Jurisdiction and Ingress

Orientation

Digital systems today lack a stable answer to a basic question: where authority is bound. Jurisdiction is inferred from server location, corporate domicile, network routing, or national border, depending on convenience and leverage. The result is ambiguity by design. Authority shifts when infrastructure moves, companies reorganize, or data crosses borders.

This paper establishes a different rule. Jurisdiction is not inferred downstream. It is fixed at the moment Personal Digital Information (PDI) is created and follows the person thereafter. All later operations depend on that binding. Nothing in the system functions correctly unless this condition holds.

This binding is a direct consequence of the Estrada Doctrine, under which authority must be fixed before any legitimate flow can occur.

Digital systems did not originally come online in the correct order. They began with execution, then layered security, then law, and then accountability, assuming that legitimacy could be assessed after action occurred. That sequence held only while digital harm was slow, local, and reversible. Once digital action became instantaneous, automated, and global, the order failed. In systems where action itself can cause irreversible effects, legitimacy cannot be downstream. It must precede execution.

Definitions used in this paper

Person
A living human individual. In this framework, the person is the source of PDI and the anchor point for jurisdiction. No institution, device, or account substitutes for the person.

PDI Creation Event
The moment at which PDI first comes into existence. This may occur through interaction, observation, recording, inference, or generation. The creation event is discrete, even if subsequent use is continuous.

Sovereign Ingress
The first lawful registration of a PDI creation event into the system. Ingress records the existence of the event, binds jurisdiction, and establishes the conditions under which the information may be processed. Ingress is not a permission grant; it is a binding act.

Jurisdiction (Person-Bound)
The legal and operational authority under which Personal Digital Information is governed. In this system, jurisdiction attaches to the person at ingress and does not migrate with infrastructure, storage, or processing location.

Structural explanation

Jurisdiction in this framework is not negotiated, selected, or optimized. It is assigned as a consequence of creation. When PDI comes into existence, it must enter the system through sovereign ingress. At that moment, jurisdiction binds to the person associated with the creation event.

This binding is singular. There is no secondary opportunity to reassign jurisdiction based on where data is stored, which network carries it, or which entity processes it.

Infrastructure participates in ingress but does not control it. Servers, networks, corporate entities, and national borders may be involved in the technical handling of information, but they are explicitly excluded as sources of jurisdictional authority.

Once assigned, jurisdiction persists. It does not drift as information moves, is copied, or is transformed. Subsequent use either occurs under the bound jurisdiction or fails to meet legitimacy requirements.

Jurisdiction Binding at Ingress