Protect people online: Restore constitutional authority over unchecked technology.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PETITION 

A Signers Summary: Most Americans live endangered by out-of-control Internet policies. The purpose of Restore Us Institute organizing a We the People petition is to restore constitutional authority over the U.S. Internet. Why? To shield everyday Americans from being exploited by the inhumanity and injustice of U.S. Internet unaccountability policy. There’s no liberty, equality, or justice in anarchy online.

Together we can restore Internet accountability to protect people and minors from out-of-control, harms online like incitement of hate and violence, polarization, cyber-bullying, harassment, sex trafficking of minors, predation of children, fentanyl overdoses from fake pharmacies, elder fraud, teen addiction, depression and self-harm/suicide, identity theft, stalkerware, sextortion, ransomware, flash mob and rob, crypto fraud/theft, spyware, monopolization, etc.

Most Americans and their government know the Internet is rife with out-of-control problems, and many have settled that it has to be that way. But it doesn’t have to be that way! This is a simple public policy problem. We the People can and will change it for the better peacefully, civilly, and constitutionally. 

What most Americans and their government do not know yet, but will, is that the universal out-of-control Internet problems sabotaging us, and America have the same root cause -- U.S. ’Wild West,’ Internet unaccountability policy. Knowing the cause of our chaos is knowing the cure for our chaos. 

Our universal solution of restoring Constitutional authority over the U.S. Internet means this. Same rules and rights offline-online. Equal protection under the law. Illegal offline, illegal online. It’s the right thing to do, is the most doable, and does the most good. Let’s get it done!

Please sign, to help us help you, your loved ones, and everyone. Together we can better everyone’s futures by restoring humanity, justice, and public safety online. 

Q&A

What am I signing here? You are signing a public, nonbinding, nonpartisan, petition to our government for redress. The redress you are petitioning the Government for is U.S. Internet accountability policy that fully restores U.S. Constitutional authority, rule-of-law, and rights to the U.S. Internet, to protect people and minors from harms and crimes online.

• For the first time, the petition will bring real and lasting public accountability to three alleged, unchecked technological tyrannies of U.S. Internet unaccountability policy. First, it opposes the inhumane policy priority of protecting technology over protecting people. Second, it opposes the unjust policy grant of technology impunity over people. Third, it opposes the disruptive policy empowerment of technology to control and govern people without rights, due process, or access to justice.
• Two thirds of the petition chronicles twenty grievances against current Internet unaccountability policy that justify Government policy reform. Specifically, you are petitioning your government to first, support and defend the U.S. Constitution, second, prioritize people’s interests above technologies’ interests, and third, no longer limit people’s constitutional 1st, 5th, 10th, and 14th amendment rights online. 

Why did Restore Us Institute form the petition as a Declaration of Independence? The recipients of the full formal petition below will be all U.S. Senators and Representatives, the President and Cabinet, and all Supreme Court Justices. Together these recipients can uniquely grasp the holistic reality, gravity, and legitimacy of a modern holistic circumstance that could warrant We the People to declare independence peaceably, civilly, and constitutionally from an unacceptable, oppressive U.S. policy. 

• America’s founding Declaration of Independence is the original source and legitimacy of people not tolerating tyranny, of the American people’s “unalienable rights,” and of “the right of the people to alter or abolish” “any form of government that becomes destructive.”
• The U.S. Government over the last twenty-five years has unwittingly spawned an existential problem of their own creation. Will the Constitution continue to govern the people going forward or will unchecked technology increasingly govern the people going forward? Today’s troubling trajectory is terrifyingly tripping towards the latter – unchecked technological tyranny. 

How can we believe that our troubled government can and will fix this? Most in government are aware of America’s out-of-control Internet problems but few have connected the dots that the U.S. Internet unaccountability policy is the primary cause and culprit. 

• As the public increasingly learns that there is a simple cure for the chaos that the government unwittingly created, public awareness, scrutiny and accountability will increasingly grow, and the Government will naturally increasingly work to do its public duty and solve it. 
• We are only asking for the government, its officials, and employees to first do their jobs, duties, and sacred oaths “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”and to second restore our sovereign, constitutional limited government, rule of law and rights to how America governed continuously and successfully for its first 220 years of existence.  
• We the People are petitioning to restore good government that operated prior to 1996, Wild West, U.S. Internet policy. Same rules and rights offline-online. Equal protection under the law. Illegal offline is illegal online. 

For more information about the following text of the formal Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny see: RestoreUsInstitute.org.

