When the delicate balance of our democratic values shifts, the greatest hidden threat to our personal freedoms emerges not from overt oppression, but from data. It’s the invisible force biting, chewing up, and undermining the very foundations of our democratic processes and institutions, often without most Americans even realizing it’s happening. 

At its core, any enterprise — be it a bustling law office fueled by revenue from client relationships, or a critical government agency — runs on communication. And communication’s most basic component is information. Break that down, and you’re dealing in data: bits and bytes, 1s and 0s. These silent, digital currents are subtly reshaping our world, and not always for the better. 

The Anchor of Liberty: A Justice System Adrift in Data 

John Adams famously declared, “representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty. Without them, we have no fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hogs.” Indeed, the right to a jury trial, enshrined in our Constitution, is a cornerstone of American freedom. The United States accounts for 80% of all jury trials globally, a testament to its design and the power of the American jury that Thomas Jefferson considered “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” 

Yet, how well are the interconnected institutional and departmental functions that drive our justice process holding that anchor in a society where data expansion accelerates exponentially? How well is the system, designed to serve “We the People,” truly upholding the principles of its constitution in a digital age? 

Consider the stark reality: less than 2% of federal defendants, and less than 4% of state defendants (a statistic mirrored in Pennsylvania), ever see a jury trial. Despite billboards proclaiming “a charge is not a conviction,” the overwhelming probability is a guilty plea. While plea deals can expedite justice, is it truly balanced when nearly 100% of cases avoid trial in the world’s leading democracy? 

The Overwhelming Attack of Data Expansion 

What drives these disproportionate conviction rates? It’s tempting to credit law enforcement and prosecutors, but a deeper look suggests our entire democratic system is under an increasing, overwhelming attack by data – specifically, data expansion. 

This isn’t about malicious intent; it’s about an inability to gather, digest, and present data in a relevant context. This inability has driven up the cost of trials and diminished the desire on both sides of the aisle to leverage our distinctly American design. Much of what separates our system from more totalitarian forms of justice has quietly disappeared, along with the trial itself. 

The Manufactured Approach to Freedom: When Efficiency Corrupts Values 

Justice is a process, a series of value-added steps towards a predetermined goal. Like a cabinet maker transforming raw material into a finished product, the justice system involves police procuring evidence, prosecutors adding value through charges, jails holding human inventory, and courts distributing that inventory for defense before a judge and jury. 

However, applying a profit-driven, efficiency-focused manufacturing mindset to a value-based system like justice inevitably leads to the corruption of those values. The key links in the chain of justice — police, district attorneys, jails, and courts — are cracking, snapping, and breaking. Our Criminal Justice system is “out on its feet,” like a boxer trying to beat the bell. 

A system once powered by constitutional principles now runs on servers with limited data architectures, designed for storage, not for mobilizing information for decision-making. Despite claims from many high-tech companies, the reality for anyone in an office job is clear: vertically oriented applications are ill-equipped to mobilize data horizontally. The more applications businesses and government institutions adopt for localized efficiency, the more they compound their overall ineffectiveness. If the whole entity is ineffective, local efficiencies become meaningless. 

The Erosion of Context: When Systems Fall Apart 

Our institutions underpin our quality of life and our entire way of living. As our lives grow increasingly complex with technology, and as our American values of life, liberty, and justice for all appear to deteriorate, we must identify why so many cherished systems are collapsing. Systems are meant to contain complexity, yet everyday life feels overwhelmingly complex – a clear indicator that our systems are not keeping pace. Technology is outpacing the rule of law, and we are being swallowed by the corruption born from data expansion. 

A system relies on related processes, which grow from related applications, which add context to related data. If applications cannot relate to each other, neither can the data they store. The true process collapses, the system breaks down, and context is entirely lost. Without useful information born from contextualized data, we are left to replace true context with whatever we choose: information, misinformation, or disinformation. 

America’s institutional and commercial systems have adopted, and now depend on, an ever-growing list of applications that fail to communicate. This rapid adoption is crippling a system once designed to protect and preserve freedom and deliver justice, quietly devaluing it into an informal stock exchange driven by the transactional math of guilty pleas. 

41,000 Hours of Video: The Illusion of Access 

Consider the recent public debate surrounding 41,000 hours of surveillance footage related to the January 6th events. While portrayed as “accessible” to the defense, how accessible is 41,000 hours of video to a lawyer charging $15,000-$30,000 for a defense? At that rate, reviewing the footage alone would take nearly two decades. Similarly, a public defender with a crushing caseload of 110 open cases, working 2,080 hours a year, would spend 220 hours just to visit each client once, leaving no time for motions, briefs, or reviewing 400 hours of discovery calls. 

The point is clear: a lawyer, no matter how skilled, is a finite resource. When the prosecution “hands over the entire cell phone” or 41,000 hours of video with a “here you go! good luck!” attitude, “access” does not equate to “equal accessibility.” If a small defense staff cannot effectively – let alone efficiently – process all the data they have access to, then that data cannot receive due consideration in the pursuit of truth. A jury cannot consider what they do not see. And they will never see what a lawyer cannot find because the legal process is digitizing in a chaotic way that has taken on a life of its own. 

A criminal defense lawyer’s office, often small with modest fees, faces climbing overhead from a chaotic mix of administrative applications: Google Ads, virtual call assistants, misfit case management systems, SharePoint, Microsoft 365, mobile apps, online banking, and electronic payment systems. This doesn’t even account for the hoops required to follow county dockets, each operating differently, or the overly complex federal billing systems. It’s more than any one human or small staff can manage, leaving them little time to apply their trade. Even the best defense lawyers are under tremendous mental, emotional, and physical strain. Time evaporates, surprises increase, and marbles scatter daily, all while rulings that change lives are made every minute across America. 

The justice system has been imbalanced for years, with resources unevenly distributed in favor of the prosecution. Yet, our democracy depends on a robust defense. The current trajectory has long been towards a transactionally oriented criminal justice system—a “DEAL” made in a daily line at the Magisterial level. This has worsened, and now it’s getting serious: even the prosecution, for all its resources, is losing its ability to organize them. 

Increasingly, data-related misses by prosecutors are surfacing in highly visible cases, as highlighted by a recent Wall Street Journal headline: “Justice Department Prosecutors Swamped With Data as Cases Leave Long Digital Trails.” U.S. Attorney offices are now managing cases with over a million pages of evidence. If technology adoption and the ensuing data expansion are not addressed with better designs, only more corruption can ensue. The flood of electronic evidence will continue to slow court proceedings and inflate the overhead of pursuing justice, eventually reducing the number of cases charged, and even the conviction rate for the prosecution. But it will not be due to a more balanced system of American justice. It will be because the unchecked cancer of data expansion has fully metastasized. 

Our institution of criminal justice is in full collapse mode as its underlying processes are being broken by rapid application and technology adoption that accumulates data instead of mobilizing information. Left unchecked much longer, the only possible future holds no anchor for the value of truth and justice. For the truth will then be solely in the hands of those in power, and those in power will be those who are best in control of the data. 

Welcome to your data democracy.