On March 20, President Trump signed an Executive Order “Eliminating Information Silos.” This means he instructed United States agency heads to effectively weave hundreds of agency databases, which include information from everything from tax filings to hospital claims, into a single, searchable vault of personal data.
The U.S. administration’s agenda could merge an internal inventory tallied by sources at more than three hundred distinct data fields, ranging from disability status to gambling winnings to passport number.
Technically, this could create more effective fraud detection with the potential to facilitate productivity; politically, this is dynamite. Although such an initiative could achieve major efficiencies, it also creates a telescope that can peer into every corner of American private lives.
The Inflection Point
For years, Americans have had to ‘pick-your-poison’: either surrender privacy so agencies can eliminate bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency or insist on privacy and accept slower, possibly wasteful public services.
What that framing misses is the quiet maturation of a class of cryptography called zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). While most of Washington still printed CSVs, brilliant engineers taught computers to answer yes-or-no policy questions like “Is this income below the SNAP threshold?” without revealing the underlying tax return.
In other words, we no longer have to pick between x or y; a third path is growing in the background and can provide us with efficiency and, most importantly, confidentiality.
ZKPs are a type of technology that allows one party (the prover) to convince another party (the verifier) that some given statement is true, without giving the verifier any private information. For example, an individual can go into a liquor store and prove they are 21 years of age, without having to present their driver’s license. Someone can prove that they have enough money to pay for something, without revealing how much money they actually have. ZKPs work by using math puzzles linked to locked information – meaning there is some repository of info that is used to verify the puzzle.
A ZK-enabled workflow is conceptually straightforward. Personal data — whether it sits in an agency silo, on a hospital server, or in an American’s digital wallet — never leaves home.
A prover combines the raw data with a policy formula, such as “Is adjusted gross income below thirty thousand dollars?” and emits a compact proof, typically only a few kilobytes.
When an agency verifier checks the proof and finds it valid, the benefit, license, or compliance check is cleared automatically. The government receives the answer it needs, not the data itself. And most importantly…the dreaded honeypot database never needs to exist.
It is 2025, and this tech is finally ready to hit the masses. A decade ago, producing a general-purpose proof (the basis of ZKPs) felt like scribbling quantum mechanics on a cocktail napkin. Today, more sophisticated and specialized hardware, public toolkits that let developers create ZKPs (open-source proving stacks), and developer-friendly languages such as Cairo have pushed costs down by orders of magnitude and placed “press-a-button, get-a-proof” reality squarely within reach. Some of these proofs, such as STARK proofs, are even post-quantum secure, which means they are resistant to the futuristic, ultra-powerful quantum computers that are currently being developed by a multitude of nation-states.
Regulatory pressure is mounting simultaneously. From the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) to the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) incoming 2026 gateway regime, watchdogs are starting to demand transparency and data protection in the same sentence.
Emailing raw spreadsheets so an auditor can rummage through them will soon feel as archaic as sending a fax in a PDF.
Public-trust debt is also coming due. Witness JPMorgan and BNY Mellon, which last week cut electronic data feeds to their own regulator after the OCC’s email system was hacked, exposing “highly sensitive” bank information. Voters see stories like that and reasonably conclude that centralized troves are data breach magnets–and they are.
If agencies want modernization without a political fuse, privacy-preserving verification tools like ZKPs are the safest path forward, and the United States should have an obligation to consider these high-tech solutions to protect American data.
Turning Theory to Practice
If the words ‘zero-knowledge proof’ still sound like science fiction, remember that the private sector is already running them in production. Benefit administrators can verify that a claimant’s income sits below a statutory cap while the underlying tax return never leaves the vault.
Procurement teams can show a contracting officer that no owner appears on a sanctions list, with no forty-column cap-table spreadsheet required. Even climate-subsidy programs can confirm a solar installer met domestic-content rules via supplier attestations instead of circulating a workbook thick enough to stop a door.
These aren’t hypotheticals; they’re extensions of the same regulated-privacy rails that banks, exchanges, and stablecoin issuers now rely on every day. The government can copy best practices instead of inventing them.
The Next Step is Already Here
As an American, as a mother, and as a General Counsel, I am frightened at the prospect of a honeypot of personal data that would inevitably be a massive target of wrongdoers. Moreso, our founders intended to protect privacy as a fundamental expression of our values. There are many modern examples where our system has lost that thread in the pursuit of efficiency, and in 2025, we should not have to choose between the two
Yes, we can build a panopticon no one trusts. Or, we could build smarter by using ZKPs to give the government exactly the data it needs — and not a byte more.
Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos is General Counsel of StarkWare, an international software development company building blockchain scaling infrastructure. Kirkpatrick Bos is a Board Member of the Illinois Blockchain Association and is based in Chicago.
