John Perry Barlow (1947–2018) was a Wyoming cattle rancher, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the electronic-frontier-foundation, and author of the 1996 "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" — one of the most widely read and debated texts in the history of digital rights. He was not a cryptographer or security researcher, but his rhetorical framing of internet freedom shaped the political and cultural context in which Schneier's security and privacy arguments developed.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Written at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1996 during the passage of the Communications Decency Act, Barlow's Declaration announced that cyberspace was a sovereign realm beyond the jurisdiction of nation-states: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind... You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."
The Declaration expressed the utopian strain of 1990s internet ideology: the network's decentralized architecture was inherently liberatory, routing around censorship and state control. It was the cultural-philosophical counterpart to the cypherpunk technical program — tim-may, eric-hughes, and john-gilmore were building the cryptographic tools; Barlow was writing the manifesto that explained why those tools mattered.
The Declaration has aged badly in some respects: the platforms and surveillance infrastructure documented in data-and-goliath demonstrate that the internet did not route around power so much as create new centers of it. But its lasting significance is in articulating the stakes: why internet freedom was worth fighting for, and what a free information environment might enable.
EFF and Digital Rights Advocacy
Barlow co-founded the electronic-frontier-foundation in 1990 with Mitch Kapor and john-gilmore after the Secret Service's raid on Steve Jackson Games demonstrated how unprepared law enforcement was to handle computer technology and how vulnerable digital speech and property were to overzealous prosecution. The EFF's founding mission — to bring civil liberties principles to cyberspace — created the institutional infrastructure that would fight the crypto-wars-export-controls, challenge the clipper-chip-announcement, and support daniel-bernstein's legal challenge to export controls.
Barlow's contribution was more rhetorical than legal or technical. He was exceptionally good at explaining why digital rights mattered to audiences who were not programmers or lawyers, and his lyricist's facility with language gave the movement's arguments a cultural resonance that technical documents could not provide. He was a connector and advocate, not an analyst.
Relationship to Schneier
Barlow and Schneier occupy different positions in the digital rights world: Barlow provided the utopian framing and the cultural legitimacy; Schneier provided the adversarial analysis and the technical credibility. Their approaches are complementary but in tension. Barlow believed that technical architecture — decentralization, end-to-end design, open protocols — would protect freedom. Schneier has consistently argued that security and privacy require active design, ongoing vigilance, and institutional structures, not just correct technical architecture.
The security-theater concept Schneier developed implicitly critiques Barlowian optimism: security measures that feel reassuring without providing real protection are exactly the failure mode that follows from assuming technical correctness is sufficient. More directly, secrets-and-lies argues that cryptography — the tool the cypherpunks including Barlow's allies were most invested in — does not automatically produce security, because security is a system property that includes human and institutional dimensions that technical tools cannot address.
After the snowden-revelations confirmed that mass surveillance had developed exactly as critics feared, Barlow's Declaration looked less like a blueprint and more like a description of what had been lost. Schneier's post-Snowden writing engages this history directly: the surveillance state that data-and-goliath documents is the answer to the question of what happened to Barlow's free cyberspace. Barlow died in 2018 having lived to see the internet become something quite different from what his Declaration envisioned.