Your privacy isn't gone. The Constitution already protects it.
A plain-language guide to what happens to your information, what government already owes you, and what you can do. About eight minutes, no law degree required.
Fiduciary Commons
Government already knows a great deal about you. The question is what it is allowed to do with it.
You can't opt out of filing taxes, getting a driver's license, or enrolling your child in school. Each time, government records facts about you. Increasingly, those records are combined across agencies into systems that can look up anyone, at any time, for any reason. No one decided to build that power. It accumulated one software purchase at a time.
The founders called a power like this a general warrant, and they wrote the Fourth Amendment to forbid it. The Constitution already treats government as a trustee of what it holds about you, obligated to use your information only for the reason you provided it. The work now is turning that obligation into enforceable state law, and into systems that cannot do more than they are authorized to do.
Choose your path
The same argument, told for the reader you are
Give the Fourth Amendment's duties the force of state law
Three coordinated model acts, enactment options, bill summaries, objections answered and an implementation note, ready for committee review.
Building or buying government systems? See the implementer materials: the architecture standard, design patterns, procurement specification and conformance tests.
The argument in six steps
One argument, in six steps
Each step is developed in a published paper. Here is the short version.
- The capability is the wrongThe danger is what a system can do, not only what someone did with it.
- The Fourth Amendment is a fiduciary charterThe Constitution already makes government a trustee of your information, with four duties: loyalty, care, confidentiality and transparency.
- Facts are an unownable commonsNo one can own facts about you, but you have the biggest stake in how they are used.
- Context bounds authorityInformation given for one purpose can't be used for another just because government has it.
- The remedy is built into the systemsBuild systems that can't misuse data, instead of rules asking officials not to.
- Statute makes it enforceableThree model state laws turn those duties into rights you can enforce in court. Utah has enacted parts of them.
Why now
The Supreme Court has named the danger
In Chatrie v. United States (2026), the Court held that obtaining a person's cell-phone location data is a search under the Fourth Amendment, and warned that government "possesses a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens' activities": a system built so that everyone can be watched at all times. Courts decide one case at a time, though. They cannot redesign the systems. That work falls to legislatures, and to the people who elect them.
About the work
A former state CIO who watched the architecture get built
Michael G. Leahy, JD, served as Maryland's Secretary of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer from 2017 to 2023 and as President of NASCIO in 2021 and 2022. Fiduciary Commons grew from watching government procurement buy surveillance architecture without recognizing it as such, and concluding that the remedy had to be constitutional and architectural, not merely administrative.