archive is the subject of an active JEOS Investigative Order and is also sought through a Freedom of Information Act request, a congressional records request other than a subpoena processed under subsection (d), or discovery in pending litigation, the executive agency, body, or party holding or processing the request shall notify the JEOS Director before responding. The JEOS Director may transmit a non-binding recommendation to the requesting party regarding the timing or scope of disclosure in light of the active investigation. The recipient retains full discretion over its response. The Director's recommendation does not constitute a legal basis for withholding, delaying, or modifying that response beyond what applicable law would independently support.
(d) Congressional Subpoena Processing.—Where a committee of Congress with jurisdiction over the subject matter issues a subpoena directed to the JEOS Director for communications held in the classified judicial archive, the following procedure governs:
(1) The subpoena shall specifically identify the Covered Official or officials whose communications are sought, the subject matter of the communications, and the time period, with sufficient particularity to enable the JEOS Director to identify responsive records without conducting a general search of the archive.
(2) Upon receipt of a valid subpoena, the JEOS Director shall, within ten (10) business days, submit the subpoena to a single JEOS Panel judge for review. The Panel judge shall determine whether the subpoena seeks communications that are subject to an active JEOS Investigative Order and whether production would compromise an active JEOS investigation.
(3) Where no active Investigative Order covers the subpoenaed communications, the JEOS Director shall authorize access through the tiered key authorization process of Sec. 1222(4) and produce all responsive communications to the requesting committee within thirty (30) days of the Panel judge's determination, subject to applicable classification handling procedures.
(4) Where an active Investigative Order covers any of the subpoenaed communications, the Panel judge shall notify the requesting committee that responsive communications are subject to an active investigation and shall specify the anticipated timeline for resolution. The Panel judge may authorize partial production of responsive communications not covered by the active Investigative Order. Production of communications covered by the active Investigative Order shall be deferred until the earlier of: the Final Disposition of the Investigative Order under Sec. 1232(c); or ninety (90) days from the date of the subpoena, unless the JEOS Full Panel, by majority vote, determines that continued deferral is necessary to prevent obstruction of a specific, identified investigative proceeding — in which case deferral may be extended for one additional period of not more than ninety (90) days.
(5) Communications produced under this subsection shall be transmitted to the requesting committee through secure classified channels appropriate to the classification level of the material. The JEOS Director shall not redact, withhold, or modify the content of responsive communications except to exclude material that is both non-responsive to the subpoena and protected by a recognized legal privilege confirmed by the Panel judge.
(6) The JEOS Director's compliance with a congressional subpoena under this subsection does not constitute a waiver of any privilege or protection that may attach to the communications in any other proceeding. Production to a congressional committee under compulsory process is not public disclosure within the meaning of any provision of this Act.
(e) Inspector General Coordination.—Where a JEOS Investigative Order and an Inspector General investigation are running concurrently concerning the same Covered Official for related conduct, the JEOS Director — as the Article III authority over JEOS proceedings — shall serve as the coordination authority. The JEOS Director shall determine:
(1) whether materials from the IG investigation should be incorporated into the JEOS proceeding;
(2) whether the IG investigation should pause pending the JEOS proceeding to avoid evidentiary contamination or conflicting preservation orders; and
(3) whether any Criminal Referral should be transmitted jointly with the IG's report or independently. All coordination between JEOS and IG offices shall occur within the judicial branch through the JEOS Director; the Department of Justice shall have no coordination role between JEOS and IG proceedings in which DOJ is itself a potential subject of oversight or in which a covered DOJ official is under investigation.
CHAPTER VI — PENALTIES FOR COMMUNICATIONS VIOLATIONS
SEC. 1251. PENALTIES FOR USE OF PROHIBITED DEVICES OR PLATFORMS.
(a) Civil and Administrative Penalties.
(1) Inadvertent Receipt — Reporting Required, No Civil Penalty.—Where a Covered Official receives a communication through a Prohibited Device or Platform but did not initiate or knowingly continue the use of that device or platform — meaning the communication was initiated by another party and the Covered Official did not respond through the prohibited channel — the Covered Official shall report the communication to the JEOS Secretariat within twenty-four (24) hours and preserve the original communication pursuant to subsection (e). No civil fine or suspension applies to a received communication that is promptly reported under this paragraph.
(2) Initiated or Continued Use — First Offense.—A Covered Official who initiates or knowingly continues a communication through a Prohibited Device or Platform shall be subject to: a civil fine of not less than $10,000 per violation. No mandatory suspension applies to a first offense of initiated or continued use, provided the Covered Official self-reports under subsection (e).