Protect people online: Restore constitutional authority over unchecked technology via:

A Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny

Note: Most italics are text from the original 1776 Declaration of Independence, others are text from the U.S. Constitution.

PREAMBLE

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any form of Government [U.S. policy] becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [that U.S. policy], and to institute new Government [policy]. 

INTRODUCTION

As non-partisan American citizens, we peaceably, civilly, and constitutionally declare independence from the unchecked technological tyranny of U.S. Internet unaccountability policy’s inhumanity, injustice, and instability.

In exercising our First Amendment rights of “freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” we the people call for full restoration of constitutional authority over the U.S. Internet to ensure equal protection under the law. Same rules and rights offline-online. Illegal offline, illegal online. 

“We candidly explain our reasons, grievances, and actions.”   

The main tyrannies of U.S. Internet unaccountability policy are threefold. 

• First, it inhumanely treasures and protects technology over humanity and profit over people. 
• Second, it unsafely grants technology impunity over people and children. 
• Third, it unjustly empowers technology to govern people sans rights, due process, or access to justice.
• Done together, these tyrannies are causing mindless madness throughout America. 

Our declaration is not a revolution like our founding 1776 American Revolution. It’s the opposite, a peaceable, civil, and Constitutional restoration of Constitution-limited government, rule-of-law, and rights online – which restores exactly what the 1996 Internet policy revolution usurped from We the People without their consent.    

• Our Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny is effectively a vote of no confidence for America’s current utopian, Internet unaccountability policies heralded in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 
• Barlow imagined that a utopian policy experiment of a “civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace” with no sovereignty, borders, elected government, rules, rights, identity/privacy, or intellectual property online, would be superior to America’s sovereign Constitution-limited government and rule of law. 

Ours is a legitimate Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny. For 25 years, the American people have been neglected and tyrannized by unjust absolutist Internet policy powers and “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” like the Founders endured and rejected before America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776.

• Our chronicled, fact-driven grievances expose how utopian policy has devolved to dystopian tyranny.
• We signers cherish our First Amendment rights to speak, assemble, and petition Government to do its duty to support and defend the U.S. Constitution and to protect people and minors from harms online.

It should be no surprise that the unaccountable power and impunity that King George used to unjustly tyrannize the Colonies and their people, could eventually rear its ugly head again in America. Our list of twenty grievances below are eerily similar to the Founders’ twenty-eight grievances against King George in the 1770s. They prove Lord Acton’s timeless wisdom that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

“To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”  

OUR GRIEVANCES

(Our “petition [of] the government for a redress of grievances” [First Amendment] and our “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” follow. [Declaration])

1.       Dictating Dependence on Undependability. Our government succeeded in creating, building, and encouraging adoption and use of an amazingly useful all-purpose Internet technology and universal information infrastructure. It is used and depended upon by everyone, for everything, everywhere, for content, commerce, communications, community, culture, capitalism, and more. Internet technology dependence de facto dictated. In Internet technology we must trust. 

• Concurrently, our government has failed in de facto dictating a most undependable U.S. Internet policy, i.e., ‘Wild West,’ minimal government accountability online policy. It’s banned borders online, denying defenses from rampant foreign cyberattacks, ransomware, and cyberespionage. It’s prohibited police and public safety online, endangering people and minors from out-of-control cybercrime, predation, and fraud. It’s denied justice online by denying rights, due process, and access to justice.   
• Government policy empowers Internet technology with impunity while disempowering people with no protections. That dictated dependence on undependability is unchecked technological tyranny.

2.       Primitivist Policy. It’s 1996 U.S. policy that the Internet/Internet services be “unfettered by Federal and State Regulation.” Ecommerce should be “self-regulated” and “minimalist” government. A 1997 Supreme Court precedent affirms absolutist free speech. In not modernizing 1996 U.S. Wild West Internet policy, America has gone from world Internet policy leader to laggard. America is regressing and falling behind.   

3.       Chaotic Consequences. Without consent of the governed or any good government oversight, U.S. Internet unaccountability policy perversely proliferates out-of-control, unintended consequences online. 

4.       Cybercrime-Time. Absolutist U.S. Internet unaccountability policy has banned police and public safety online, by largely preempting State and local law enforcement jurisdiction online. This mindless jurisdictional power play perversely protects the preferences and profit of corporate technology over protecting people. 

