Thank you all for your support

First, thank you to everyone who has signed, shared, commented on, or even just taken the time to read this petition.

The signatures are still growing, and I genuinely appreciate everyone helping get these issues in front of more people.

I have also significantly expanded this petition since it first went live. It now goes deeper into data minimization, data brokers, AI, government purchases of commercial data, encryption, employee and bystander privacy, and the fact that the United States continues to fall behind other countries when it comes to comprehensive privacy protections.

That international comparison is important.

Europe has GDPR. Canada has PIPEDA. South Africa has POPIA. Even China, the country American politicians constantly warn us about obtaining our data, has PIPL and nationwide requirements governing how companies process and minimize personal information.

That does not make China's government a model for civil liberties or protection from government surveillance. It does make our situation incredibly ironic.

American politicians repeatedly tell us how dangerous it would be for China to obtain enormous amounts of data about Americans while our own federal government still has not established comprehensive nationwide rules limiting how much of that data companies can collect, retain, aggregate, and trade in the first place.

If you are worried about somebody obtaining a database, perhaps we should start asking why that database needed to contain so much unnecessary personal information at all.

Data minimization is privacy.

Data minimization is cybersecurity.

And in some situations, data minimization is national security.

I also added something personal to the petition: I work professionally in cybersecurity and operate my own infrastructure, and when I have meaningful choices about providers or regions, I often prefer European options partly because I value operating within an environment that has comprehensive privacy regulation.

As an American working in technology and cybersecurity, I should not have to look across the Atlantic for the kind of comprehensive privacy environment I want in my own country.

WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO WITH THESE PETITIONS

This is also part of something larger I have decided to put more effort into.

For years, I have complained publicly about cybersecurity, privacy, technology policy, critical infrastructure, surveillance, and politicians making laws about technologies they often seem to barely understand.

Complaining can raise awareness, but eventually I started asking myself what else I could actually do.

I have platforms.

I have an audience.

I work professionally in cybersecurity.

I have spent years learning, tinkering, building infrastructure, working with technology, and talking about these problems.

So I want to at least try using those platforms for something good in the areas where I can provide real expertise.

I do not expect a Change.org petition by itself to magically rewrite federal law.

That is not the point.

The point is to organize people around specific issues, make these concerns easier for ordinary people to understand, show policymakers that people actually care about them, and hopefully turn years of individual frustration into something more coordinated.

If something gains enough support to make lawmakers, regulators, journalists, technologists, or advocacy organizations pay attention, that is progress.

And I plan to keep going.

THE FOUR CURRENT PETITIONS

RIGHT TO PRIVACY

Give Americans a Real Right to Privacy and pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation.

https://www.change.org/privacyforallamericans

DATA CENTERS AND INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS

Require data centers to pay their fair share for the electrical infrastructure and other costs their enormous growth creates instead of shifting those burdens onto ordinary utility customers and communities.

https://www.change.org/data-center-fair-share

SECURE AMERICA'S CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Make Cyber-Informed Engineering and meaningful cybersecurity requirements a baseline for critical infrastructure instead of continuing to build systems expected to operate for decades without treating cyber risk as an engineering requirement from the beginning.

https://www.change.org/secure-critical-infrastructure

STOP WARRANTLESS MASS SURVEILLANCE

Push back against the normalization of mass surveillance and technology that can track enormous numbers of innocent people without individualized suspicion.

https://www.change.org/stopwarrantlesssurveillance

MORE ARE COMING

I am also working on several additional petitions around issues I have complained about for years and finally want to try mobilizing people around.

COMING SOON: MODERNIZE THE U.S. PAYMENT SYSTEM

The United States is far behind where a modern financial system should be. We still rely heavily on checks, an aging ACH system, unnecessary delays, insecure processes, and payment infrastructure that looks increasingly outdated compared with systems available elsewhere in the world.

Checks in particular create fraud and identity-theft risks, disproportionately affect people who still depend on them, and remain embedded in government and financial processes long after better technology became available.

I want to push for a modern American payment system that is fast, secure, accessible, privacy-respecting, and built around modern financial infrastructure rather than trying to patch systems designed decades ago.

And no, replacing the banking system with cryptocurrency or stablecoins is not the answer.

COMING SOON: STOP USING SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AS IDENTIFICATION

Social Security Numbers were never designed to become America's universal identity credential.

Yet we built enormous portions of our financial, employment, credit, government, and identity systems around a number that is effectively permanent and cannot function as a secure secret because people have been forced to provide it repeatedly throughout their lives.

A modern country should have a modern identity architecture.

That could include concepts such as public-key cryptography, replaceable identifiers, stronger identity verification, and mechanisms for recovering from compromise instead of telling victims of identity theft that the same compromised number essentially follows them forever.

This is also a cybersecurity and national-security problem when the identities of government employees and military personnel depend on systems built around SSNs.

COMING SOON: PROTECT CHILDREN ONLINE WITHOUT DESTROYING EVERYONE'S PRIVACY

I also want to address the repeated cycle of legislation claiming to protect children online while introducing mass surveillance, identity-verification systems, encryption threats, or other technologically dangerous solutions that frequently fail to address the actual underlying problems.

Protecting children matters.

So does doing it competently.

We should be capable of protecting children without building surveillance infrastructure over the entire population.

AND THERE IS MORE COMING

There are several other technology, cybersecurity, infrastructure, privacy, digital-rights, and consumer issues I have complained about for years that I want to start turning into concrete campaigns.

I am not going to pretend I personally have the answer to every public-policy problem.

But when an issue intersects with areas I actually understand, I would rather use whatever reach and expertise I have to try to help than sit around complaining that nobody is doing anything.

That means researching these issues, documenting the problems, proposing realistic solutions, listening when people raise legitimate counterarguments, correcting things when necessary, and continuing to make complicated technical subjects understandable to people who do not work in technology.

THANK YOU

Most importantly, thank you again to everyone signing and sharing these petitions.

Every signature tells me these are not concerns I am shouting into the void about.

Every share introduces the issue to somebody who may never have thought about it before.

Every thoughtful comment helps demonstrate that ordinary people actually care about how technology affects their rights, their money, their infrastructure, and their lives.

I plan to keep using my platforms to advocate for cybersecurity, privacy rights, responsible technology policy, secure infrastructure, and other issues where I believe my experience can contribute something useful.

I have spent years complaining about a lot of these problems.

Now I want to at least try mobilizing something around them.

Thank you for being part of it.

And if you believe in any of these causes, please sign the ones you support and share them with someone who should know about them.