(3) Initiated or Continued Use — Second Offense.—A civil fine of not less than $10,000 per violation; and mandatory suspension without pay for not less than ten (10) business days.
(4) Initiated or Continued Use — Third Offense.—Removal from office.
(5) Enrolled Device Exception.—Use of a communications application that is not on the Prohibited Platform List under Sec. 1223 on a currently enrolled JEOS device does not constitute a violation of this subtitle regardless of whether that application is designated as an Approved Communications System. The removal trigger applies only where the Covered Official initiated or knowingly continued each of the three qualifying offenses. Offenses involving only receipt of a prohibited-channel communication do not count toward the third-offense removal threshold regardless of whether a civil fine was assessed.
(b) Criminal.—Any Covered Official knowingly using a Prohibited Device or Platform with intent to obstruct oversight, destroy official records, or conceal a Triggering Violation shall be imprisoned for not more than five (5) years, or fined under title 18, or both.
(c) Enhanced Penalty.—Use of a Prohibited Device or Platform to facilitate or conceal a Triggering Violation is subject to criminal penalties under subsection (b) in addition to any penalties for the underlying violation.
(d) Agency Head Accountability.—Any agency head who fails to enforce Approved Communications System requirements with actual or constructive knowledge of non-compliance shall be personally liable for civil penalties and may be referred for criminal prosecution where the failure was willful or reckless.
(e) Self-Reporting Safe Harbor.—A Covered Official who self-reports use of a Prohibited Device or Platform to the JEOS Secretariat within forty-eight (48) hours of the communication, before any JEOS inquiry, flag, or investigation has commenced, shall receive a complete waiver of the civil fine for that specific violation, subject to all of the following conditions:
(1) the Covered Official shall immediately preserve the original communication on the prohibited device or platform without deletion, alteration, or forwarding;
(2) the Covered Official shall transfer the complete content and metadata of the communication to the JEOS Secretariat within forty-eight (48) hours of self-reporting, using the transfer procedures specified by the JEOS Secretariat;
(3) the transferred communication shall be entered into the JEOS archive and treated as a monitored communication subject to all retention, analysis, and review procedures applicable under this subtitle;
(4) the waiver applies to the civil fine only — the provisions of subsection (a)(3) regarding mandatory suspension for a second offense and subsection (a)(4) regarding removal for a third offense remain applicable and are not waived by self-reporting; and
(5) the waiver is not available where the content of the self-reported communication itself constitutes probable cause of a Triggering Violation, in which case the communication is immediately treated as a Tier 1 flag under Sec. 1231(c).
(f) Financial Hardship Waiver.—The JEOS Director has discretion to reduce or waive any civil fine assessed under this subtitle upon a documented showing of financial hardship, subject to the following:
(1) The Covered Official shall submit a sworn financial disclosure to the JEOS Director within thirty (30) days of the civil fine assessment, identifying all sources of income including salary, investment income, outside employment, trust distributions, and any other financial resources; existing financial obligations; total assets; and any extraordinary financial circumstances.
(2) The Director shall consider the totality of the Official's financial circumstances, including all streams of income and assets. An Official of substantial financial means — including investment portfolios, trust assets, outside business income, or any other resources beyond government compensation — shall not receive a waiver or reduction except upon extraordinary showing of hardship. Cabinet-level officers and other senior officials required to file public financial disclosure statements under the Ethics in Government Act are presumed to have the means to pay applicable civil fines absent a specific documented showing to the contrary.
(3) A waiver or reduction under this subsection applies to the civil fine only. The mandatory suspension under subsection (a)(3), the offense count toward the third-offense removal threshold under subsection (a)(4), and any other consequence of the violation are not affected by a financial hardship waiver.
(4) The Director's hardship waiver determination shall be logged in a non-public JEOS Director's record. The sworn financial disclosure submitted under paragraph (1) is confidential and shall not be publicly disclosed. The fact that a waiver was granted or denied, and the general basis for the determination, shall be transmitted to the JEOS Full Panel within five (5) business days of the decision.
(5) The financial hardship waiver is available for first, second, and third offense civil fines. Its availability at the third offense reflects Congress's recognition that removal from office is itself a significant consequence that will result in loss of government income; the civil fine at that stage serves a deterrent function that may be disproportionate where the Official demonstrably lacks the means to pay.
CHAPTER VII — CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION AND SEVERABILITY
SEC. 1261. CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION.
(a) This subtitle shall be construed consistently with the Fourth Amendment, Article II, and Article III of the Constitution. In any conflict with the Constitution as authoritatively construed by the Supreme Court, the Constitutional provision prevails.
