Moving Americans Privacy Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DENHAM. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Reichert of the Subcommittee on Trade for yielding and for his work on this important issue.

Protecting Americans' personally identifiable information has been hotly debated in the Halls of Congress this month. Last week, we debated appropriate limitations on private companies' access, use, and distribution of private data.

This week in the House, we are moving a package of bills to improve the Federal Government's use of Americans' data to ensure that the government is doing everything to keep its citizens safe.

Private companies should not be selling personal information without consent, but unequivocally, the Federal Government should not be selling the personal information of its citizens and armed services members.

I introduced H.R. 4403, the Moving Americans Privacy Protection Act, to ensure that Federal agencies are taking the necessary extra step of removing Social Security numbers, passport numbers, and ID numbers from shipping information.

Currently, the Customs and Border Protection agency is not taking this step.

In absence of this action, when Americans move internationally, their information may be erroneously made public online.

Representatives from the Department of Defense, Department of State, the DEA, and FBI, and others have heard from their employees on numerous occasions that their information has been found for sale on the internet through the manifest disclosure process.

Annual Department of Defense moves alone are enormous in scope, with roughly 600,000 servicemembers and their families moving every year, of which 200,000 of those are going international.

In 2014 and 2015, the Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command issued separate advisories alerting servicemembers to this issue.

We must do a better job of protecting our armed servicemembers who are making a sacrifice to wear the cloth of this great Nation.

I want to be clear that there is merit to shipping and cargo statistics. We need to make them available for economic trend analysis, but that does not mean that we put our citizens and Armed Forces at risk in the process.

The manifest disclosure process should not be repealed. The CBP should be required to remove the sensitive data.

Chairman Brady and Chairman Reichert have identified this issue and unanimously reported the bill out of the committee last week. It is good governance and bipartisan legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colead, Congressman Pascrell, for his work on this bill, and I urge its passage.

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