Constitutionally Unconstitutional or is it? (Prof. Wayne Unger)

On this week of Serious Privacy, Paul Breitbarth of Catawiki, Ralph O’Brien of Reinbo Consulting, and Dr. K Royal interview with Wayne Unger, a #constitutional scholar and Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University. They delve into recent #U.S. #political events under the new administration. The discussion covers the legality of #executiveorders, implications for #privacylaws, #birthright #citizenship, #TikTok, and concerns about retaliation for political speech. Insights are shared on the broader impact of these issues both domestically and internationally.

00:00 Breaking News: Italian Regulator Blocks DeepSeek

02:41 Introduction to This Week's Guest: Wayne Unger

02:49 Constitutional Challenges in the U.S.

05:04 TikTok Ban: Legal and Political Implications

14:51 Trump's Executive Orders and Constitutional Questions

18:16 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board Controversy

23:30 Global Reactions and Personal Reflections

32:51 Concluding Thoughts and Farewell

If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us!

From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

Transcript

PLease be aware this is largely an automated transcript. For accuracy, listen to the podcast.

Constitutionally Unconstitutional or is it?

[00:00:15] Paul: When we schedule this episode, we plan to talk about the constitutional issues related to freedom of speech and the TikTok ban in the United States. However, we have seen so many developments in the U. S. since, including the dismissal of three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, that a broader discussion on the U.S. Constitution in relation to our favorite topic seems in order. There are now actually two people making faces at me. Our guest today is Wayne Unger, assistant professor of law at Connecticut's Quinnipiac University, where he teaches constitutional law, criminal law, first amendment, and law and tech courses.

And we're very happy to welcome Wayne back on the show. My name is Paul Breitbarth. 

My name is Ralph O'Brien. 

My name is Wayne Ungar. 

[00:00:59] K Royal: and I’m K Royal.

I'll leave that in there. And welcome to Serious Privacy. Wayne, thank you so much for coming back on. I don't know if our producer is going to keep all the laughter in or not, but there are not enough hours in the day to cover the constitutional issues here in the U. S. So with that, we have an unexpected question.

I was going to say, what's your favorite constitution? 

[00:01:20] Paul: What is your favorite 

[00:01:20] K Royal: Exactly. Okay. Wayne. 

[00:01:24] Wayne Unger: with the first amendment that is the part of the constitution that I'm probably most experienced in. And that I, for lack of better term parade around the most. So here with some of my research all dating back to the first amendment and thought privacy, the freedom of thought, that's, that's my area of expertise right now.

[00:01:44] K Royal: I love that. So I'm going to go to the non Americans and say, what's your favorite clause in the U S constitution?

[00:01:50] Paul: the U. S. Constitution, I thought you would allow me to pick my own 

[00:01:55] Wayne Unger: How American centric of us just to say, okay, you gotta pick an American constitution.

[00:02:00] Paul: yeah, definitely. In that case, I will probably say Article 4. Because that's about the only provision in the U. S. Constitution that I'm very familiar with. So yeah, that entails somewhat a form of the right of privacy. So I would argue then that Could 

[00:02:18] Wayne Unger: Paul, I think I’m gonna maybe pose a correction there. It's not Article 4, it's the Fourth Amendment. Article 4 is totally different and has nothing to do with prophecy.

[00:02:33] Paul: To my defense it's a long time ago since I’ve actually read the US constitution in uni and I think even then I mainly focused on the amendments and not on the actual provisions of the law. 

[00:02:45] K Royal: You actually might really like, article four, Paul. It is the relationship between the states and the federal government. So. You know, you, you, you could like that one too, 

[00:02:55] Paul: Yeah, preemption. 

[00:02:57] Ralph O'Brien: well preemption is good, preemption is good, but speaking from the UK, I'd have to answer what constitution? We, we don't have one. We have an unwritten constitution here, here in the UK. We have no document we can point to that says we the people give power to those people in power. I mean, you suppose you could go to the Magna Carta, but It's no constitution here.

[00:03:23] K Royal: But that would be why the U S has a constitution,

[00:03:26] Ralph O'Brien: Yeah, Those evil English and their, royalists. right? 

[00:03:31] Paul: So what about you, K? 

[00:03:32] K Royal: And I'm going to say my favorite is if is an amendment, it's the 28th.

[00:03:38] Wayne Unger: The Equal Rights Amendment.