• Internet policy makes people vulnerable to attacks by default by requiring minimal market incentives and government duties to create secure code, apps, chips, software, firmware, or hardware. Protecting people and America online simply has not been a meaningful government priority for twenty-five years. 
• Much less than one percent of cybercrime is prosecuted in America.
• Thus, there’s no deterrence for: Incitement of hate and violence, polarization, elder fraud, sex trafficking of minors, predation of children, cyber-bullying, harassment, fentanyl overdoses from fake pharmacies, teen depression and self-harm/suicide, identity theft, stalkerware, sextortion, ransomware, flash mob & rob, crypto fraud/theft, spyware, monopolization, cyberattacks, cyberespionage etc.   

5.       A Liar’s License. U.S. Internet unaccountability policy is self-defeating policy of no truth, facts, trust, belief, faith, values, mores, or standards. Unaccountability corrupts truth, honesty, integrity, and morality/ethics.  

6.       A Cheater’s Charter. The mindless cause of Big-Tech’s serial mass monopolizations and monopsonizations is their common, unbeatable, accountability arbitrage advantages of an offline-online accountability double standard. Internet technology corporations don’t have to play by the rules of the game like their offline competitors must. They enjoy an unfair competition, cheaters charter online. There cheaters-can-take-all.

7.       National Neglect. For twenty-six years, five Administrations thirteen Congresses and seventeen Supreme Court Justices together, have neglected to protect people and minors from attacks, harms, and crimes online, to protect Internet technology and corporate interests from responsibility and accountability. In other words, tragically, our government has long treasured and protected profit-over-people. 

8.       Corrupt Capture. The extraordinary bias here for regularly favoring technology and corporate interests at the expense of, and harm to, the people’s interests -- screams of technology and corporate, corrupt capture of the U.S. Government via Internet unaccountability policy. 

• President Eisenhower in his farewell address warned of this corruption threat: “that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite.” This sadly confirms most Americans’ fears that their government no longer serves the people’s interests, but powerfully prioritizes profit-over-people. 

9.       Unaccountable Usurpations. America’s online anarchy policy has usurped America’s authorities. Online, it’s surrendered America’s sovereignty; abdicated America’s authority; corrupted the Constitution; banned borders; denied defenses from cyberattacks, cybercrime, and cyberespionage; rejected rule-of-law; rejected rights; prohibited police and public safety; denied duty of care; inverted incentives; and deterred deterrents.

10.   Constitution De-constituted. Internet unaccountability policy subverts the Constitution’s good purposes.

• From “form a more perfect union” to apparent polarization, division, distrust, fear -- Internet Incivility. 
• From “establish justice” to apparent no rule-of-law, rights, or access to justice -- Internet Injustice.
• From “insure domestic tranquility” to apparent incitement, attacks, The Chaos Quo -- Internet Instability. 
• From “provide for the common defence” to apparent out-of-control cyberattacks -- Internet Insecurity. 
• From “promote the general welfare” to apparent out-of-control cybercrime/fraud -- Internet Ill-being.
• From “secure the blessings of liberty” to apparent hate, lies, bias, rage, violence -- Internet Inhumanity.  

11.   America as Its Own Worst Enemy. Approved anarchy policy is mindlessly self-defeating and self-destructive.  

• It’s disrupted and corrupted America’s truths, beliefs, mores, values, standards, and trusted institutions. 
• It’s subverted the Constitution’s purposes of unity, justice, stability, security, prosperity, and liberty.
• It’s worsened our futures socially, culturally, politically, economically, financially, and internationally.

12.   Internet Injustice Breeds Big Bad. U.S. Internet unaccountability policy on autopilot subverts everything good in America. It de facto perversely promotes, models, and rewards: 

• Tyranny over liberty; anarchy over authority; lawless disorder over law and order; conflict over goodwill; violence over peace; injustice over justice; evil over good; wrong over right; hate over love; lies over truth; corruption over integrity; polarization over unity; extremes over limits; partial over equal; and freedom to harm over freedom from harm. 

13.   Preempting the People’s Power. U.S. Internet unaccountability policy Federally surrendered sovereignty and constitutionally limited government online. In asserting Federal jurisdiction over its de-governed Internet, it denies States, localities, and people their sovereign authority, citizenship, and rights online. 

• This runs counter to the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Thus, profit-over-people policy perversely preempts the people’s power. 

14.   A Nation Divided Cannot Stand. Our 21st Century reality is a self-defeating and counter-productive, chaotic policy of rule-of-law vs. rule-of-code. Internet policy imposes a diametric double standard for legal/illegal conduct, i.e., government authority and accountability offline, but ~none online. This mindlessly incents and incites diametric real vs. artificial selves, conduct standards, responsibilities, realities, and futures. 

