- AUTHOR: ANDY GREENBERG.ANDY GREENBERG SECURITY
- DATE OF PUBLICATION: 02.08.16.02.08.16
- TIME OF
PUBLICATION: 9:58 AM.9:58 AM
WHEN DIGITAL DYSTOPIANS and critics of Internet libertarians need a
rhetorical dart board, they often pull out a document written by John Perry
Barlow, co-founder of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, a former
cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. On this day in 1996, Barlow sat down
in front of a clunky Apple laptop and typed out one very controversial email,
now known as the “Declaration of Independence of
Cyberspace,” a manifesto with a simple message: Governments don’t—and can’t—govern
the Internet.
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and
steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” read the document’s first
words. “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.”
In the modern era of global NSA surveillance, China’s Great Firewall,
and FBI agents trawling the dark Web, it’s easy to write off Barlow’s
declaration as early dotcom-era hubris. But on his document’s 20th anniversary,
Barlow himself wants to be clear: He stands by his words just as much today as
he did when he clicked “send” in 1996. “The main thing I was declaring was that
cyberspace is naturally immune to sovereignty and always would be,” Barlow, now
68, said in an interview over the weekend with WIRED. “I believed that was true
then, and I believe it’s true now.”
Barlow laid out that thesis with a kind of unblinking confidence in his
original message: “I declare the global social space we are building to be
naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us,” he told the
world’s governments. “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any
methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not
know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your
borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public
construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself
through our collective actions.
That heady language may have been a result in part of Barlow’s
circumstances when he sat down to write his declaration. It was six years since
he’d cofounded the Internet digital rights group EFF, and now Barlow found
himself at the 1996 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In the middle
of a party on the last night he realized had an impending deadline for a
contribution to a compendium called “24 Hours In Cyberspace.” Barlow had spent
the previous four days in Davos listening, as he describes it, to world leaders
pretend to understand an Internet they had hardly used themselves. And he was
incensed at President Bill Clinton’s decision the same day to sign the
Communications Decency Act into law, empowering the FCC to ban the transmission
of “obscene” material on the Internet just as it did on radio and network
television. So after a “fair amount of champagne” he left the dance floor and
banged out the statement on his laptop in one of the hotel’s side rooms.
Barlow believes the Internet is a separate, global place without the
physical boundaries that define states and give them their power.
Barlow was pleased enough with the results to email it to about 600
friends. Soon, he says, the declaration had been copied to tens of thousands of
websites, and Barlow was “getting megabytes of email from all over the
planet.” The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace became part of a
successful EFF campaign that helped overturn parts of the Communications
Decency Act on First Amendment grounds. And it became a rallying cry for a
certain kind of digital civil libertarianism that’s defied partisan
politics and carried through to the present.
Governments Play Catch-Up
But in recent years, Barlow admits his ideas have become less commonly
used as a call to arms than as a political punching bag. He points to
the speech of
French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011 at the G8
conference calling for the Internet to be “civilized,” which many
contrasted directly with Barlow’s words: “The universe that you
represent,” Sarkozy said, addressing tech firms, “is not a parallel
universe which is free of rules of law or ethics or of any of the fundamental
principles that must govern and do govern the social lives of our democratic
states.” In a speech in 2013, Google
general counsel David Drummond contrasted the reality of governments’
Internet filtering, censorship and surveillance with Barlow’s declaration.
“Like the Spice Girls, that idea was right for its time, but I think it needs
to be updated to fit the world we’re in now,” he told a Google Ideas
conference audience. “Governments have learned in what might be the steepest
learning curve in history that they can shape this global phenomenon called the
Internet and in ways that often go beyond what they can do in the physical
world, and they’re doing so at an alarming pace.”
Just ahead of today’s anniversary of the declaration, the
Internet-focused think tank the ITIF wrote in a
press releasethat Barlow’s document should be replaced with its own more
moderate “Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace” that counsels
cooperation with governments. “Barlow’s original declaration that the Internet
and activity on it cannot and should not be governed has proved false time and
again,” it reads. “Even he has backed away from his statements, as the
potential negative consequences of turning the Internet over to Anonymous,
4chan, ISIL, and other online miscreants have become clear.”
But Barlow says, to the contrary, that he hasn’t backed away from his
declaration at all. He maintains that its central thesis holds, whether the
ITIF likes it or not: That the Internet is a separate, global place without
the physical boundaries that define states and give them their power.
“Cyberspace is something that happens independently of the physical world in
exactly the same way as the mind and body,” Barlow says. “It depends on the
physical world and can’t exist without it, but to a fairly large extent, it’s
another thing, unprecedented in world history: An environment where people
across the planet could come together and have a sense of political
constituency.”
“It’s very simple,” he concludes. “They don’t have jurisdiction.”
Bending Toward Independence
The Internet’s dependence on physical infrastructure—and the fundamental
fact it’s made up of people who live inside governed states—Barlow concedes,
means that a government can of course intrude in cyberspace and even imprison
or torture any Internet enemy it tracks down in the real world. But the digital
terrain, he maintains, doesn’t favor that sort of control. He points to the
advent before his 1996 manifesto of free encryption, proxy services and
remailers that could hide users’ locations as they emailed. Today he refers to
more sophisticated tools like Tor and Signal designed to hide people and their
communications. (Never mind that both software projects receive at least part
of their funding from the U.S. government agency the Broadcasting Board of
Governors.)
“I’m able to speak absolutely freely with Ed Snowden any time I want to,
despite the fact that I’m pretty sure the folks at the NSA would…like to know
when I did or what we were saying,” says Barlow, who helped to found the
Freedom of the Press Foundation where Snowden serves on the board of directors.
“There’s a huge surge towards encrypting everything on an end-to-end basis.”
Barlow points to unlikely examples, including WikiLeaks and the online
black market Silk Road, as illustrations of the government’s inability to
control the Internet long term: Yes, Julian Assange may be confined to the
Ecuadorian embassy, but WikiLeaks lives on and has inspired dozens of media
organizations to adopt its methods through tools like the SecureDrop
anonymous upload system. Sure, Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht was caught by
the FBI and sentenced to life in prison, but new Silk-Road-style markets have
replaced it and continue to generate close
to $100 million a year in illicit online drug sales.
In essence, Barlow argues that the arc of the Internet’s history is
long, but bends towards independence. His strongest example, perhaps, is found
in the copyright wars: Yes, Napster and Megaupload can be sued into oblivion or
shut down. But the file-sharing protocol bittorrent has thrived in spite of Hollywood
and the recording industry’s best efforts. “I said this whole notion of
property [in cyberspace] is going to get hammered,” Barlow says. “It has been
hammered.”
Barlow admits that what he describes as the “immune system” of the
Internet isn’t exactly automatic. It requires effort on the part of activists
like himself. “It wasn’t a slam dunk and it isn’t now. I wouldn’t have started
the EFF and the Freedom of the Press Foundation” if it were, he says. But he
nonetheless believes that there is a kind of inexorable direction of the
Internet’s political influence toward individual liberty. “I do have a kind of
Marxist sense of the inevitability of this shift taking place, that there will
be a global commons that includes all of humanity. And that it will not be
particularly subservient to governments in any way.”
Read Barlow’s full Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace here, and watch him
deliver it himself in the video below:
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