[00:03:40] K Royal: Have we officially decided it?

[00:03:43] Wayne Unger: former president of the United States, while he was president declared it to be part of the constitution with 38 ratifying, but there are a bunch of legal issues related to that one. So we'll see, we'll have to wait for a court to rule on whether it's a valid amendment or not.

[00:03:57] K Royal: God help us. All right, let's dive into some of the constitutional issues we have seen in 2025. Shall we? 

[00:04:06] Wayne Unger: You mean in the last 10 days? Specifically,

[00:04:09] K Royal: Yeah, pretty much. 

[00:04:10] Paul: Well, no, let's go a little bit further back because I still do want to include that TikTok ban and I think that's more than 10 days ago.

[00:04:17] Paul: let's, let's, start at the original topic of our conversation. Because. Yes, Congress can pass laws, like any parliament can pass laws, but there are boundaries to what laws they can pass. And the Constitution would be one of those boundaries. So, how come closing down a company is not an issue especially if it's an online platform, is not a freedom of speech issue, but it's also not a property 

[00:04:44] Wayne Unger: right? So that's a brilliant question and a question that I often answered ahead of the band. And for us to answer that question, we can back up just a little bit and look at the language of the first amendment and the language is written in an absolute way. So it says Congress shall make no law, et cetera, et cetera.

However, the court has never accepted an absolute viewpoint of the First Amendment. So there are many times in which a public interest, a government interest may supersede the individual right to free speech to free press, et cetera. And this is one of those times at least according to the Supreme Court.

So the Supreme Court accepted the argument that the ban infringes or burdens the speech that happens on the platform, both the platform speech directly through its content curation, its editorial discretion via its algorithm and users speech that of course is disseminated across the platform. But at least according to the United States Supreme Court.

In its recent decision the national security interests and the risk of Chinese government subversion through tick talk of Americans is sufficiently. compelling as to justify the infringement upon the first amendment liberties.

[00:06:12] Ralph O'Brien: that's fascinating. To me, one of the things that froze up is why just tick tock? I mean, you know I've done work with Huawei. We've seen lots of other Chinese AI tools, you know, now coming to the top of the charts. There are other Chinese companies, other Chinese apps. Do you, we think TikTok was chosen as a banner bearer or was there a specific reason that you think TikTok has been singled out amongst all of these businesses?

[00:06:41] Wayne Unger: There are several things that I kind of speculate towards. And I think it's important to go back and look at the history of the tick tock ban. So the tick tock ban started in the final months of the president Donald Trump's administration, his first term in office, and he signed an executive order to ban tick tock.

Now That was again under the at least in the executive order, it was under the guise of again, national security data harvesting by the Chinese government, et cetera. And eventually that executive order was stayed and held in abeyance when the Biden administration came into the white house and then the Biden administration picked up where the Trump administration left off and continued to have negotiations with bite dance and tick tock, tick tocks, us operations by dance being the parent company about divesting tick tocks, us operations.

Those ultimately failed those negotiations failed and Congress moved in 2024 in April of 2024 and passed the law that is just More commonly known as the TikTok ban, but it's really about controlling foreign access to by, by foreign adversaries act or something, something along those lines.

So that was signed in April. They were given X number of days to either divest its operations or face the ban. They once again challenged it on first amendment grounds and some other claims in court. The first amendment claims made it all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court upheld the ban.

And so it went dark on the 19th. TikTok went dark on the 19th here. So recognizing its history, one could argue that the Trump administration first banned the app because of political reasons back in 2020 because there was a lot of communication that was anti Trump being disseminated across that platform and essentially Gen Z was kind of, you know heavy users of Tiktok were, were rallying behind President Biden or then candidate Biden as he ran for election for the, in 2020.

 that said Congress of course, passed the law and President Biden signed the law into effect in April of 2024. So the hypocrisy I'll say here is that we have only focused on one platform that has the Chinese ties. And we have not looked at other platforms, either Chinese based in China or have ties to the Chinese communist government.

And we haven't looked at any other social media applications that are also doing the same data collection and data harvesting as tick tock was doing. I mean, the data that TikTok was collecting, we can, I think, reasonably assume that meta has been collecting, continues to collect Instagram at Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, that all of these social media applications are collecting and then using to build their profiles for that algorithmic content curation.

