David McElroy

There’s serious disagreement over what Edward Snowden is. We can all agree on the basic facts of what he did, but we disagree about what to call him. He worked for the U.S. National Security Agency and contractors for the NSA. He saw things that he thought were wrong, so he turned over a lot of U.S. government secrets to a couple of newspapers, exposing details and making allegations about the government spying on its own people.

But is Snowden a hero or a villain? For many of us, he’s a hero. He’s exposed spying that we assumed was secretly going on. For those of us who believe this, he’s a hero for risking his life and his future to expose something that he believed was morally wrong.

The people who call Snowden a traitor fall into two camps. One is the group of politicians and bureaucrats who already knew what was going on and didn’t see anything wrong with snooping on the rest of us. Although I find that position legally and morally repugnant, it’s to be expected. It’s the other group of people who are more problematic. That’s the people who want Snowden arrested and put into prison because he broke the law.

I observed this conversation Saturday between a friend of mine and one of his friends. He started by posting a statement in support of Snowden, and the woman responded.

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If you send your children to private religious schools, you might be part of something that “encourages division,” according to Barack Obama.

Speaking to a couple thousand people in Northern Ireland earlier this week, Obama said that children going to schools in line with their parents’ faith — Catholic and Protestant, in this case — is a bad thing that “discourages cooperation.” Although the connections between certain things in his speech seem tortured and unclear to me, it sounds as though he’s comparing religious schools to segregation.

“Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity — symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others — these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it,” Obama said. “If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.  It discourages cooperation.”

So according to Obama, letting people make the choice about how to educate their children is tantamount to “segregated schools and housing” and “lack of jobs and opportunity”? Really? In which alternate reality does he find this to be true? Freedom of association is a good thing — and people have the freedom to make choices that you don’t approve of.

To me, the attitude embodied in this speech betrays a couple of things.

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In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” At the time, it was exciting and liberating for those of us who were paying attention. In retrospect, it was naive and premature.

Barlow has been an important figure in the development of the online world — both as a coder and as a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — but some people know him best as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. (You might also remember a story I wrote last year about his “love at first sight” relationship with a psychiatrist.)

Barlow’s declaration of independence for the online world is pretty libertarian in nature. (He’s frequently described as a “cyberlibertarian.”) It’s about the efforts of governments to control people and about how they’ve failed, so those in cyberspace were moving on to a world without elected governments. It’s about how those of us in the online world are building a new world beyond the control of governments.

The problem is that it’s turned out to be far easier for governments to control cyberspace than Barlow and Co. imagined 17 years ago. In fact, governments are encroaching more and more on what used to be a wide open frontier — and they’re imposing the rules and control of their world on cyberspace.

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