Former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, known as "The Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace"

John Perry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder along with Mitchell Kapor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since May of 1998, he has been a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, following a term as a Fellow with the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

He is a recognized commentator on information economics, digitized intellectual goods, cyber liberties, virtual community, electronic cash, cryptography policy, privacy, and the social, cultural, and legal conditions forming in Cyberspace (a term he first applied to the already-existing global electronic social space now generally refered to by that name). Barlow has been called "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services” by FutureBanker Magazine, “The Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace” by Yahoo Internet Life, and a “Cyberspace Cadet” by the Wall Street Journal.

Barlow is currently working on keeping the Net free, private, and open, and working on what he calls The Ignorant Network, defining a set of secure peer to peer standards that will provide perfect authentication in a network that willfully forgets having set up the transaction.

In addition to his song collaborations with The String Cheese Incident, John Perry Barlow speaks to groups ranging from the Club of Madrid's Terrorism Conference, to the World Social Forum, to various corporate and college audiences around the globe. He continues to write for a diversity of publications, including The New York Times, Time, Forbes ASAP and, from its inception, Wired.

Areas of expertise: Information Technology, E-Commerce, Innovation, Creativity