So for that reason I think that the TikTok ban, this is my. personal and professional opinion is, is just a band aid versus Congress trying to tackle the root causes of the issues. Here we just did it under the guise of it's being, it's a Chinese owned company. And that was the rationale, which the Supreme court agreed with.

Nonetheless, there are still present risks with respect to the data collection that happens on a variety of platforms.

[00:10:26] Paul: And I guess the U. S. Constitution does not include a provision saying do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you, right? Because American companies doing what the Chinese are doing is not as bad as China doing it themselves.

[00:10:41] Wayne Unger: No comment on that one, Paul.

[00:10:43] Paul: Ralph. 

[00:10:43] Ralph O'Brien: we saw this recently with chat GPT, you know, chat GPT and open AI have been openly critical of deep seek for, you know, using their algorithm or using their. Proprietary information in order to promote themselves, but, you know, it could be said, that what's chat GPT trained itself on and where did chat GPT get its data, right?

So, as Wayne was saying, I think sometimes you roll out someone as a scapegoat when there are larger underlying issues about data scraping, data collection we need to think about. for your attention. If the decision was a political one motivated by you know, criticism of Trump, let's say, on the platform, then, yeah, why Chinese why not go against, you know, Blue Sky or any other liberal thinking you know, app or where there is more freedom of speech out there?

Yeah, I do find it both a fascinating and paradoxical decision, considering that TikTok only went dark for what was a few hours.

[00:11:50] Wayne Unger: Right. And on that point Some of the messaging that TikTok delivered via its it's application when it went dark was very pro Trump and Trump is going to save us now in my eyes, that is very much the political message that is advantageous for Tiktok to put out there. And, and we generally know that President Trump is one to respond to flattery as an example.

So all of that said the, the, the Tiktok is going to save, excuse me, President Trump is going to save Tiktok. Well, it's, Kind of a well known fact here in the United States, the president can't act unilaterally to overturn a law that was properly passed by Congress. So here he can't repeal the law.

And the law itself, I should add, applies to all of the service providers that enable the U. S. Operation of TikTok, right? So Apple and Google, with respect to their app stores cannot distribute either the app itself or any updates to the app. So that's why you can't find it here in the United States on the app stores anymore.

Any web hosting service providers, as an example, cannot service Tiktok anymore. And there are statutory penalties if they disregard the law and they do not comply. And so, yes, Tiktok Trump can say, I'm going to sign an executive order. And yes, Trump can say, I'm going to save TikTok. But at the end of the day, the law is still very much on the books.

It's still valid. And while Trump has every right to direct his attorney general to enforce one law over another law. Because of limited resources. And here he could direct his attorney general to, to not enforce the ban. But then you have to ask a company like Apple, if I was the general counsel at Apple, I would say it's still not worth the risk because you're still subject to that legal liability in the future.

What happens after the second Trump administration leaves office? And then what happens with respect to shareholder lawsuits here in the United States, because the legal liability would be so great, one could argue that the board of directors and the senior officers of a corporation are not upholding their fiduciary duties to the shareholders.

So again, trump can say what he wants to say, as he often does, of course, but he can't undo the law without an act of Congress. Now, the republicans control both the House of Representatives and the Senate here in the United States. And of course, Donald trump is a republican in the White House, so they could very much pass a bill to undo it, except I don't think they have the votes even amongst themselves.

So I think that's Unlikely to happen, but it's still a possibility.

[00:14:37] Ralph O'Brien: so that was 11 days ago, 10 days ago,

Trump came into office and a whole slew of executive orders followed. Some of which might be deemed constitutional, others of which I think is, fair to say, more questionable. So putting TikTok, 

[00:14:56] Wayne Unger: You’re being generous, Ralph. 

[00:14:57] Ralph O'Brien: Well, wait, I mean, perhaps over to you then, what are your initial first views? Perhaps being less generous.

[00:15:04] Wayne Unger: It has been a long 10 days of this Trump administration having been sworn in 10 days ago, with a number of actions that are pushing boundaries with respect to constitutional law. Now, if there is anything that is that I think most can agree on, most constitutional law scholars can agree on that comes out of a Trump administration is answering some constitutional questions that we've never had to answer before, then that's for better or for worse, right?

Like for example, we never had to answer whether, The president of the United States, either sitting or former has criminal immunity. We've never had to answer that before, but we did of course, with president Trump or at least the Supreme court answered that for us with their ruling there.

