The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Dispute, Territorial Jurisdiction and Global Governance

“As I was walkin ’ – I saw a sign there And that sign said ‘private property’ But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing! Now that side was made for you and me.” Woody Guthrie “The spatial scope of social and political organization is not set for all time. The territorial state is not a sacred unit beyond historical time. ” (Agnew 1994, p.105) The dispute arising from the European Union’s attempts to protect information privacy, an individual’s control over the processing of personally identifiable or name-linked data (Kang 1998), raises difficult questions about territorial jurisdiction and democratic governance, indeed about how political “space ” and a political community are defined in the digital age. It illustrates an emerging geographic incongruity between the reach and domain of the territorially defined Westphalian state-- as legal jurisdiction, political authority, and self-governing democratic community-- and the deep and dens