"If the Sixth Amendment gave us a civic map for where and how to try a case, the AI age asks us to draw that map onto networks—so that public trials remain public, juries remain local, and power meets a rule before it meets a person, even when judgment arrives by wire."

— Aditya Mohan, Founder, CEO & Philosopher-Scientist, Robometrics® Machines

Scene — Newport, 1773: The Royal Commission in the Long Room

Salt wind slips through cracked panes as a royal seal swings above a table stacked with parchment. Wax sticks, red as coals, lie beside quills and a neat pile of warrants commanding that suspects be sent to England for examination on treason. A clerk reads each name into the hush while townspeople crowd the doorway—sailmakers and coopers, a magistrate in a worn coat, a widow whose son served as a pilot. Someone whispers about losing the local jury. Outside, the harbor clinks with spars; inside, the commissioners’ ribbons and sashes catch the light as they debate who will be transported beyond seas. No one speaks of venue or vicinage; the room smells of salt and tallow—and something else: distance.

What the Gaspee Commission Attempted

After colonists boarded and burned the grounded revenue schooner HMS Gaspee on June 9, 1772, King George III established a Royal Commission of Inquiry. Meeting in Newport in early 1773, it carried power to gather testimony and commit suspected rioters for transport to England on charges of high treason. The proposal cut straight through local courts and juries, and Rhode Island’s officials—backed by a wall of community silence—forced a stalemate. No one was sent across the Atlantic. Yet the threat was clear enough to be remembered three years later in the Declaration of Independence—“transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”—as a betrayal of lawful judgment by one’s equals.

Why It Matters in U.S. Law

The Gaspee episode sharpened American commitments that later hardened into text. The Sixth Amendment’s guarantees of a public trial, an impartial jury, and vicinage reflect resistance to distant, unreviewable proceedings. Venue and jurisdictional rules cabin the state to lawful forums; the rights to confront witnesses and compel evidence root the trial in a community able to test claims. The message from Newport is simple and enduring: no exile from procedure, no justice by export.

The AI Parallel — Trials Across Borders Without Leaving a Room

In 2025, the ocean is fiber‑optic. Evidence leaps jurisdictions at line speed, and decisions that shape liberty and property run through cloud regions far from the people they judge. A powerful actor may export data to a jurisdiction with weaker safeguards or invoke foreign secrecy laws to shield AI models, their training data, and associated records from domestic scrutiny—trial across the ocean without a ship. This is the modern risk the Gaspee Commission foreshadowed: cross‑border data seizures and model processing that evade local notice, jury, and due‑process safeguards. When AI systems inform bail, benefits, watchlists, or liability, domestic courts must be able to see the reasons, test the records, and apply the Constitution where consequences land.

Guardrails for an Algorithmic Vicinage

The legal design is familiar. First, anchor decisions to lawful forums—venue, vicinage, and subject‑matter limits should follow the person, not the data center. Second, require transparency fit for adversarial testing—model weights where feasible; documented data lineage; validation methods; error rates; and audit logs available to the court under protective orders when needed. Third, channel cross‑border demands through treaty pathways and equivalent safeguards, not private contracts or unilateral orders. Fourth, guarantee contestability—notice that an AI model was used, human‑readable reasons, access to records, and a real opportunity to challenge inputs and outputs before a neutral adjudicator. Fifth, treat model outputs as evidence to be weighed, never as automatic verdicts.

Contemporary Examples — When Data and Models “Sail” Overseas

• TikTok’s recommendation engine & China’s export‑control shield (2020–present): When the U.S. pressed for a forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations, Beijing revised its export‑control catalogue to cover “personalized information recommendation” technology. This meant ByteDance could legally refuse to transfer its core algorithm, training data, or model weights abroad without Chinese approval. The maneuver allowed TikTok to invoke Chinese secrecy law as a shield, preventing U.S. regulators from scrutinizing or appropriating the algorithm at the heart of the platform.

