Dear Friends,
As we enter the second week of the new Trump Administration, I wanted to share CDT’s plans for this new landscape, and the trends we’re already seeing unfold.
As we look to the years ahead, CDT is focusing on three priorities:
- Defending users’ rights, especially for those who are most vulnerable;
- Standing up for the institutions that help protect users’ rights, including a free press and democratically-accountable government; and
- Advancing an affirmative vision for how technology can strengthen our society and our democracy.
Our work of the past few days illustrates these principles in action. For years, CDT has served as part of a group of civil rights experts advising Meta on how its actions impact marginalized communities. When Meta announced the end of its fact-checking program and stunning changes to its content moderation policy that would allow more anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant content on its platforms, CDT spoke out. With other members of that group — including the American Association of People with Disabilities, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, GLAAD, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and more — we made clear that policies allowing marginalized communities to be bullied into silence does nothing to protect free speech.
When the Trump Administration demanded the overnight resignation of all Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), CDT immediately raised the alarm about this effort to gut an independent agency charged with preventing abuses of surveillance power. We underscored the PCLOB’s deep bipartisan roots, and made the business case that threatening the PCLOB jeopardizes essential cross-Atlantic data flows. The news of their firing broke as I type this: we’ll continue fighting for this agency and robust independent oversight of the government’s surveillance authorities, no matter which party is in power.
When President Trump took action to repeal the Biden Administration’s AI Executive Order, we shared our deep expertise with media and allies alike. We noted the Trump Administration’s decision to review and revise, rather than scrap altogether, OMB’s guidance on federal agency use of AI and the National Security Memorandum on AI — and are making the case that these frameworks, along with NIST’s valuable work on AI testing and risk management, should be preserved as common-sense, basic foundations to advance responsible AI innovation.
Meanwhile, CDT teams continue to publish groundbreaking work on best practices for technology design and governance — helping companies, NGOs, and state and local governments use technology in ways that serve their users’ interests.
Fundamentally, CDT is holding firm to two essential principles. First, our belief that technology can and should be developed in a way that makes life better for all of us. Second, our commitment to finding every opportunity to advance that objective, large or small. Whether it’s raising the alarm about dangerous policy changes or working with unexpected partners to find common ground, we’re in the business of making concrete change to advance civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age.
Spanning the gap between government, civil society and corporate tech leaders, CDT’s work has never been more important.
Thank you, as always, for your ongoing support and collaboration.
Sincerely,
