Privacy & Civil Liberties

Our information, our choices, and our independence should be ours. The tools to take them back already exist. The laws need to catch up — but we don’t have to wait.

Send me to Washington to push for federal privacy protections — I’m the only one in this race who’s identified what’s happening and understands what needs to be done.

But we don’t wait for government to catch up. We bring resources back to the district through grants and earmarks and build our own privacy infrastructure right here, right now.

The short version

  1. Data extraction crept in slowly — from a Publix loyalty card to an industry that tracks everything and sells it to anyone who’ll pay.
  2. The tools to take it back already exist — open-source AI that stays local, mesh networks, community broadband. We don’t have to invent anything.
  3. Pass a federal privacy law. Require warrants for government data access. Create a public data broker registry.
  4. Real enforcement — not fines companies budget for. Jail time. Loss of government contracts.
  5. Both parties let this happen. We build the local alternatives now and push the laws in parallel.

My father was a Slovak refugee who fled authoritarianism. He spent his whole career working against it. About 30 years ago, he warned me it was coming to America. I didn’t understand what he meant back then. I do now.

We see the fire today. My dad smelled smoke 30 years ago.

Almost 40 years ago, I got my first Publix loyalty card. It tracked my groceries, gave me coupons, made recommendations. I thought it was great that a company would care enough to help me like that.

Then everyone started doing it. Then companies started selling that data back and forth. What started as a store that remembers what I like became an industry that knows everything about us and sells it to anyone who’ll pay.

After 9/11, the same thing happened with our government. We felt less safe. When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, it was our government protecting us. Then we learned our government was also surveilling us. A grocery store that knows our preferences becomes a data broker that sets our insurance rates. A security agency that protects us becomes a surveillance system that watches us.

It doesn’t happen overnight. It creeps. A little more data here, a little less oversight there. Each step seems reasonable. Nobody looks at the cumulative picture until it’s already built.

The creep isn’t abstract. It’s in the driveway, on the doorstep, in the living room, in every pocket, and at the ballot box. Each of these pages digs into a specific place where independence is being quietly extracted — who’s doing it, how, and what the alternative looks like.

Cars 90% of new cars collect driving data and sell it to insurers. The car we bought is reporting on us to companies we never agreed to do business with. Front Doors Ring cameras now run facial recognition. Flock Safety shares neighborhood footage with ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy — no warrant, no contract, no notice. Living Rooms Alexa listens. The Roomba maps the house. The mic that saves a life is the mic that sells the wheelchair. The same sensor array that detects a fall builds a behavioral profile. Phones Our phones log location hundreds of times a day. Data brokers sell it to anyone — including government agencies dodging the Fourth Amendment. Votes AI microtargeting sends different messages to different voters — same candidate, same day, completely different promises. The best defense isn’t banning AI. It’s giving everyone the same tool.

Take It Back

Laws need to change. But laws take years, and by the time Congress acts, the extraction has moved three steps ahead. The good news: the tools to take back our digital independence already exist. A worldwide community of developers is building privacy-respecting alternatives to the platforms that extract from us — decentralized versions of the tools we already use, designed to keep our information local. We don’t have to invent anything. We have to bring it here.

Local AI That Stays Local

Not all AI is owned by big companies. Open source models exist that anyone can download and run on their own hardware. They aren’t as capable as the commercial models yet, but they’re getting better every month — and nobody is extracting data because nobody owns the pipeline. The code is public. The training is transparent.

I want a personal AI — but I want whatever I tell it to stay between us. That’s already possible. A model running on hardware we own, that never phones home, that helps with prescriptions or budgets or letters without sending a word to a server in Virginia. That’s not science fiction. It’s running on machines in this district right now.

Mesh Networks and Community Infrastructure

Right now, most of what we do online routes through data centers a thousand miles away. Every hop is a point where our information can be accessed. Mesh networks keep connectivity in the community’s hands — decentralized, resilient, and not dependent on a single corporate chokepoint. Community-owned broadband already works in dozens of cities and rural areas across the country.

Maker spaces with 3D printers and local computing mean someone with an idea can test it right here — without moving across the country and begging for venture capital. Florida 3 can become a place where ideas grow without paving over the land. Not a Silicon Valley. More like an AI aquifer — distributed, self-replenishing, generating fresh value, and impossible to drain from the outside.

Funding It

This isn’t just a vision statement. Community broadband infrastructure qualifies for USDA ReConnect earmarks. Maker spaces qualify as USDA Community Facilities. Digital literacy programs can be funded through library and education grants. The earmark mechanism that brings back water infrastructure and health clinics can bring back digital independence infrastructure too.

And while we build the local alternatives, the legislative work happens in parallel — not instead.

Policy

Protect Our Data

  • Pass a federal privacy law. The US still doesn’t have one. Our data belongs to us — not the platform, not the broker, not the agency.
  • Warrant required. No exceptions. If the government wants our data, it gets a warrant. No buying it from a broker to dodge the Fourth Amendment.
  • Data broker registry. Every company that buys and sells personal data registers publicly. We can see what they have. We can delete it.
  • Public investment rule for data. If our data trained a model worth billions, we’re co-investors, not raw material.

Fix the System

  • Money out of politics. Overturn Citizens United. Clip lobbying power. When a company can spend unlimited money to elect the people who regulate it, that’s not democracy — that’s a subscription.
  • Restore the FTC. The consumer protection agency has been gutted. Fund it. Staff it. Let it do its job.
  • Congress does its job. Hearings. Subpoenas. Testimony on the record. If officials violate their oath, we remove them. If an agency overreaches, we control the funding. These are constitutional tools, not suggestions.

Enforcement with Teeth

  • Real penalties for companies caught extracting without consent. Not a fine they budget for quarterly. Sizeable financial penalties AND executives can go to jail. Companies banned from government contracts for repeat offenses.

Designed Inefficiency

Our country has existed for 250 years because of its inefficiencies. It was designed that way. Three branches that check each other. Powers separated on purpose. A system built so that no one person, no one party, no one agency, no one company can control it all.

Both parties have eroded that design across decades. A little more surveillance. A little more executive power. A little more corporate influence. A little less transparency. A little less accountability. Each one small enough to accept. Together, they’re a transformation — and it crept in so slowly that most of us didn’t notice until the alarm bells started going off.

I don’t have a clean answer on Edward Snowden. What he did was illegal. He also showed us that our own government was collecting phone records, emails, metadata — all of it — without telling us. Whistleblower and lawbreaker at the same time.

But I know this: if the system had real accountability, he wouldn’t have had to break the law for us to find out.

Government is an extension of us — there to take care of our needs so we can focus on our wants. When government starts controlling instead of serving, that’s centralization. People controlling their own lives and information — that’s decentralization. That’s independence.

We gave Congress the tools: the power of the purse, the power of oversight, the power to subpoena, the power to declare war. We need representatives who will actually use them.

We already have these protections on paper. The Fourth Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. The entire architecture of checks and balances. The problem isn’t that we need new rights — it’s that companies and government stopped following the ones that already exist. I’m not asking for anything new. I’m asking them to follow the rules we already wrote — and building the local infrastructure so we’re not defenseless while we wait.