• Internet unaccountability policy naturally turns the Internet into an extreme machine that wrongfully and needlessly fosters extreme polarization, division, incitement, hate, lies, distrust, bias, rage, and violence. President Lincoln warned of the peril of a freedom double standard. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”

15.   Internet Inhumanity’s Dehumanization. Offline a person is animate: a living being, human, individual, citizen, voter, consumer, customer, or adult/minor. However, online a person tellingly is inanimate: artificial, virtual, and dehumanized, non-living things, called ‘data,’ ‘user,’ ‘avatar,’ or ‘product.’ 

Tragically, people have devolved into…       

• Commercial Chattel. Online we’re dehumanized inanimate data products, commercial chattel that’s bought and sold with impunity by data brokers, without meaningful consent, rights, or recourse. 
• Lab Rats. Online we’re lab rats, detrimentally experimented on without consent or rights. 
• Indentured Servants. We’re indentured servants online who are disenfranchised commercial captives of unfair, one-sided, legal terms, indentures, and monopoly and monopsony power. 
• Second-Class Citizens. Federal preemption of State’s sovereignty preempts state citizenship online. 
• Defenseless Prey for Predators. Online minors are easy prey for predators of all kinds, with minimal age-appropriate protections. Children, tweens, and teens are tricked, addicted, and exploited online with impunity. Inhumane Internet policy has corruptly fed many millions of minors to online wolves. 
• Lost Personal Sovereignty. We no longer control of our own destinies because online others can largely control our virtual value, private data, identity, and what we discover, learn, think, believe, see, say, and share online. Sadly, online our ‘freedom’ is an artificial illusion not reality. 

16.   Anarchy’s Amoralism Demoralizes America. U.S. Internet unaccountability policy’s approved anarchy and technology primacy are antithetical and hostile to the Judeo-Christian moral and ethical values upon which the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and America’s legal/justice systems are based. 

• Loves Idols over God. U.S. Internet unaccountability policy de facto has deified and worshiped the Internet, technology, innovators, and money as Gods, all-knowing, all-seeing saviors that claim technological answers and solutions to satisfy all the world’s problems, needs, and wants. 
• No Golden Rule. U.S. unaccountability policy online models a de facto ‘harm your neighbor’ policy and ‘Rotten Rule’ of “Do whatever you want to others.” That’s the opposite of modeling God’s “love your neighbor as yourself” commandment, i.e., the Golden Rule/Ethic of Reciprocity of “treat others as you want to be treated,” which every major religion, and ethical tradition believes in some form. 
• No Right and Wrong. Universal unaccountability policy online means abdicating authority to legislate, administrate, and adjudicate right vs. wrong, legal vs. illegal, and good vs. evil. In turn this means no holding wrongdoing, illegality, or evil to account online. In time, this de facto corrupts our consciences and surrenders our souls. There is no good, liberty, equality, or justice in anarchy.      
• Degrades Humanity. U.S. unaccountability policy degrades people and humanity by taking away their rights and protections from harm online. U.S. technology primacy policy perversely values guarding and shepherding technology idols over God’s people and children. That rejects our Founders’ moral “truths… that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 
• Morals Matter. President George Washington warned “…morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” President John Adams warned “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Founder Ben Franklin warned “laws without morals are in vain.”  

17.   Indefensible Internet Insecurity. What good is government that can’t or doesn’t do its main duty? It doesn’t protect its citizenry from foreign attacks and harms that they cannot defend against alone. America’s social contract with the government should be citizens limit their freedoms in return for freedom from harm. 

• Today, most Americans have been victims of foreign based cyberattacks and cybercrime, Today America can’t defend Americans from a rampant, Russia-empowered, ransomware-crimewave nor out-of-control online China-sponsored cyberespionage, trade secret-theft, and theft of national security secrets. 

18.   Crypto Corruption. Absolutist Internet unaccountability policy has mindlessly empowered the monied crypto movement to try to disrupt and supplant the global financial system with Internet blockchain technology on the heels of the historic financial damage of the Great Recession and Financial Crisis. Stability be damned.

• In the sector most defined by, and reliant on, trust, security, stability, integrity, and predictability, Big Crypto falsely represented crypto as trustworthy, secure, stable, and honest, when they knew it was not. It is fraud-riddled and bubble-prone. Countless Americans have been defrauded and lost their savings. 

19.   Permitting People Poisoning. Absolutist free flow of info policy has proven deadly for many Americans and minors. Almost all online pharmacies accessible online in America are illegal and foreign based. They have resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary American fatalities from fentanyl overdose and other unsafe counterfeit medicines, non-certified supplements, and anabolic steroids.

