Sparks: Apple issues new challenge against UK order for access to private user data

The ebbing of personal privacy is reported as a legal dispute, yet it is truly a map of the shifting isotherms of global sovereignty where the silicon valleys of the West collide with the ancient bedrock of the state.

What we now call data sovereignty is merely a hypothesis being tested for consilience across the domains of commerce and law, where a single victory in the courts would confirm a new taxonomy of digital citizenship entirely.

The iron house is now built of glass and silicon, and while the inhabitants argue over who holds the key, the air remains just as thin for those who simply wish to sleep without being counted.

Tell me, if a man locks his door to keep his secrets, does the city become more just by breaking the lock, or does it merely prove that it no longer knows what it means to be a city?

A king demands to see inside my tub while I am away, as if his crown gave him the eyes of a god, yet he cannot even see the shadow he casts over his own people.

There is a gate across the digital highway called privacy, and the reformers are quite anxious to tear it down without ever stopping to ask why the travelers felt the need to build it in the first place.

If we concede that a government may peer into every private corner of a man's mind, then we must also conclude that the man is no longer a citizen, but a tenant in his own soul.

Just as water seeks the smallest crack to exert its pressure, the power of the state flows toward every unsealed pocket of information, following a mechanical law of expansion that ignores the beauty of the vessel it breaks.

Things that are hateful: a stranger who insists on reading your letters before they are finished, a lock that opens for everyone but the owner, and a government that mistakes prying for protection.