Now that said, taking a look at Trump's executive actions over the last 10 days well, they're a little bit all over the place. Some you could argue are constitutional. Some you could argue are not constitutional. Let's start with the birthright citizenship. Executive order. I know it's not necessarily a data privacy aspect.

But the birthright citizenship is saying if you're born here in the United States, you are a citizen. If you were born here in the United States, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, you are a citizen.

[00:16:21] Ralph O'Brien: you go. End of.

[00:16:23] K Royal: that's not constitutional. 

[00:16:25] Paul: According to Trump, 

[00:16:26] Wayne Unger: and this is the question I posed is the Trump administration has said that the 14th amendment to the United States constitution is not constitutional. And it's, it's. From a logic standpoint, does it make sense? Because the 14th amendment is part of the constitution, 

[00:16:44] Paul: I've never been able to see any logic to President Trump's reasoning, but that could just be my European perspective. But K, are you then a US citizen? If you were born in the US, I mean, were your all your ancestors there legally? Are you pretty sure that's true? 

[00:17:02] K Royal: Pretty, pretty sure considering I'm part Choctaw, 

[00:17:06] Paul: But were they legally in the United States? I mean, they were not Americans. 

[00:17:09] K Royal: Right. It wasn't America when, when They started. 

[00:17:11] Wayne Unger: They weren't subject to jurisdiction thereof. 

[00:17:14] K Royal: How far back do we have to go to justify our own constitution and the wording that we used in it?

[00:17:21] Wayne Unger: Right. So here's what we do know. Is the executive order says to his administration that we are not recognizing birthright citizenship anymore. That has been enjoined temporarily. As more arguments are held in federal courts. That said, The Supreme Court has already ruled on the 14th Amendment, the birthright citizenship clause, and has said, again, if you are born here, you are a citizen.

And that case arose from the Chinese Exclusion Act that the United States implemented decades ago. And so we already have binding law that incorporates that clause of the Constitution. Now, of course, What we would expect here is this, these cases challenging Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship are going to work their way back up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court can decide either to affirm its previous decision from decades ago.

or overturn that. So we'll find out what I mean, we're probably two years away from having an answer to that question.

[00:18:26] K Royal: Yeah. 

[00:18:28] Paul: More interesting for us, of course, is the dismissal of three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. And while that may not be a direct constitutional issue, I still wonder, these are, Senate confirmable positions. And I don't know all the intricacies of how that would work, but I know for the privacy and civil liberties oversight board, it always needs to be bipartisan.

So usually under a Republican president, there are three Republicans under a Democratic president. There are three out of five Democrats. But it is up to the members themselves, to my best understanding, to resign if they no longer want to serve, or at some point their term expires. But to be dismissed like that just by executive order for something where the Senate has said, we want you there, is that at all possible? 

[00:19:19] Wayne Unger: So the short answer is generally yes. This goes back to the president's appointments and removal power in article two. So in article two of our United States constitution, it says that the president of the United States has the authority to appoint principal officers of the United States government.

And if appointed, Some of those officers, the principal officers have to be are subject to the advising consent of the United States Senate, AKA Senate confirmation. There are these principal officers can be more so in the traditional sense, just, I hate to use this term, but an ordinary principal officer.

Or Congress in creating a particular agency could have created it as an independent agency, for example, like the Federal Reserve Board here in the United States, and those independent agencies have some level of legal protection with respect to, say, a president wanting to remove somebody from that agency. 

The Supreme Court has generally held that an independent agency is constitutional, and if they're an independent agency, then in short, I'm simplifying here, but in short, the leaders of that independent agency can only be removed for cause. So just ordinarily terminating somebody would not be permissible there.

That said there is and has continued and has been a little bit of a debate politically on the extent of the president's removal power. The president can, of course, terminate somebody on, on his cabinet, for example willingly. For any reason or no reason at all because he has the constitutional authority to do that.

But then on the independent side, the political question there is, does that interfere, right, that for cause removal, does that interfere with the president's removal authority in any way? So far, the Supreme Court has placed a little limitation on that, but has generally upheld Congress's determination that that person can only be removed for cause.

[00:21:23] Paul: This, this very much reminds me of a case we had in Europe 12 years ago where when Hungary got a new government led by a certain Mr.

Viktor Orban, who you may be familiar with. He decided that he didn't like the chair of the data protection authority. But he also knew that the Data Protection Authority was an independent institution, so he could not just fire the guy.

