Dr. Jon Padfield is an electrical engineer by training, a former Indiana State Representative, and, a lecturer in business management at Indiana University Columbus. He is better known to a quarter-million subscribers as the creator of Business Reform, a YouTube channel devoted to what he calls the intersection of business, technology, and society — which is the polite way of saying he spends his time explaining how the surveillance apparatus works and what, if anything, can be done about it.
The views below are his own. We publish them (as we did a previous story about him) because they deserve the widest possible audience.
On America’s 250th Year, Our Founding Principles Have Never Been More Urgent
By Dr. Jon Padfield
On July 4th, Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that is the functional equivalent of America’s birth certificate.
I believe this is the perfect time to ask what the founders would think of the government they gave us tracking everywhere we drive, everything we purchase, and every electronic device we carry on or in our bodies (cell phone, AirPods, Fitbit, hearing aids, glucose monitor, etc.) so they can identify us even if we have our faces covered or are riding in someone else’s vehicle.
The founders clearly spelled out their vision of the proper role of government in the lives of American citizens, and I personally prefer their vision to what we are experiencing today, especially as it relates to the warrantless, mass surveillance infrastructure being erected like a cage around us.
A Nationwide Prison Exercise Yard
The rapidly expanding surveillance infrastructure in our country today is turning America into an open-air prison.
If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the words of Flock Safety’s “unofficial spokesman,” Police Sergeant Jamie Milliman who, while berating and falsely accusing an innocent woman of theft, proudly proclaimed on camera:
“You know we have cameras in that town, and you can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing.”
What he said doesn’t describe public safety, it describes what happens when inmates are allowed out of their cells for an hour to visit the prison exercise yard while being closely monitored by armed guards. Today over 109,000 automated license plate readers log the location of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans from “sea to shining sea” every time they pull out of their driveway.
What the Founders Actually Said
In June 1776, the Committee of Five — Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston — was appointed by the Continental Congress to draft a declaration of independence from British rule. Historians estimate that Thomas Jefferson wrote approximately 80% of it, but it was Dr. Benjamin Franklin who suggested using the phrase, “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” “Self-evident” is a term used in mathematics to describe something that is so obvious that it does not need any further explanation.
The preamble to the Declaration of Independence lays out six “self-evident truths” that I will discuss in this article because too many Americans, includingfar too many elected officials, have either forgotten or never learned them.
The first self-evident truth is that “all men are created equal”. Intellectual honesty demands I acknowledge the elephant in the room: many of the signers owned slaves. But the failure of men to live up to a principle does not invalidate the principle itself.
The second self-evident truth is that we “are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights” and among those rights are the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Our founders believed, as do I, that our rights come from God. They cannot be taken away from us by men because they were not bestowed upon us by men. However, they may be violated by men. That is why we need an entity stronger than any individual to protect those rights.
The third self-evident truth is the one most relevant to our current moment: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
Let that sink in. If just powers come from the consent of the governed, then any government power exercised without the consent of the governed is, by definition, unjust.
Patrick Henry expanded upon this idea 12 years later during the debate on whether Virginia should ratify the U.S. and join the Union of States. In one of his speeches during the debate, Henry stated, “You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured, for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government.” In a follow up speech the following day he added, “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.”
The fourth self-evident truth is that whenever government becomes destructive to these ends (securing our rights), “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it”. To be perfectly clear, the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were announcing a revolt. I am not calling for revolt, I am calling for a restoration to America’s founding principles and the idea that it is the purpose of government to “secure our rights”, not to keep a database of everywhere we drive, everything we buy, everything we share online and every website we visit.
The fifth self-evident truth cautions that governments long-established should not be changed for light and transient causes. This is very common senseobservation that anytime you fundamentally change a form of government that there are risks and that such serious action should only be undertaken in response to serious provocation.
The sixth self-evident truth spells out in concept where the line is drawn that justifies altering or abolishing the existing government and replacing it with one that is more likely to secure our future happiness and safety. The founder used the phrase, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce the people to absolute despotism.” At that point, it is no longer just the right of the people to alter or abolish their government, according to our Founders, “it is their duty” to throw off such government.
The Surveillance Thought Experiment
Imagine a country where the government tracks and stores records of everywhere its citizens fly and drive, everyone who is in the vehicle with them as they drive, and every credit card purchase they make. Imagine that government used a facial recognition database containing more than 30 billion facial images so it could identify everyone walking down the street, entering a building or attending a protest. Imagine it records everyone’s social media posts along with what websites they visit, who they call and text, and who calls and texts them.
Now imagine that all of this surveillance infrastructure was built without the knowledge or consent of the people being surveilled 24/7.
What country would most people think I was describing? China or the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The Consent That Was Never Asked For
The 109,000 license plate readers now blanketing the country did not appear on any ballot. I am not aware of a single mayor, sheriff, or city / county council member who ran for office on a platform of “elect me and I will spend your tax dollars to track everywhere you drive.” They didn’t tell us. They didn’t ask.
But people are pushing back. In the past nine months alone, 53 communities have voted against installing Flock cameras or canceled existing Flock contracts — and the pace is accelerating. The Mount Lake Terrace City Council approved Flock cameras in June 2025, then voted to cancel the contract just six months later. The opposition is not partisan. People on the left, right, and center are working together because the vast majority of Americans, when they learn what these systems do, do not want to be surveilled around the clock.
The battle over AI data centers has produced some equally instructive moments. When a massive data center was proposed in Festus, Missouri, residents packed a high school gymnasium in opposition. Public comment ran two hours, filled entirely with passionate resistance. The city council voted 6-2 to approve it anyway. As one resident noted: “Every meeting I’ve attended, there have been 80 to 90% opposition. The other 10% are mostly people who don’t live here.” Two weeks later, every council member up for reelection was voted out. Recall petitions followed for the rest.
Meanwhile in Utah, Kevin O’Leary is pushing a 100-billion-dollar, 40,000-acre data center project that, when completed, would consume more than double the entire current electricity usage of the state of Utah. It is ironic to me that Mr. O’Leary is claiming foreign money is funding the opposition to his proposed data center when his citizenships (plural) are in Canada, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates.
A Restoration, Not a Revolution
In 1776, our founders were calling for a revolution after suffering “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” I am NOT calling for a revolution, but to a restoration of the princples they spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. The idea that “governments are instituted among men” to secure our rights and that government “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
I do not want revolt, I want restoration. I do not want vandalism of surveillance infrastructure, I want legislative and judicial victories over surveillance infrastructure. I want to see our politically fractured country uniting behind these principles, as they are already starting to do, to peacefully demand and end to the warrantless, mass surveillance. These are not new or radical ideas - two hundred and fifty years ago they were held to be self-evident.