# Law

Ideas, not dogma. Nothing here is final — these are proposals for how a society could govern itself once
the tools exist to do it honestly. Written for a future where power is technically incapable of abuse, not
just legally forbidden from it. Today's arguments about surveillance and government assume today's
tools; these proposals assume better ones get built first.

## Surveillance must be verifiably safe before it is public

Cameras and sensors in public space are only legitimate once the systems watching us are themselves
impossible to watch in secret. That means, as a hard prerequisite, not a nice-to-have:

- No plaintext feed exists anywhere. Video and data are encrypted at the point of capture, before they
  ever leave the device.
- No single party — public agency or private company — holds a key that can decrypt the whole system.
  Access requires cryptographic agreement from multiple independent, rotating custodians — the same
  design principle behind end-to-end encrypted messaging, applied to public infrastructure: no one
  entity, however it's asked, can hand over everything alone.
- Every access is itself logged to a public, tamper-evident record — so surveillance of the surveillance
  is always possible, by anyone, not just an internal review board.
- Ownership and operating cost are distributed across the public, not concentrated in one agency or
  vendor that a government or investor can lean on privately.

Until infrastructure meets that bar, more cameras is not more safety — it's a single point of failure
waiting for the wrong hands to find it. Build the guarantees first. Expand the eyes second.

## Voting

Representation by proxy made sense when a message took days to travel by courier, horse, or telegraph. It
doesn't anymore. Every citizen can inform themselves and cast a vote directly, with results anonymized,
recorded on a public and auditable chain, and independently verifiable by the voter without revealing
their choice to anyone else.

## Transparency in public office

Serving the public is a trade: reduced privacy for the officeholder, in exchange for the power they hold.

- Elected officials' government business is actively recorded and streamed, with narrow, specific
  exceptions for national security and genuine private life — not a blanket excuse.
- Personal finances of the President, Vice President, and members of Congress are public from the moment
  of election and remain so for as long as they hold office.
- Supreme Court justices are directly elected, serve fixed four-year terms, and their personal finances
  are public for the duration of their service. An odd-numbered court (proposed: 19 seats) avoids ties.
- Congressional terms are limited to two six-year terms, with no stock trading permitted while in office.

## Judicial proceedings

Proceedings are recorded and archived by default. Sealing a record to conceal wrongdoing is never
permitted; narrow sealing to protect victims or active investigations is.

## Citizenship

A foreign national who lives and works as a contributing member of society for ten years earns
citizenship. A felony conviction during that period extends the requirement to twenty years, counted from
release. Military service can accelerate the timeline. Every path includes a national security review,
made public to the applicant and, in aggregate, to citizens generally.

## National security

Legitimate national security exceptions still exist — but they are exceptions: reviewed and justified
case by case, not a default excuse to skip every principle above.