Everyone is being monitored, both the guilty, and the innocent. While we were watching Netflix, organizing ITunes playlists and downloading the latest apps, the NSA was hard at work building an elaborate infrastructure that allows it to intercept the vast majority of human communications. They have access to your emails, texts, phone calls, Facebook messages, and even your credit card transactions. They know your user IDs and passwords. They can decipher your location at all times through time stamps.

We’re all being tagged, like we’re on one giant Orwellian animal farm. Your purchases are documented too. Besides invading the privacy of everyone on a global scale and hindering freedom of speech, this metadata is valuable. Corporations pay to know your interests, what you’re buying and where.

Like other aspects of inherent rights, if tribes don't exercise sovereignty over digital domain, they will lose it. The federal government is treating this new digital landscape as though it is undiscovered country where they may once again plant their flag and seize all of it ala Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery.

Under the Marshall Trilogy, the Supreme Court held that tribes only have the right to use and occupy lands. Even though this logic is decidedly flawed, they ruled that if we no longer use or occupy our homelands, we lose it and essentially no longer exist as tribal nations. Since this is established foundational legal precedent, it only follows that the government and its entities could hold that tribes’ inability or unwillingness to exercise sovereignty over its metadata, including that of its membership, could mean that we are relinquishing that authority.