Fifteen hundred of the participants in the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, almost all of them non-violent, were imprisoned through a disturbing use of modern surveillance technology. Twenty years earlier, no such universal punishment would have been possible, even had the government, then far less authoritarian, wanted to impose it. Numerous people with non-violent disagreements with the prevailing regimes in Britain and the United States have been debanked, and the Central Bank Digital Currency, enthusiastically backed by many central banks, could make it impossible for such people to live at all by de-moneying as well as de-banking them. Leftist governments have become totalitarian, because new technology has enabled them to be so. We need anti-surveillance technology and an AI Bill of Rights to reverse this Orwellian process.

When in January 1997 my beloved late wife decided to join a demonstration at the national parliament in Sofia against Bulgaria’s last Communist government, that of Zhan Videnov, I begged her not to do so (I was in Zagreb at the time, powerless to intervene directly). She ignored me, as she generally did, and participated in the demonstration, which closely resembled the J6 demonstration except that the demonstrators did not show respect to the parliament building as the J6 crowd did to the Capitol; indeed they set fire to it. There were, however, no repercussions for my late wife, a peaceful non-incendiary participant (as far as I know!) who joined me in Zagreb a week later without difficulty. The Videnov government fell the following week, to be replaced by a corrupt and imperfect but democratic and pro-market government, to universal rejoicing. That happy outcome was possible, despite the Communists’ notorious intolerance of opposition, because modern surveillance technology had not yet been invented, or at least had not yet reached Bulgaria.

Like my late wife’s co-demonstrators in Sofia, almost all the J6 crowd were non-violent, some entering the Capitol because the normal National Guard presence had been withdrawn by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Of course, a few were violent or destructive, and there also seems to have been “police rioting” and agents provocateurs from both Antifa and the FBI. In the 1997 U.S., only the most violent of those demonstrators would have been arrested – for one thing there would have been no way to identify all the non-violent ones. That is in accord with the founding principles of the United States or any other free society, which permit peaceful demonstrations against the regime, a vital safety valve in a government system that inevitably makes some decisions the populace dislikes.

In the J6 case, a Stalinist-show-trial set of prosecutors, a hard left court system and a tainted District of Columbia jury pool, which voted 92.4% for President Biden in 2020, combined to deprive the J6 demonstrators of their liberties, perpetrating a gigantic civil liberties violation in doing so. President Trump was entirely right to pardon all the J6 demonstrators, even though maybe 20-30 of them probably committed violence or malicious damage, because the evidence pool is now too tainted for justice on those 20-30 to be easily resolved. However, only a massive collective damages lawsuit by the J6 group against the malfeasants who tyrannously imprisoned them will go some way to rectifying the injustice.

Debanking people is obviously less serious than throwing them in jail, but it is a major inconvenience and in many cases is more than that. The banks talk to each other, so if you are debanked by one institution you may find it very difficult to make alternative arrangements with another bank. This is especially the case if you are debanked for expressing opinions contrary to some current popular hysteria. As they showed in their response to DEI nonsense, the big banks are the worst moral cowards in the history of moral cowardice, because they are subject to endless deliberately incomprehensible regulations which, in the case of a popular hysteria, are administered by the wokest of tyrannical regulators.

President Trump’s denunciation of debanking to Brian Moynihan, chief executive of Bank of America, probably the most morally cowardly of the big banks, is a big step in the right direction. However, banking regulations prohibiting the practice of debanking would be useful – yes another bunch of bloody regulations, but the regulatory thicket is so dense that a few more won’t hurt. Once banking is deregulated properly and the big banks are broken up, as they should be, a simple prohibition against collusion should suffice to keep the problem in check, since banking will be competitive enough to spawn pro-dissident institutions. Ideally, technological barriers will be erected, so that banks don’t know their customers’ opinions, as in the old days they didn’t.

De-moneying, as is possible if a Central Bank Digital Currency is introduced, is altogether more serious. My esteemed co-author Kevin Dowd has written a book, soon to be forthcoming: “Against Central Bank Digital Currencies” which sets this out in detail. If a CBDC is in place, the monetary authorities can track every payment and can freeze holdings so that disfavored market participants can be made suddenly unable to use their money. Since CBDCs will exist only as cellphone messages, with no possibility of obtaining physical cash, their issuers will have complete control over how and by whom they are used.

Yes, of course this control is valuable in combating drug trafficking and money laundering, but we all know perfectly well from the experience of the last four years that governments absolutely cannot be trusted not to use CBDCs against innocent but politically disfavored citizens, like the J6 demonstrators or (to pick another example) Canadian truckers. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has said to Congress that he absolutely will not issue a CBDC while he is Chairman, but his term expires in May 2026 and the mice underneath him cannot be trusted to behave themselves during a Chairman transition or under a subsequent Chairman who has made no such promise.

The one saving grace is that wherever CBDCs have been tried – Finland, Ecuador and Jamaica, for example – they have had little take-up by the public despite huge promotion and have ended as a negligible percentage of the local money supply. Nevertheless, CBDCs are so attractive to World Economic Forum types, and civil liberties so unimportant to such people, that we cannot entirely rule out some kind of forced adoption, for example in the European Union, a well-known haven of regulatory adventurism. CBDCs must be fought, if only because they have no real purpose beyond oppression.

Technology cannot be un-invented; it is therefore essential that ordinary people be given tools to protect themselves against technology used in the service of totalitarian leftist governments (yes I agree that such technology is equally necessary in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the totalitarian Left is far more dangerous to us non-Russians). Such tools should take two forms: technological counters and legal protections, ideally embedded in the Constitution.

Technologically, the key need is to devise communication devices for ordinary people to use that are properly end-to-end encrypted and have no “back doors” that can be used by malign government institutions, domestic or otherwise. The Blob and its allies in the media will squawk that such “back doors” are necessary to stop terrorists, but in reality there are a far higher proportion of malign totalitarian members in the Blob than there are terrorists in the population as a whole. The open source software world has already made decentralized communication, on-device machine learning algorithms, and internet anonymization possible. It’s therefore legal and cultural factors rather than economic and technological ones that allow governments to use cellphones or facial recognition software to pick us out of a crowd and indulge in a 5am arrest. Proper technology, designed with anti-surveillance in mind can at least make it a lot more difficult for them.

Constitutionally, there is a need to put the right of free demonstration and the right of free speech ahead of any random government’s ideological preferences or security paranoia. Just as the Founding Fathers felt they needed the 1791 Bill of Rights to enshrine constitutionally freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom against self-incrimination and the right to bear arms, so now we need a new Bill of Rights to guard against all the additional capabilities which government has obtained from the digital revolution. We need this new Bill of Rights even more urgently because of the increasing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, which can and will be used to oppress the domestic populace further without a Constitutional prohibition.

This new Bill of Rights must include explicit protections against government overreach, such as prohibiting the coercion of companies to insert backdoors or weaken encryption in their software. It should also safeguard against the use of courts (secret and otherwise) to bypass due process and prevent the deployment of psychological and surveillance warfare tactics aimed at manipulating the domestic populace. I am neither a technologist nor a Constitutional lawyer, so I can only state the need for these protections without designing their precise extent and wording. However, legal protections there must be, so that governments cannot simply evade any technological barriers we erect and continue to oppress us.

The Founding Fathers set up a nice constitutional system in the United States, as did the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Liverpool and their brethren in Britain. Much of the Clarendon/Liverpool system in Britain has been lost, but the protections in the Founding Fathers’ Constitution have only recently begun to erode. We must bolster them, and erect technological and legal barriers against their further erosion.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)