John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow was an American poet, essayist, and activist, and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. In 1990, after being questioned by the FBI during the investigations that followed Operation Sundevil, he wrote Crime and Puzzlement, describing how poorly law enforcement understood computer networks.

The EFF

That year he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore to defend civil liberties online, beginning with support for hackers and companies swept up in the Sundevil raids. Barlow is credited with popularizing the term "cyberspace" for the Internet.

The Declaration

On 8 February 1996, responding to the U.S. Telecommunications Act, Barlow published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace from Davos, declaring that governments had no sovereignty over the networked world. He was a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center and co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2012. He died in February 2018.

Timeline

• 1947-10-03Born in Jackson, Wyoming.
• 1990-06Publishes 'Crime and Puzzlement' after FBI questioning related to the Operation Sundevil era.
• 1990-07Co-founds the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• 1996-02-08Publishes 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace'.
• 2012Co-founds the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
• 2018-02-07Dies in San Francisco.