So he abolished the agency and created a new one. And there, after a few years, the European Court of Justice said this is an egregious violation of the then Data Protection Directive and also of the EU treaties. This is not something that could have happened because you immediately interfere with the independence of a supervisory authority.

So it's, I mean, I think in this case the democratic members have accepted their dismissal and will not go to court. But a supreme court or any court um, be tempted to rule in a case like this? And say, Mr. President, you overstepped your mark here. 

[00:22:28] Wayne Unger: Well, so certainly. The injured party. So those individuals who have been removed would have to challenge that removal in court. And then I think the court will make a determination based on if again, it's an ordinary agency or an independent agency. And if it's an independent agency, we have to go back and look at whatever Congressional act created that agency and what limitations did Congress create for any removal?

I don't know the exact provisions related to this particular board. So I can't comment on specifics. But I will say that if for hypothetically, if there were statutory protections for these individuals, like a four cause removal, then they may have a case, but the counter argument That the Trump administration, of course, is going to make is that he has broad removal power and that the independent, you know, for cause is a burden on that removal power.

And so for that it's unconstitutional. We'll see how that plays out. But of course, they're the only ones. They're the injured party who can bring the claims. If they don't challenge their termination, then we won't have an answer to that.

[00:23:42] Ralph O'Brien: noises I've heard so far are very much that the Republican members remaining on the Liberties Oversight Board 

[00:23:52] Paul: Thank you, Only one. 

[00:23:54] Ralph O'Brien: Yeah, sorry. I was saying business as usual, saying we still remain competent. We can still do our jobs. It's business as usual. So for me, it becomes fascinating to then see the EU response to that.

Because certainly, you know, when we've created when we've said yes, the U. S. is adequate because of this executive order made in Biden's time, and because of the way that this all works, and there is a working council, and there is a court, you know, I wonder, you know, whether Mr. Schrems, of course, or, or, you know, is, is then, who was fairly critical anyway, because it was just an executive order that could be overturned by the next president.

You know, what's what the response is going to be in terms of continued adequacy. And of course, how long do these things take? You know, we've seen these things take ages to go to the European courts in the first place when challenged. So, you know, we challenge the adequacy now based on this decision, gotta be another four years before it ends up in the CJEU.

I mean, it's got to be different.

[00:24:57] Paul: Well, it's first up to the European Commission to decide whether they want to warn the U. S. that adequacy is at risk. And yes, the Civil Liberties Oversight Board is claiming that they're fully functional, but they cannot take decisions on enforcement because they do not have a quorum with only one member.

[00:25:16] Wayne Unger: Yeah. K,

[00:25:21] Paul: and I'm sure you have thoughts.

[00:25:23] Wayne Unger: being quiet. 

[00:25:25] Paul: Exactly. 

[00:25:26] K Royal: Yeah. I have lots of thoughts and it's interesting because we rarely discuss our own political leanings on the podcast because we want to make sure that one, that we're fair to our listeners and we're not biasing one direction or the other. And I think most of our listeners probably have an idea of where I go, I will say that every day I wake up and I try to avoid the news because there is something else happening that to me is simply unbelievable, unimaginable, unimaginable.

[00:26:01] Ralph O'Brien: Yes. I mean, yeah, 

we try and be bipartisan, which is the US term, you know, we try and be fair to our listeners and looking at all points, but you know, you do have personal views and You know, and actually,

[00:26:15] K Royal: We  do.

[00:26:15] Ralph O'Brien: it affects people outside the U. S. and I have you know, people in my family who receive gender affirming care and they have friends in America who are in similar positions and who have woken up.

[00:26:31] K Royal: Yes, 

[00:26:32] Ralph O'Brien: After seeing, executive 

orders such as, you know, the mutilation of children, which I would call gender affirming care, but that's an opinion again. And you know, and it affects people beyond the US you know, people who are afraid to thou speak up or say their peace or be represented for fear of retaliation.

And you know, and, and, and that, that speaks to a deeper problem. You know, the US actually does have influence outside of its border. Right. You know, it is a powerful country. 

[00:27:02] K Royal: When I was at the Global Privacy Assembly with y'all in Jersey, the real Jersey, not the New Jersey every single driver we had, every person I ran into that was outside the U. S. wanted to know our opinions of the election process that was going on before the election results came through. Every single person wanted to know.

