The Creep
Almost 40 years ago, I got my first Publix loyalty card. It tracked my groceries, gave me coupons, made recommendations. I thought it was so cool 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 you like became an industry that knows everything about you and sells it to anyone who’ll pay.
After 9/11, the same thing happened with our government. Many of us felt less safe. When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, it was just our own government protecting us. And then we suddenly realized our own government is spying on us.
A grocery store that knows your preferences becomes a data broker that sets your insurance rates. A security agency that protects you becomes a surveillance system that watches you. It doesn’t happen overnight. It creeps. A little more data here, a little less oversight there, and by the time you notice, it’s everywhere. That’s the creep — and it’s creepy.
In 2004, the tsunami hit Indonesia. A teacher friend told me her ultimate frisbee team was raising money for the Red Cross. Instead of handing her cash, I wrote them a check. For years after, I kept getting letters from the Red Cross begging for money with every sob story imaginable. Then other groups I’d never heard of started contacting me too. It turned me off to the point that I’ll never donate to the Red Cross again. I still donate occasionally, but I’m much less trusting about who gets my information along with my money.
I won’t sell your information. If you donate up to $200, your information stays private — that’s federal law. Above that, FEC rules require your name and address to become public. Either way, what I really want from you is your vote. And tell everyone else to vote for me too.
Where It’s Crept To
This isn’t abstract. The creep is in your driveway, on your doorstep, in your living room, in your pocket, and at the ballot box.
250 Years of Intentional Inefficiency
Our country has existed for 250 years because of its inefficiencies. It was designed that way. Three branches that check each other. Powers that are 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 people didn’t notice until the alarm bells started going off.
They’re going off now. And the people who are supposed to be checking the system are the ones dismantling it.
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 our phone records, our emails, our metadata — all of it — without telling us. Whistleblower and lawbreaker at the same time.
But I know this: if the system had any real accountability, he wouldn’t have had to break the law for us to find out.
Government Is an Extension of Us
Our government takes our contributions and turns around to take care of our needs. That’s the deal. But it must be overseen by capable people who answer to the voters — the masses, not a self-selecting minority.
Congress has the tools. The power of the purse — fund an agency or defund it. The power of oversight — hearings, subpoenas, testimony under oath. The power to declare war. The power to remove officials who violate their oath.
We gave those powers away. We handed war authority to the executive. We let agencies write their own rules. We let lobbyists draft the legislation that regulates their own industries. We did it for safety, for efficiency, for convenience. But without a balance, we lose our independence and become prisoners of the system we built to protect us.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those seven words describe our DNA. Everything on this page is about getting back to them.
Pushing the Creep Back
Protect Your Data
- Pass a federal privacy law. The US still doesn’t have one. Your data belongs to you — not the platform, not the broker, not the agency.
- Warrant required. No exceptions. If the government wants your 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. You see what they have. You can delete it.
- Public investment rule for data. If your data trained a model worth billions, you’re a co-investor, not a 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 just got 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 spying. Not a fine they budget for quarterly. Sizeable financial penalties AND executives can go to jail. Companies can also be banned from government contracts for a period of time. Repeat offenders get higher penalties. You can’t budget for prison time.
Hold Myself Accountable
- Four terms. Maximum. If I can open the doors wide enough, get resources flowing into the district, and train people to keep it going, I’ll leave sooner. No one should hold power long enough to be corrupted by it — including me.
A Warning I Never Forgot
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 fully understand at the time. I do now.
My father knew what it looked like when a government started controlling its citizens instead of serving them. He warned me. I listened.
This isn’t a partisan problem. It happened under both Republican and Democratic administrations. We allowed it — and we had good reasons at each juncture. That’s the insidiousness of a slow creep. Each step seemed reasonable. Nobody looked at the cumulative picture until it was already built. This isn’t about blaming one side. It’s about recognizing the pattern so we stop adding to it.
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 actions — that’s decentralization. It’s time to elect people who return the power from the government back to the people.
Open Source AI: Privacy’s Next Shield
Not all AI is owned by big companies. Open source AI models exist that anyone can download and run on their own hardware. They aren’t as capable as ChatGPT or Claude yet, but they aren’t far off — and they’re getting better every month.
Individuals around the world who value their privacy are working on these models. The code is public. The training is transparent. Nobody is extracting your data because nobody owns the pipeline.
I want FL-3 to lean into this technology — improve open source AI so that instead of spying on people, it protects them and their information from being extracted by the big companies. This isn’t just defensive. It makes our district its own tech hub. Not a Silicon Valley. More like an AI aquifer — generating fresh value, replenishing, sustaining everything above it, distributed and impossible to drain from the outside.
Not Left. Not Right. American.
Most people want the same thing: the right to be left alone unless they choose otherwise, and the right to a fair hearing when someone comes for what’s theirs. That shouldn’t depend on which party is in power or which company has your data.
A society where every action is observed is not a free society, regardless of who’s doing the watching. And a population with no privacy has no power to push back when the rules change.
We already have these protections on paper. The Fourth Amendment. 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.