“The Federal Trade Commission sent letters to 13 data brokers warning them of their responsibility to comply with the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024 (PADFAA).
“PADFAA prohibits data brokers from selling, releasing, disclosing, or providing access to personally identifiable sensitive data about Americans to any foreign adversary, which include North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran, or any entity controlled by those countries. The law defines personally identifiable sensitive data to include health, financial, genetic, biometric, geolocation, and sexual behavior information as well as account or device log-in credentials and government-issued identifiers such as Social Security, passport, or driver’s license numbers.”
Although frankly it’s not a good idea to sell PII to our friends either, but that’s another topic.
While Bredemarket only conducts business in the United States (with one exception), my clients have no such constraints.
Who are my client’s prospects?
Because of my extensive business-to-government (B2G) experience, I often work with clients that sell products and services to government agencies throughout the world. Well, except to North Korea and a few other places.
And as those clients (or their marketing and writing consultants) identify their public sector prospects, terminology becomes an issue.
And they have to answer questions such as “which government agency or agencies in Country Y potentially use biometric authentication for passengers approaching a gate in an airline terminal?”
Hint: chances are it’s NOT called the “department of transportation.”
Ministry
Add one factor that is foreign (literally) to this United States product marketing consultant.
Many of these countries have MINISTRIES.
No, not religious ministers or preachers.
Billy Graham. By Warren K. Leffler – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID ppmsc.03261.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=905632.
When I say “Minister” here I refer to government officials, often from the country’s legislature, who manage a portfolio of agencies that are the responsibility of a Minister.
Sisa
Let’s take one ministry as an example: Sisäministeriö. Oops, Finland’s Ministry of the Interior. This one ministry is currently headed by Mari Rantanen of the Finns Party (part of a four-party coalition ruling Finland).
“Minister Rantanen is also responsible for matters related to integration covered by the Labour Migration and Integration Unit of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment.”
Back to Interior. One huge clarification for U.S. people: other countries’ ministries of the interior bear no relation to the U.S. Department of the Interior, which concerns itself with parks and Native Americans and stuff. Minister Rantanen’s sphere of responsibility is quite different:
“Under the Government Rules of Procedure, the Ministry of the Interior is responsible for:
public order and security, police administration and the private security sector
general preconditions for migration and regulation of migration, with the exception of labour migration, as well as international protection and return migration
Finnish citizenship
rescue services
emergency response centre operations
border security and maritime search and rescue services
national capabilities for civilian crisis management
joint preparedness of regional authorities for incidents and emergencies.”
These responsibilities result in this organization…whoops, organisation.
Border Guard Department, which is the national headquarters for the Border Guard
Administration and Development Department
The units reporting directly to the Permanent Secretary are the International Affairs Unit and Communications Unit.
Directly under the Permanent Secretary are also guidance of Civilian Intelligence and the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service, Internal Audit and Advisory Staff to the Permanent Secretary
So, who’s gonna buy your biometric product or service in each of the 200 or so countries in which you may conduct business?
If you’ve read a few hundred job descriptions, one phrase that you’ll often see is “cross-functional collaboration.” The theory is that the employee (for example, a senior product marketing manager) will seamlessly work with marketing, product, R&D, customer success, sales, finance, legal, and everyone else, all working together for the good of the company.
But the world usually doesn’t work like that. YOUR department is great. The other departments are the bozos.
Google Gemini.
There’s actually a benefit to this when you look at government agencies. If you believe that “the government that governs least” is preferable to Big Brother, then the fact that multiple agencies DON’T gang up against you is a good thing. You don’t want to be chased by the FBI and the CIA and the BBC and B.B. King and Doris Day. And Matt Busby.
But there are times when government agencies work together, usually when facing a common threat. Sometimes this is good…and sometimes it isn’t. Let’s look at two examples and see where they fall in the spectrum.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1972
Normally bureaucrats are loyal to their agency, to the detriment of other agencies. This is especially true when the agencies are de facto competitors.
