Politics & Power Quote by John Perry Barlow

Barlow’s line lands because it treats “government protection” not as a broken promise but as a category error. The metaphor is blunt, almost slapstick: you don’t hand the tools of concealment to the very person incentivized to look. In one move, it punctures the comforting civics-class story that the state is a neutral referee, and replaces it with a simpler logic of self-interest and power.

The intent is polemical, but the craft is in how it reframes privacy as an adversarial relationship. A “peeping tom” isn’t a tragic figure or a well-meaning bureaucrat with competing mandates; it’s a predator. That choice isn’t subtle: Barlow is telling you to stop imagining surveillance as an accidental overreach and start seeing it as a built-in appetite. The joke carries a threat.

The subtext is also distinctly late-20th-century cyberlibertarian: privacy isn’t something granted from above, it’s something defended through architecture, encryption, and norms that keep institutions at arm’s length. Coming from the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” it reads as an early warning flare from the dawn of the commercial internet, when utopian talk about digital freedom collided with law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and data-hungry regulators.

What makes the quote durable in 2026 is its portability. Swap “government” for any platform that monetizes attention and data, and the logic still bites. It’s less a slogan than a diagnostic: if the watcher controls the blinds, you don’t have privacy, you have theater.