From: Politico | Morning Cybersecurity
By TIM STARKS
With help Eric Geller, Martin Matishak, Margaret Harding McGill and Cristiano Lima
WHERE SCOTUS FINALISTS STAND — President Donald Trump is expected to announce his pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy tonight, and the MC team dug into the records of the three most widely reported finalists for their positions on cybersecurity and related topics:
— KAVANAUGH: The federal judge whom Trump appears most likely to nominate has a history of embracing warrantless surveillance and rejecting Fourth Amendment challenges to it. Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wrote a concurring opinion in 2015 when the court declined to rehear a case affirming the legality of the NSA’s warrantless phone metadata collection program. The operation, exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, “is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote, citing the “third-party doctrine” that says records collection from a service provider like a phone company does not constitute a search of the customer. (Months earlier, Congress had enacted a law requiring the NSA to stop collecting the records itself and begin requesting them from the phone companies.) Furthermore, he wrote, a “critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”
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