"A comparison point is in the 1990s battles over encryption," said Kurt Opsahl, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog group.
France responded by rounding up thousands of migrants near the frontier—at one point even stopping a train from the Italian border town of Ventimiglia—and sending them back to Italy.
By 1700 the Virginia frontier had been pushed as far west as the fall line-the point upstream at which the rivers emptying into the Atlantic became unnavigable.