20.   Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater. Internet unaccountability policy in 1997 perversely changed the legal treatment of minors from being protected by criminal law from being coerced or enticed for sex or prostitution to no longer being protected in criminal law from being coerced/enticed for sex/prostitution. 

• Free Speech Absolutism generated this extremely perverse result of the Supreme Court’s first and only overall Internet precedent. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in ACLU v. Reno to overturn on technical grounds eight of ten provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for technically abridging adults constitutionally protected free speech rights to access p0rnography online.
• Protector of Predators. For over two decades, the only Supreme Court precedent for Internet law/policy de facto, guided and taught the judiciary that adults’ coercion and enticement of minors for sex and prostitution online is protected free speech, not the illegal and heinous, criminal conduct it was and is. 
• Enter the 21st Century. The Supreme Court needs to update the judicial branches’ reality that the Internet is no longer only a 1996 speech platform and communications network that a small percent of Americans use for an average of thirty minutes a month. 
• SCOTUS adapted to change in the 19th and 20th centuries in ruling some offline speech to not be constitutionally protected in precedents because there is no freedom to harm people or society. Today, SCOTUS is endangering Americans in de facto imagining and acting like all Internet traffic is and should remain constitutionally protected speech.  
• When SCOTUS looks, it will find a matured Internet that has evolved into a real all-purpose technology, and a comprehensive conduit for a panoply of conducts online that operate with freedom-to-harm impunity of Internet unaccountability policy. Like SCOTUS had ruled offline that some types of harmful speech were not protected speech, SCOTUS needs to develop online precedents that guide what types of online conducts are not protected speech. 

CONCLUSION

We citizens of the United States of America support the peaceable and civil restoration of U.S. Constitutional authority over everyone and everything offline and online in America to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from this earth.” 

In peaceably, civilly, and constitutionally declaring our independence from the unchecked technological tyranny of U.S. Internet unaccountability policy’s inhumanity, injustice, and instability, we are doing the following.

1.       Petitioning for Reconstitution. Overall, We the People, petition the U.S. Government to reconstitute the U.S. Constitution’s de-constituted authority online to fully restore the Constitution’s authority and accountabilities over the Internet to restore what’s been lost online, i.e., sovereignty, reciprocity, limited-government, rule of law, rights, reason, responsibility, rules, restraints, recourse, and redress. Same rules and rights offline-online. Equal protection under the law. Illegal offline, illegal online. 

2.       Petitioning for Restoration of Rights. Specifically, We the People petition the U.S. Government to restore justice online by restoring our ‘unalienable’ God-given rights, our 1st, 5th, 10th, 14th Amendment rights, civil rights, and human rights, that have de facto been taken away by Internet unaccountability policy. When U.S. Internet policy takes away people’s rights of protections from harm, it de facto grants inanimate technologies an unjust, inhumane, and tyrannous right of impunity over people. 

3.       Petitioning for a People Primacy Protection Principle. Specifically, We the People petition the U.S. Government to restore humanity online by abolishing U.S. technology or corporate unaccountability policies that subvert the U.S. Constitution’s purposes, or wrongly elevate technology or corporate primacy over people primacy in public policy. The U.S. Constitution’s ‘We the People’ perspective inherently affirms an American people primacy principle.

4.       Petitioning for No Federal Preemption. Specifically, We the People petition the Federal government to not preempt the Tenth Amendment Right of States, localities, and the people to govern technology, and to not preempt State and local law enforcement of criminal or civil violations committed by a person, a corporation, or a technology online. 

We affirm our duty as citizens to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to encourage our fellow citizens to publicly affirm the same in signing this declaration.

• We pledge to share this Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny with our fellow American citizens going forward. We do so to encourage good citizenship, good policy/law, good government, and the greater good of liberty and justice for all and goodwill to others.  

Signing gives our fellow Americans three encouragements. First, no American is alone in recognizing that America and Americans’ futures are worsening and need bettering. Second, there is a defensible, doable, and time-tested solution here to much of America’s worsening that can better Americans futures. Third, there’s more that unites us than divides us, so Americans can unite peaceably and civilly in a nonpartisan, mindful movement to advance better lives and futures for Americans and America.  

In closing, we sign this peaceable petition to our government for a redress of grievances entitled “A Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny” for the sake of posterity, and to advance a more humane, just, stable, and free America for Americans, because we love our God, love our neighbors, and love our Constitutional country.  

 

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Note: To learn more about this Petition/Declaration, Restore Us Institute, and The Mindful Majority, please see RestoreUsInstitute.org. Thank you for your mindfulness, support, and unity.