In theory, and certainly in the 1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have completely separate spheres of operation. But on the highest level they perform the same function: catch bad people. And each agency certainly wants to take the credit when a bad person is caught. Conversely, if one of the agencies has a bad person, the other one usually works to expose it.
Usually.
A few of you are old enough to remember a third-rate burglary in Washington, DC in 1972. The burglary took place at a political party office in some hotel or another. We now know with the benefit of hindsight that the FBI-CIA rivalry worked. Bob Woodward learned a few days after the break-in that two of the alleged burglars were connected to E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative. Who told Woodward?
“Woodward, we now know, had been tipped off by Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI. The Bureau had itself become involved in the investigation of a mere burglary because once the police found wiretapping equipment, the investigation fell under its remit.”
Google Gemini.
This is how it should work. Although the mere fact that Hunt knew Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez was not a crime, the FBI was certainly bound to investigate the matter.
Until it wasn’t.
“Richard Nixon and senior White House personnel including Chief-of-Staff Bob Haldeman and domestic policy tsar John Ehrlichman devised a strategy to block the investigation. This began to unfold as early as June 23, a mere three days after the break-in. That day, Haldeman proposed to Nixon to “have [Vernon] Walters [deputy director of the CIA] call Pat Gray [director of the FBI] and just say ‘stay the h*ll out of this’ on grounds of ‘national interest.’”
This recorded conversation would become very important two years later, but back in 1972 very few people knew about it. And very few people knew that Gray “destroyed secret documents removed from Howard Hunt’s safe.”
Think about it. If Richard Nixon hadn’t recorded his own conversations, we may have never learned that the CIA partially neutralized an FBI investigation.
But other instances of cross-functional collaboration come to light in other ways.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration before 2026
The FBI-CIA episode of 1972 was an aberration. Normally agencies don’t cooperate, even when massive amounts of effort are performed to make them work together.
One prime example was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002-2003. Because it was believed that 9/11 happened because relevant agencies were scattered all over the government, Congress and the President performed a massive reorganization. This affected the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice, Transportation, and Treasury.
For our discussion:
The Department of Justice lost the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was broken up into three separate agencies within DHS. One of these is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
The relatively new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was moved from the Department of Transportation to DHS.
The theory, of course, is that once all these agencies were under the DHS umbrella, they would magically work together to stop the evil terrorists. However, each of the component agencies had vastly different missions. Here is the mission of the TSA:
“Protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.”
Well, “freedom of movement” is not the primary part of ICE’s mission:
“Protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”
While these missions are not mutually exclusive, the difference in emphasis is apparent. And the agencies competed.
Some of you may remember air marshals. After 9/11, some airline flight passengers were actually air marshals, but the passengers (and any terrorists) didn’t know which flights had air marshals or who they were.
Google Gemini.
The Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) was part of the Transportation Security Administration.
“Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced [in September 2003] that the federal air marshals program will move from the Transportation Security Administration to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”
The idea was to concentrate all enforcement operations in one agency, to protect FAMS from uncertain TSA funding, and to allow ICE agents to be cross-trained as air marshals. But this didn’t happen, so two years later FAMS moved from ICE back to TSA.
And both agencies went on their merry little ways.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration in 2026
“When Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Acting Director Ha Nguyen McNeill was pressed [by the House Committee on Homeland Security] on reports that ICE is using domestic flight passenger information to support deportation operations, she did not deny cooperation. Instead, she defended it as legitimate intra-departmental coordination and framed it as part of DHS’s overall mission set.
“In response to lawmakers’ questions, McNeill said TSA assistance to ICE is ‘absolutely within our authorities’ when it involves sharing passenger information for immigration enforcement operations.”
McNeill effectively said that TSA doesn’t dump its data on ICE, but responds to individual ICE inquiries.
“Airport travel…becomes a choke point for detentions – no longer just transportation, but a compliance checkpoint for civil enforcement, re-engineering mobility into an enforcement tool.”
Bredemarket 