Staving Off the Police State of the Future

By IPI President Tom Giovanetti. The police state of the future wont require neighbors and family members to spy and report on each other to the local authorities. It wont require random checkpoints and surprise inspections or that you constantly be required to produce your papers. Thats because we are building superior tools right now that unmoored from constitutional boundaries could be used by a digital police state to track our online activity (server logs) offline travel (GPS and cellphone logs) correspondence financial transactions political activity and website visits and what we do on those websites . Technology is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. By giving us the tools of connectedness immediacy global reach and easy retrieval the internet has quickly become a necessity of life in the information age. But in the hands of an unrestrained government those very same tools could make possible a digital police state far more powerful than the old fashioned analog police state. Tom youve been watching too much Person of Interest youre probably thinking. No actually Im reading the news which this week includes the Department of Justice demanding that the DreamHost webhosting company turn over all of its information about an estimated 1.3 million visitors to an anti-Trump website. In other words the Trump administration is demanding personal information about its political opponents. Yes officials obtained a warrantfrom an 84-year-old judge who officially retired 25 years ago before the internet was even a thing. It demands all records or other information related to the anti-Trump website including the names IP addresses geographical locations and credit card information of all visitors to the site. What the judge has granted is a general warrant which gives officials broad authority to search unspecified people for unspecified crimes.  Such warrants are designed to harass and intimidate and they have a chilling effect upon speech and political action.  As a result they have been deemed unconstitutional because they lack the Fourth Amendments specificity requirements. The Fourth Amendment has had a hard enough time dealing with threats to privacy in a rapidly changing world. Whether it is sufficiently robust to stand up against a government that possesses massive tracking and surveillance powers will depend on our absolute insistence that our Fourth Amendment rights be preserved. Organizing for political activity is not a crime and should not subject large numbers of people to a dragnet by law enforcement. The warrant is unconstitutional and must be resisted by people of all political stripes who recognize the danger of an unrestrained government in the digital age. Regardless of your political orientation if we want to prevent the police state of the future we must strongly oppose every incremental move that threatens our Fourth Amendment protections. And that means opposing the Trump administration as it tries to gather digital information on its political opponents. Todays TechByte was written by IPI President Tom Giovanetti.