NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide

[dan@geer.org (dan@geer.org)]

 > The next step is where the federal government declares all state's grounds
 > to be in full ownership of a private company, so that all land is now
 > effectively foreign and no citizen's rights apply to citizens anymore. An
 > American abroad is not an American. That's an official view.


Eleven years before he became the fourth President of the United
States, James Madison said that:

   Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home
   is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended,
   from abroad.

One wonders how Madison would feel about an interconnected world
where "abroad" has so thoroughly lost its meaning, at least with
respect to Internet-dependent critical infrastructure if not national
frontiers.  My guess is that Madison would decide that the Internet
is, per se, "abroad."


--dan