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"\"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.\"\nThose are the words that open the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, a seminal paper by John Perry Barlow. In the paper, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the online rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation argued governments should never meddle with cyberspace, a separate place where the real-world rules had no reason to exist.  \nSEE ALSO: PRISM: Does the NSA Really Get Direct Access to Your Data?\n\nBarlow's declaration \u2014 the product of a time when Internet thinkers were perhaps a bit naive \u2014 might seem outdated now. Much has changed since then. Governments have indeed claimed sovereignty over the Internet, and nobody reasonably expects the Internet to be left alone anymore. \nHowever, the Utopian ideals that shaped that declaration influenced an entire generation of kids who grew up messing around with a Windows 95 computer and a noisy 56k connection. Those ideals still resonate today.\nAnd they're partly what pushed Edward Snowden to become a whistleblower by leaking a series of top-secret documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. His leaks have revealed a secret court order that allows the NSA to collect the metadata of Americans' phone calls for months at a time; a secret system codenamed PRISM that intercepts Internet communications; a presidential directive asking for a list of targets for cyberattacks; and \"Boundless Informant,\" a NSA tool to data-mine the world. \nOne of Snowden's reasons to leak those documents, according to his interview with The Guardian, was a belief that Internet privacy and freedom foster progress.\n\"I don't see myself as a hero,\" he said, \"because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.\"\nSnowden considers the Internet \"the most important invention in all of human history.\" He thinks the NSA and the U.S. government are curtailing Internet freedom in the name of national security and the fight against terrorism. His views have deep roots: As a teenager, he spent hours and hours on the Internet, \"speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own.\"\nWe can agree or disagree with Snowden's actions and argue for hours and days about whether he is a hero, the most important whistleblower in America's history or a villain. He did what he did at least partly because he wanted the Internet to remain free, and he thought the people of the Internet deserved to know more about the NSA surveillance programs.\nImage via The Guardian via Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/06/10/edward-snowden-internet-freedom/>