Americans now have responsibility for a bunch of new places they can’t find on a map.

It turns out that the National Security Agency considers Canada, Greenland, Mexico and parts of Central America as part of the U.S. “Homeland.”

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein — chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — displayed a diagram that revealed the NSA considers Mexico, Canada, Greenland and parts of Central American as part of the U.S. ‘Homeland.’

The diagram displayed by Feinstein visualized the 54 events around the world allegedly disrupted by the NSA’s bulk data collection program.

The Atlantic Wire first noticed that while the senator correctly identified the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa on the map, North America was referred to as a single entity – the ‘Homeland.’

Following the 9/11 attacks, the federal government adopted the term ‘Homeland’ to refer to the nation itself. It turns out that designation seems to have taken on a different meaning within the past 12 years, without the broader public’s awareness.

The Atlantic Wire proposed a possible answer: “Is this a way of blending in Canadian and Mexican terror activity disruptions (which, we’ll remind you, is different from actual plots interrupted) to give a larger sense of the NSA’s success at halting terrorism within our borders?”

Trade and security agreements among the North American nations, however, are not new.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into force in 1994, created special economic and trade conditions between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

A North American security perimeter pact, announced in 2011, was recently criticized in the Toronto Star for potentially endangering the sovereignty of Canada.

The NSA and the Department of Homeland Security did not return The Daily Caller’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/02/nsas-h.../#ixzz2arVuJZrw