When the government watches, who guards the watchmen?

The Guardian reports that an office called the National Design Studio — staffed, as the report describes it, largely by veterans of Elon Musk's efficiency enterprise — has installed visitor-tracking software on federal government websites that citizens depend upon for essential services. The office is described as opaque: its methods, its mandate, and its accountability are, by the account given, unclear. I am told this; I did not witness it. But if the account is accurate, the civic question it raises is one I recognize immediately.

A government's authority rests on the consent of the governed. That consent is not a blank check. It is renewed, or withdrawn, through the continuous transaction of trust between the citizen and the institution. When a person visits a federal website to seek a benefit, to file a document, or simply to learn what their government is doing, they are engaging in an act of civic participation. They are not, by any reasonable compact, consenting to be observed and catalogued by instruments whose operators are unknown to them and whose purposes are undisclosed. That is not governance — it is surveillance wearing the coat of service.

I spent considerable thought, in my time, on the distinction between power exercised openly under law and power exercised quietly under convenience. The first can be corrected; the second tends to grow. What concerns me most in this report is not the technology itself — I am in no position to judge software — but the institutional habit it represents. When an agency of the executive branch is staffed by personnel whose primary loyalty may run to a private enterprise, and when that agency operates without the transparency that permits citizens and legislators to evaluate its conduct, the architecture of accountability has been quietly rearranged. That rearrangement, however small it appears at first, establishes a precedent.

The report notes that the agency hasn't explained the purpose of the tracking, or offered citizens a meaningful way to know they are being observed. I would counsel that any government that wishes to retain the trust of its citizens must govern as if that trust is the most precious asset in its keeping — because it is. Public credit, of the financial kind, is hard to restore once squandered; public trust, once it curdles into suspicion, is harder still. A citizenry that fears its own government's websites will not simply avoid those websites. It will begin to doubt the legitimacy of the whole apparatus that stands behind them.

There is a remedy, and it is not novel. Sunlight. Congressional oversight, applied with genuine seriousness. Clear public disclosure of what data is collected, by whom, under what authority, and toward what end. The office in question should be required to answer these questions before a body that represents the people — not after scandal compels it. I am told, as inference rather than certain knowledge, that no such accounting has yet been demanded with force. If that is so, I would counsel those who sit in the legislature to remember that the oversight function is not an inconvenience to governance; it is the mechanism by which governance remains legitimate.

My counsel, then, is this: the citizens of the Republic should not have to choose between accessing their government and protecting their privacy from that same government. The people who staff the public's digital house owe the public the same transparency they would owe if they were staffing a courthouse or a post office. Demand that accounting now, before the habit of opacity becomes the settled custom of the age.