Summary
Diagnosis without prescription leaves constitutional law incomplete. This article supplies the remedy for the problem identified in Digital General Warrants. It argues that government information relationships are fiduciary in character: citizens who cannot refuse to provide information face the power asymmetry and dependence that equity has long recognized as triggering fiduciary duties.
The Fourth Amendment itself works as a fiduciary charter. Its particularity requirement implies loyalty, its reasonableness standard implies care, its search prohibition implies confidentiality, and its warrant requirement implies transparency. Public trust doctrine reinforces these duties. The article's principal contribution is a bilateral trust structure: individuals hold information about themselves as primary trustees, for their own benefit and for society's epistemic commons, while government holds only secondary fiduciary status. That structure explains why surveillance capacity, not only surveillance activity, violates constitutional structure, and why centralized national identity systems are unavailable in the American setting.
Key claims
- Government information relationships meet every structural condition for fiduciary obligation.
- Four duties derive from four textual features of the Fourth Amendment.
- The duties have determinate architectural implications: sequestration, query-without-collection, individual-held credentials and transparency.
Where it fits
Read on the site: Proposition 2: a fiduciary charter ยท Proposition 3: facts as a commons.
Cite as
Michael G. Leahy, Government as Information Trustee: A Fiduciary Framework for Surveillance-Age Privacy (2026), https://ssrn.com/abstract=6434361.