 So I very clearly got an idea of exactly how much people outside the U.

S. are concerned about our politics. And I mean, who wouldn't be right? We'd be concerned about any of the, the larger first world countries and, and how their processes go over. But I will say that it's not that I don't have opinions on what we're talking about, I do, but Wayne is adequately expressing the , the sentiment and the legality of the things that are happening here.

And I will say though, that when it comes to privacy, it's the states that have privacy law. Not the federal government, as we've said. I mean, we do have federal sectoral laws. I don't see any changes to most of those happening. We do see that some of the enforcement activity has already slowed down.

The level of enforcement we saw coming through before January 20th was amazing. I mean, it was almost like everybody was hurry up and push this enforcement through, push this rule through, get this act passed, hurry, hurry, hurry before we no longer can. And we haven't seen any since then, except for on the state level.

 We're already seeing the impact now, but who's to say what it's going to look like in three months or six months or in two years, 

[00:28:38] Wayne Unger: kind of response Here, I think that we can have a reasonable discussion recognizing all sides of an argument. But there are some things that the Trump administration has done that should be noted on both sides or all sides or across the political spectrum, because it is well established for example, like birthright citizenship.

Certainly there are other issues that are say more politically charged and. May fall into gray areas, at least with respect to constitutional law, and I try to be fair in assessing those. I try to say, you know, this, let's look at what we have. These are the facts and this is what the law says and then provide a prediction.

But again, objectively here Donald Trump in between his first administration and now heading into a second has provided a lot of constitutional questions or has created say a lot of constitutional questions because he's pushed boundaries. And for some, many across the country are happy that he's been pushing these boundaries are content with it.

Would like to see changes in the law. And he's essentially forcing some of those changes.

[00:29:51] K Royal: he is. He's forcing the debate

[00:29:53] Wayne Unger: Right. And just as much as there are individuals who of course have a distaste in their mouth regarding some of these actions because it does challenge the status quo or does challenge binding law as we know the law is today.

That said We're again, 10 days in as of this recording Kay, you mentioned two weeks by the time we're published. It's going to be four years of Donald Trump pushing those constitutional questions that we've never had to answer before. And we'll see how a 6 3 conservative majority Supreme Court comes out on it.

I would like to think that the, the justices on the Supreme Court are all intelligent, smart people. Otherwise they would not have gotten there. I disagree with every single one of them on something. And I also agree with every single one of them on something. And I, as I tell my students, as we study the Supreme Court and its opinions, we also see contradictions amongst the same justices.

So like, for example I'm not going to name any particular justice, but one justice may say something in one case and then two years later, say the complete opposite in that case. Or one justice may parade around a particular principle, like say judicial restraint, and then not exercise judicial restraint in another case.

[00:31:17] Paul: Yeah.

[00:31:18] Wayne Unger: from my perspective as a constitutional law scholar and then also where constitutional law and data privacy overlap here. I think it's fair to note that That there are different sides to many of these questions that are being posed and on the data privacy side, Kay, to your point, I, I want to highlight another part of the United States, which is we're a dual sovereign system where we have states.

Checking the federal government and the federal government checking the states. And that's always been that way. And it's typically, of course, the party that's not in the White House that attempts to check the federal government. But in, in the United States here, for example, we still have a very active privacy agency in California working and with their economic vastness that they can drive a lot of impact in the space.

[00:32:10] K Royal: I will say that last administration under Biden and this administration is going to provide constitutional scholars with a lot of material for probably centuries to come. It's not just that, but it, it is hard for me personally to give my opinion on some of this. I mean, I have to, when I teach, I have to be objective and I have to present both sides equally and present it from more of an academic perspective.

But personally, 

[00:32:37] Paul: Yeah, no, I  fully appreciate that, K. And obviously I, I trained as a constitutional scholar before I went into data protection and all of that. So for me, this remains fascinating as a topic and to

[00:32:50] K Royal: It is fascinating, regardless of what side you're on. It's utterly 

[00:32:53] Paul: exactly as a, as a lawyer, It's absolutely amazing. And I'm pretty sure that, we'll continue this conversation also in the months and years to come,  Whatever will happen. everybody you so much for joining us. speak mind the podcast

[00:33:10] Ralph O'Brien: Thank 

[00:33:11] Paul: you.

[00:33:11] K Royal: Thank y'all.