Draft Legislation
Mandates decentralized, citizen-controlled digital identity architecture. Prohibits centralized identity repositories, surveillance-capable systems, and rent-seeking conduct. The technical foundation on which PDTA and GAAFA operate.
When you prove who you are to a government system, the system confirms the fact it needs and retains nothing more. Your credential belongs to you, held in your own digital wallet, presented with selective disclosure. The government attests to attributes; it does not hold, centralize, or surveil the identity transaction.
Government digital identity systems may not exhibit the four characteristics of a general warrant: perpetual data retention, universal scope, discretionary official access, or delegable authority to contractors and fusion partners. Centralized aggregation enabling mosaic surveillance is prohibited.
Every government agency or contractor collecting personal data in public digital services is a data fiduciary with binding duties of loyalty, care, confidentiality, and portability. Violations resulting in demonstrable harm are enforceable through a private right of action.
Government must deploy privacy-preserving, citizen-controlled, decentralized identity systems consistent with W3C VC and DID standards. Systems must support selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs without phone-home queries to the issuing authority.
Agencies may collect only the minimum data required by law for the specific authorized purpose. Each function's data must be maintained in sequestered, purpose-specific databases that cannot be cross-referenced or aggregated without fresh specific authorization.
Citizens have enforceable rights to access, correct, and delete their records; to selective disclosure of identity attributes; to be free from surveillance at credential presentation; and to a physical ID alternative that cannot be withheld to coerce digital adoption.
Only open, publicly available technical specifications developed through a consensus process may be used in government identity infrastructure. Proprietary lock-in, unnecessary data aggregation, and monopolization of identity infrastructure are prohibited.
The constitutional prohibition on general warrants, derived from the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches, applies to digital identity and data systems operated by government. Digital identity systems may not exhibit the characteristics of general warrants: perpetual duration of data access and retention without time-limited authorization; universal scope of collection extending beyond the specific function for which data was collected; discretionary executive power to access, search, or correlate data without individualized justification; or delegable authority permitting broad classes of officials, contractors, and fusion partners to access personal data without specific, documented need.
Each public function's data must be maintained in a purpose-specific database that is not shared with, accessible to, or searchable by any other government function without fresh authorization from the data subject. Cross-agency aggregation enabling mosaic surveillance is prohibited as constitutionally equivalent to the general warrant. This provision is the technical implementation of PDTA's purpose limitation requirement and the Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement.
This provision, added in the May 2026 current draft, establishes the constitutional premise underlying the entire identity architecture in operative statutory text. Individual identity is inherent in the person and precedes state recognition: the state does not define or create an individual’s identity but endorses attributes the individual already possesses. Government’s role in digital identity systems is therefore constitutionally bounded to endorsement and cryptographic verification, not to the definition, creation, or assignment of identity. The preference for endorsement over direct issuance follows from this constitutional premise rather than from administrative convenience. Direct issuance is permitted only where no suitable endorsed credential exists for a specific function, and a government entity that issues a credential does not acquire any ownership interest in the underlying identity attributes. This provision was developed in direct response to conversations at the April 2026 SEDI Summit and reflects the shared constitutional foundation of VIDA and Utah’s SEDI legislation.
The complete draft legislation is available to download as a Word document or to read directly on Google Drive. Critiques identifying specific incoherence in any provision should be directed to the scholarship address.
The most useful engagement is precise: a specific provision that does not do what it claims, a statutory requirement that is technically unimplementable, or a constitutional argument that a court has already rejected in a relevant context.