Down in the Valley,
in the shadow of the old industries who serve big business and the military,
there were men and women who invented technologies
for the use of people and communities.
Many of them were idealistic,
and they thought that everyone could understand and use
the tools of technology
for the common good.

I dreamed that the Military Industrial Complex
harbored criminals who began to use the covert terrorism --
that they were already using against the citizens of this country --
against the new inventors who challenged their entrenched corporate power.

Then the good men and women,
who made the hardware, wrote the software, envisioned the networks,
gathered together to fight the dark forces.

"We were not born to be soldiers," they said.
"but on this cyber-battlefield,
we know the territory.
We are designers of systems, writers of code, makers of hardware.
We fight for freedom,
with our hands on the systems which we made.

We define sanctuary
not as a place of escape
but as a return to freedom for our homelands."

We ask for sanctuary