Moving Americans Privacy Protection Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. DAINES. Madam President, today the Senate passed the bipartisan, bicameral Moving Americans Privacy Protection Act--S. 758, H.R. 1568-- and will send it to the President for his signature. In 2017, a small Montana trucking company came to me with concerns that servicemembers and Americans moving home from abroad were having their identities stolen after cargo manifests were made public by Customs and Border Protection without the removal of their personally identifiable information. So I took action, drafted the Moving Americans Privacy Protection Act, and worked with a bipartisan group of Members in the House and Senate to move forward with a solution.
The bill is simple and straightforward. It requires Customs and Border Protection to remove all personally identifiable information, including Social Security Numbers and passport numbers, from manifest sheets before making them public. This is an easy solution to a longstanding problem, and I am glad Congress is finally acting to get this bill to the President's desk and signed into law.
In 1984, Customs and Border Protection were required to publicly disclose certain manifest information. Since then, we have seen the inadvertent disclosure of Americans' personal data with little to no recourse. In today's digital world, once a person's information is put online, it is nearly impossible to remove it. And while the CBP does offer a process for consumers of shipping services to make their information confidential, these forms can take months to process and are often processed after the individual's data has already been released to the public.
I believe the priority should be to protect Americans' privacy and automatically remove this personal information, rather than requiring citizens to make a request and hope the paperwork is processed in time. This bill will ensure that happens.
I want to thank Senator Peters for helping lead this bill with me in the Senate, as well as Senator Marshall and Senator Stabenow. I also want to thank Representative Waltz and Representative Pascrell for leading the House companion bill that we passed in the Senate today. I also want to thank all our staff and the staff on the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee for their work over the years to get this bill signed into law. Finally, I want to thank all the Montanans and Americans, including the large group of trucking, moving, and servicemember organizations, who have championed this bill for so long.
I look forward to our bill getting signed into law and ensuring Americans' and servicemembers' privacy is finally protected.
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