Technology, Privacy, and Constitutional Government
The Constitution Party affirms that technological advancement does not alter the fundamental relationship between the people and their government. The powers delegated to government remain limited by the Constitution, and the rights of the people do not diminish because new technologies make intrusion, surveillance, data collection, or centralized control easier.
The Fourth Amendment was written to secure the people in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures and to prohibit general searches by requiring probable cause and particularity. We hold that these principles apply no less in the digital age. A government that lacks constitutional authority to conduct a general search does not acquire that authority by employing a corporation, purchasing access to privately collected information, contracting for a surveillance service, or directing artificial intelligence to search and correlate information on its behalf.
Private enterprise and private property are essential to liberty.
Corporations and technology companies operating as private enterprises are therefore not government merely because they possess information or technology. But neither may government use a private corporation as an instrument to exercise powers government itself does not possess. When private technology is employed for governmental purposes, constitutional limitations upon government must remain intact.
This principle has immediate application to automated license-plate readers, facial and image recognition, artificial intelligence, data brokers, cloud databases, and other technologies capable of recording, retaining, combining, analyzing, and retrospectively searching information about the movements, associations, activities, or transactions of the people. The Constitution Party opposes the transformation of such technologies into systems of general governmental surveillance of people who are not suspected of crime.
The same constitutional principles apply to the rapidly expanding infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence and large-scale computing. The Constitution Party does not oppose data centers, artificial intelligence, or technological development as such. We support genuine private enterprise conducted with respect for private property and constitutional government.
We oppose government/private partnerships, special governmental privilege, involuntary public subsidy of private enterprise, and arrangements that transfer extraordinary private costs to taxpayers, utility customers, property owners, or communities that did not voluntarily assume them.
Government also has a duty to conduct the people’s business openly. Public money, public infrastructure, governmental authority, tax privileges, utility commitments, or other public resources should not be committed through secrecy that prevents meaningful accountability before governmental commitments become effectively irreversible.
Neither economic development, technological competition, administrative convenience, public safety, nor national security creates governmental power that the Constitution does not grant. Technology may change rapidly, but principles of constitutional government do not change.
The Constitution Party therefore affirms a simple standard: government may not use technology – or a private corporation providing that technology – to exercise power over the people that the Constitution does not give government itself.