(b) Nothing in this subtitle grants JEOS authority to take direct action against any Covered Official. JEOS authority is limited to monitoring, review, and referral. All enforcement action shall remain with the Department of Justice, Congress, and courts of competent criminal jurisdiction.
(c) Executive Privilege.—This subtitle does not abrogate constitutionally grounded executive privilege. Where a Covered Official asserts executive privilege with respect to a flagged communication, the JEOS Panel shall adjudicate the claim under United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), by majority vote of the Full Panel, with the Special Ethics Advocate having standing to oppose.
(d) This subtitle creates no private right of action for Covered Officials challenging JEOS monitoring. Such challenges shall be raised before the JEOS Full Panel, with appeal to the D.C. Circuit and further review by the Supreme Court on certiorari. Where the Supreme Court holds any provision of this subtitle unconstitutional, the JEOS Director shall, within ninety (90) days of the ruling, transmit to Congress a proposed remediation plan specifying which remaining provisions continue to operate and what legislative action, if any, is required to restore full system functionality consistent with the Court's ruling.
SEC. 1262. SEVERABILITY.
If any provision of this subtitle, or its application to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remainder shall not be affected thereby. Each provision shall be given effect to the maximum extent consistent with the constitutional ruling.
SEC. 1263. JEOS EFFECTIVE DATE, PHASE-IN, AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULE.
(a) Immediate Effect.—This subtitle takes effect on the date of enactment with respect to: the prohibition on use of Prohibited Devices and Platforms under Sec. 1221; the establishment of JEOS as a judicial body and the commencement of the appointment process for the Director, CTO, and Panel; and the obligation of OPM to begin CTO candidate pool compilation under Sec. 1212(c)(1).
(b) JEOS Implementation Schedule.—The following milestones govern implementation of subtitle B (EAJOA) and are mandatory under the authority of the judicial branch, the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge, and the JEOS Director and CTO once designated. These milestones are separate from and independent of the ASPPEA implementation schedule in subtitle A. The dates specified are targets. The operational milestones under paragraphs (11) and (12) may not be reached until their substantive preconditions are satisfied — independent red team security verification and CISA certification. The JEOS Director may extend any milestone upon written certification to the JEOS Full Panel and to Congress stating the cause of delay and a remediation timeline; any extension exceeding ninety (90) days in the aggregate for a given milestone requires the concurrence of the JEOS Full Panel. No extension may waive a substantive precondition to an operational milestone:
(1) Date of Enactment: Prohibited Devices and Platforms prohibition takes effect; JEOS establishment and appointment process commences; OPM begins CTO candidate pool compilation under Sec. 1212(c)(1); OPM transmits government-wide notification to all agency heads under Sec. 1211A(a)(1) within seven (7) days.
(2) 21 Days After Enactment: OLC publishes Covered Official interpretive guidance under Sec. 1211A(a)(2); each Federal Agency designates and reports its JEOS Liaison Officer to OPM under Sec. 1211A(a)(3). Roster compilation begins on this date.
(3) 40 Days After Enactment: OPM transmits certified CTO candidate pool of not fewer than five (5) and not more than ten (10) qualified candidates to the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge under Sec. 1212(c)(4). This gives the Chief Judge fifty (50) days to review the pool before the day 90 simultaneous designation deadline.
(4) 89 Days After Enactment: All agency JEOS Covered Officials rosters complete, certified, and held ready for transmission under Sec. 1211A(b)(1); NIST publishes JEOS cryptographic implementation guidance document designating applicable FIPS standards under Sec. 1222 of this subtitle.
(5) 90 Days After Enactment: D.C. Circuit Chief Judge simultaneously designates inaugural JEOS Director and JEOS CTO under Sec. 1212(a) and Sec. 1212(c)(5); both begin work immediately. Covered Officials shall cease initiating Official Communications through Prohibited Devices and Platforms. Migration of Official Communications to Approved Communications Systems shall occur on a phased basis: the pilot cohort defined in Sec. 1211A(f)(1) shall complete migration not later than the date the pilot monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(11) — five hundred forty (540) days after enactment; all remaining Covered Officials shall complete migration not later than thirty (30) days after the full monitoring system becomes operational under Sec. 1263(b)(12) — that is, approximately seven hundred sixty (760) days after enactment, being seven hundred thirty (730) days to full system operational plus thirty (30) days for enrollment completion. The prohibition on initiated prohibited-platform use in Sec. 1221(a) takes effect at day 90; the migration completion deadlines of this paragraph govern only the phased transition of Official Communications infrastructure. For the period between day 90 and the date on which the JEOS Director first certifies one or more Approved Communications Systems under Sec. 1222, Covered Officials shall conduct Official Communications exclusively through government-issued email accounts, government-furnished devices operating on agency networks, and any existing agency communications infrastructure designated as compliant by the relevant agency Chief Information Officer — such infrastructure is hereby deemed a transitional Approved Communications System for purposes of this subtitle until the Director's first certification. The Director shall certify at least one Approved Communications System within sixty (60) days of designation. If the D.C. Circuit Chief Judge fails to make both designations within ninety (90) days, the authority passes to the full Judicial Conference to make both designations by majority vote within thirty (30) additional days; if the Judicial Conference also fails to act within that period, the designations are made by the most senior active Article III circuit judge by years of service who meets all eligibility requirements under Sec. 1212(a) and Sec. 1212(c)(2), within ten (10) additional days.
