October 29th, 2018

A Declaration of Digital Rights, by Legacy Research

We believe the single best defense for individual liberty and freedom is financial independence. And recent events in the United States and China have put our financial independence in jeopardy.

The US government is now working closely with big tech firms to monitor the American people’s financial and political activities. And China, using its Social Credit Score system, is now showing how monitoring can easily lead to control. The program is still in its infancy, but it is already being used to deny travel, mortgages, jobs, and even access to dating websites, based on data available from social media and other tech companies. China also uses digital facial and gait recognition to keep track of millions of citizens.

We fear the rise of an all-powerful, surveillance-and-control government, run by unaccountable elites in Washington, New York, and San Francisco.

And we fear that if we do nothing, the idea of America—in which the sole, proper role of government is to protect individual rights—will be lost forever.

Accordingly, we the undersigned declare ourselves committed to the five principles below, which we are calling a Declaration of Digital Rights.

If you share our belief that something must be done now to prevent a tech-enabled tyranny from destroying the basic fabric of our Constitutional rights, we ask you to join us. Specifically, we ask you to take two actions today, without further delay.

First, add your signature to this Declaration.

Second, forward this Declaration to friends, relatives and neighbors, and to candidates for local, state and Federal office. Ask them to publicly support these principles.

This is a first step to raise awareness among the American public of disturbing trends that pose a grave threat to our rights as free Americans. We pledge to do more in the coming months and years. We hope you’ll join us.

We the undersigned, in Order to protect our Constitutional and God-given rights to individual liberty, privacy and wealth; to prevent the suppression of free speech and free thought; to ensure that privacy and the freedom to live our lives without being watched by Big Government or Big Tech; to protect our wealth from arbitrary confiscation; do declare the following Digital Rights:

A right to digital free speech. The government, either acting directly or via powerful media companies, will be banned from using the internet to restrict our free speech, defining unpopular opinions as ‘hate speech,’ and censoring the speech of ordinary Americans on purely political grounds.
A right to cash. Private citizens have the right to engage in private, win-win commerce with bearer instruments without state supervision.
A right to be in public without being watched by government agents. The use of facial or gait recognition technology by government would be limited to legitimate needs of crime prevention, not to impose a permanent surveillance-and-control government from destroying liberty in America.
A right to our own wealth and cash without fear of its arbitrary confiscation. Civil asset forfeiture, by which law enforcement officials can confiscate your cash or property without due process as specified by the fourth Amendment, would be banned.
The right to data privacy. Your personal data would be your property,to keep private, sell, or delete as you please.

We the undersigned do solemnly declare that we support this statement and ask our representatives to take action to protect these rights, hereby described.

Source: Legacy Research