The serial revelations by Edward Snowden , the former National Security Agency contractor who stole and leaked classified government information , have ignited a variety of disputes in the United States and around the world . Is the collection of metadata , detailed records of phone calls and other communications , as benign or as malignant as it has been portrayed ? What are the proper limits in conducting electronic surveillance of geopolitical allies or of ordinary citizens ? How much government espionage activity must be publicly available to really give meaning to the concept of `` consent of the governed '' ? Is it appropriate to secretly compel private enterprise to assist in intelligence collection ? Tough questions all , but they give rise to another even more important one . Will the Internet as we know it survive the barrage of headlines and accusations ? As commonplace as the net has become , it 's hard for even older folks to remember the world before we all became wired . And younger generations do n't even try to picture that benighted universe . But the net is recent , the product of visionaries like Vinton Cerf and his colleagues at Stanford in the early 1970s ; they developed the Internet 's original protocols for the Department of Defense so department labs and a few universities could pass among themselves large volumes of data quickly and easily . The World Wide Web that would take off from that Defense Department start would be a multistakeholder enterprise : nongovernmental , collaborative and ( certainly at its origin ) largely American . The Americans ( i.e. , the various Internet governance structures , like ICANN , the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers , anchored in the United States and operating under a contract with the U.S. government ) proved good stewards , nurturing an enterprise that was ubiquitous , free , unitary , egalitarian and democratic . Information has never flowed as freely or in such volume as it does today , enabling global commerce and global expression on an unprecedented scale . And in that , the Web was consistent with the traditional American emphasis on free enterprise and free speech , values not universally shared in today 's world . As Americans fret about the theft of personal information and intellectual property and the threat of cyberattack ( dark forces leveraging the Web 's ubiquity and connectivity for dark purposes ) , others are attacking the very essence of the network . They are less concerned about theft and more concerned that their citizens can access information -- any information -- as well as make their voices heard globally . In December 2012 , Russia and China pushed very hard at a meeting in Dubai of the World Conference for International Telecommunications to wrest `` control '' of the Internet from its traditional governance structures ( increasingly international but still with a strong American flavor ) and hand it to this U.N.-sponsored body . Their apparent purpose was to make it easier for them to impose controls on their digital `` territory '' and on their citizens , to transfer to cyberdomain authorities control they had long exercised in physical space . Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his co-author Jared Cohen anticipated this in their thought provoking work , `` The New Digital Age , '' in which they warned of the Balkanization of the Web , with countries establishing `` sovereignty '' over their digital domains and demanding the digital equivalents of visas and passports before allowing entry to their national domains , and , in the case of their own citizens , exit . Indeed , they proved prescient as countries like Brazil and Indonesia are already establishing digital `` residency requirements , '' demanding that prospective cloud service providers retain data only on servers in their sovereign space , a requirement that flies in the face of the very nature and inherent advantages of a global Web . At the 2012 Dubai conference , the Russians and the Chinese got strong support from places like Iran and the Arab world , but garnered support from 89 countries , falling short of the two thirds required . And now enters Snowden . It actually does n't matter how accurate or inaccurate , precise or overdrawn , the headlines are as they allege that the United States and Britain are taking unconstrained advantage of the Web for espionage . ( I , for one , doubt that NSA and Britain 's Government Communications Headquarters , are actually that interested in the personal data of the 1.5 billion people who have downloaded Angry Birds , to cite but one recent accusation . ) But the Russians , the Chinese , the Iranians and others will use these headlines to buttress their case and to undercut Western arguments based on free expression and free access to information . The next meeting of the International Telecommunications Union , a U.N. agency , is in Busan this October and prospects are not good for holding the line on the multistakeholder model of Internet governance , as governments demand more direct control . The current phrase to describe that development is `` splinternet '' and if that occurs we will be faced with multiple ironies . The United States , the creator of the Web as we know it , will have hastened its end through its espionage sins , real or imagined . And Edward Snowden , who by all accounts is a near constant habitué of that idyllic universe , will have lit the fuse of its destruction .
Hayden : « He says some nations leveraging this to change Web 's governance , control citizens . He says this would let them subvert `` free expression '' on the Web , counter to its nature . Hayden : If `` splinternet '' happens , U.S. will have helped cause it with `` sins '' real , imagined .