(6) First Business Day After Director Designation: All agency certified rosters transmitted to the JEOS Director under Sec. 1211A(b)(4). Until the Secretariat is operational, all immediate notifications under Sec. 1211A(c)(2) and monthly updates under Sec. 1211A(c)(1) shall be transmitted to the Director rather than the Secretariat.
(7) Within 10 Business Days of Director Designation: Director reviews OLC interpretive guidance and issues superseding interpretation if necessary under Sec. 1211A(a)(4); agencies transmit supplemental roster updates within 10 business days of any superseding interpretation.
(8) 150 Days After Enactment: JEOS Director and CTO issue classified procurement solicitation through JEOS independent contracting authority under Sec. 1211(l). The Director shall commission the red team security verification panel under Sec. 1211(j)(3) not later than this date, so that verification can proceed in parallel with system development.
(9) 180 Days After Enactment: Government development team selected and, where permitted under Sec. 1211(k)(2), system build and integration contractors selected; system development begins. Not later than this date, the JEOS Director shall transfer all agency rosters to the Secretariat regardless of Secretariat staffing level; the Secretariat shall be considered sufficiently operational for roster intake purposes once it has not fewer than ten (10) cleared staff in place including at least one senior attorney, one information systems security officer, one administrative director, and one human resources specialist. Not later than this date, the JEOS Director shall transmit a capital expenditure plan to Congress under Sec. 1211(e). Red team verification shall be certified complete not later than thirty (30) days before each operational milestone.
(10) 240 Days After Enactment: NIST publishes first 6-month review and update of JEOS cryptographic implementation guidance under Sec. 1222 of this subtitle.
(11) 540 Days After Enactment: The pilot monitoring system shall become operational for the pilot cohort, defined as the heads of the executive departments listed in 5 U.S.C. § 101, other officers of Cabinet rank, and all members of the White House Office holding positions at the GS-15 level or above or equivalent, upon completion of the independent red team security verification described under Sec. 1211(j)(3) as well as CISA certification confirming that the system meets all applicable NIST standards. The pilot cohort device enrollment completion date is governed by Sec. 1211A(f)(1).
(12) 730 Days After Enactment: The full monitoring system shall become operational for all Covered Officials, upon completion of independent red team security verification and CISA certification of the full system. All remaining Covered Officials shall complete device enrollment not later than thirty (30) days after this date under Sec. 1211A(f)(2), which is approximately 760 days after enactment.
(c) The prohibition on initiated use of Prohibited Devices and Platforms under Sec. 1221 shall take effect ninety (90) days after enactment. Device enrollment deadlines and Official Communications migration deadlines are governed by Sec. 1211A(f) and Sec. 1263(b)(5) respectively, and are tied to the system readiness milestones, not to the date of enactment.
(d) Red Team Failure Consequences.—If the red team security verification process under milestone (11) or (12) identifies critical vulnerabilities, the JEOS Director shall:
(1) transmit a classified report to the JEOS Full Panel, the Comptroller General, and the "Gang of Eight" within five (5) business days;
(2) pause work toward the immediate and next relevant milestone until the remediation effort is complete and a follow-on red team verification confirms that the vulnerabilities are resolved; and
(3) certify to Congress, the JEOS Full Panel, and the Comptroller General that all identified critical vulnerabilities have been resolved before activating the next milestone and phase of the relevant system.
SEC. 1264. TITLE-WIDE SEVERABILITY.
(a) In General.—If any provision of this Act, an amendment made by this Act, or the application of such provision or amendment to any person or circumstance is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, the amendments made by this Act, and the application of such provision or amendment to any other person or circumstance shall not be affected.
(b) Severability of Applications.—If the application of any provision of this Act or any amendment made by this Act to any person, entity, government, or circumstance is held to be invalid, the application of such provision or amendment to all other persons, entities, governments, and circumstances shall not be affected.