• Meta’s EU→U.S. data transfers and the €1.2B fine (2023): Following the European Court of Justice’s Schrems II decision, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission investigated Meta’s transfers of European user data to U.S. servers. Regulators found the transfers exposed Europeans’ data to weaker surveillance safeguards under U.S. law. In 2023, Meta was fined €1.2 billion and ordered to halt such transfers. The case illustrated how routing data to a jurisdiction with less stringent protections can bypass domestic privacy rights.

• Microsoft’s Ireland emails & the CLOUD Act (2013–2018): U.S. prosecutors sought access to emails stored in Dublin under a warrant issued pursuant to the Stored Communications Act. Microsoft resisted, arguing U.S. law could not compel disclosure of data stored overseas. The dispute climbed to the U.S. Supreme Court before Congress mooted it by passing the CLOUD Act in 2018, explicitly authorizing warrants for data held abroad. The episode showed how storing data offshore can frustrate domestic legal process until statutes adapt.

• Clearview AI and EU/UK jurisdiction (2022–2023): Regulators in France, Italy, and the Netherlands levied fines against Clearview AI for scraping facial images and processing biometrics without consent. In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office fined Clearview £7.5 million, but in 2023 a tribunal overturned the penalty, holding that the ICO lacked jurisdiction over a U.S. company serving only foreign law‑enforcement agencies. The case underscored how jurisdictional shields can block domestic oversight of datasets and AI models maintained abroad.

Data Sovereignty Versus Foreign Jurisdiction

The “trial across the ocean” of the Gaspee incident has been replaced by modern battles over data sovereignty—the principle that data should be subject to the laws and governance structures of the country where it originates.

• The modern HMS Gaspee: Today’s “customs ships” are massive, centralized data repositories and cloud infrastructure of global tech companies. Countries and regulators seek to exert control over this data to ensure compliance with local law, while companies prefer free cross‑border flows to optimize AI models.

• A fragmented regulatory landscape: The EU’s GDPR and AI Act, China’s PIPL, and a growing number of U.S. state laws create a patchwork of conflicting rules on data transfers. A company training an AI model on a global dataset must navigate these divergent standards, often limiting access to critical training data.

• The rise of sovereign AI: Governments wary of losing digital sovereignty are investing in “sovereign AI” strategies—national AI factories, sovereign cloud platforms, and local compute clusters to ensure data and models remain subject to domestic jurisdiction.

Exporting Data to Bypass Safeguards

The Gaspee Commission’s goal was to export defendants to bypass the local jury. In the AI era, similar dynamics arise when companies export data across borders to evade domestic safeguards.

• Evading privacy rights: Sensitive personal data may be shifted to jurisdictions with weaker privacy protections to train AI models in ways that would be unlawful at home.

• Circumventing algorithmic transparency: Transparency rules in some jurisdictions require companies to explain high‑risk AI decision‑making, but moving training to less‑regulated venues lets firms avoid scrutiny.

• Sidestepping bias and fairness laws: AI models inherit biases from training data; relocating operations to weaker regulatory environments can sidestep emerging fairness obligations, perpetuating discrimination.

The AI Era’s Version of Colonial Resistance

Just as colonists resisted the Gaspee Commission, modern actors are building safeguards against extraterritorial control.

• Localized AI models: Compact and efficient local models allow data to remain on‑device or within borders, minimizing cross‑border transfers.

• Privacy‑enhancing technologies: Federated learning and differential privacy enable global model development without moving raw data beyond jurisdictional lines.

• Legal activism and litigation: Companies, advocates, and governments contest cross‑border data demands through courts and regulatory challenges, echoing the colonial fight for procedural protections.

From Long Room to Server Room

The Gaspee Commission failed to ship a single defendant, but it succeeded in teaching a rule that still binds: justice loses legitimacy when it is exported to avoid local rights. The modern equivalent is exporting data and models to avoid constitutional process. If the Sixth Amendment gave us a civic map for where and how to try a case, the AI age asks us to draw that map onto networks—so that public trials remain public, juries remain local, and power meets a rule before it meets a person, even when judgment arrives by wire.