On Independence Day, we celebrate our freedoms and those who fought for them. We celebrate the legacies of battles to define freedoms and the system that sustained a dialogue within which those particularly American definitions could form. On the Fourth of July, we pay homage to the United States of America, our history and most of all what it represents — to Americans and, less often, to the larger world. America, we say together in the glare of carefully engineered fire, the land of the free.

While enjoying the fireworks, the corn and the hamburgers, we would do well to remember that freedom is negotiated. Its definition is always in flux. Changes can happen in fits and starts or they can happen imperceptibly. But inevitably, change will come.

Over the past two weeks, a series of hacker attacks were aimed at the Arizonan iteration of freedom. When the hacker group LulzSec released hundreds of Arizona Department of Public Security internal documents, the members portrayed their motivation as the larger social good. They were protesting SB1070, a policy they view as racist and unjust.

LulzSec’s presumed successor Anti-sec released a manifesto — as part of a hack, of course — that claimed dedication to “the eradication of full-disclosure.” The leaks, the hackers say, are intended to point out carelessness in online security, an implied lazy self-satisfaction.

The next frontier in the definition of freedom is the Internet, the modern town square rendered global. The leaks highlighted the vulnerability of our personal information, much of which is stored online, but the lesson we should take from these attacks is much larger. How do we define freedom on the Internet? Who owns it and why? How do we reach agreement when the whole world and a lot of money is involved? They are big questions with very personal consequences.

Security and freedom sometimes seem to be friends and other times enemies. The hackers argue they are doing the world a service in providing incentives for improved security. Institutions must join the arms race or leave members susceptible to personal harassment — cell phone and Social Security numbers exposed. DPS officials were understandably annoyed to have their personal effects scattered on the information superhighway. But to what effect?

The bottom line in the Arizona hacks was that little information of operational consequence was released. DPS looked vulnerable, but if LulzSec was truly protesting the state’s handling of border issues, DPS — highway patrol — was the wrong choice. Encouraging agencies already inclined toward secrecy to clamp down on information seems a strategy of self-sabotage and counter to the venerated spirit of the First Amendment.

Freedom, as we’ve defined it, depends on information. You are unlikely to have chosen to buy local grass-fed beef for your celebratory burger without a label to tell you it was so, nor the security of knowing the FDA vouched the beef won’t poison you. It’s worth remembering that in our choices — from eating local beef to clicking the Facebook “Like” button — we define freedom.

Carli Brosseau

I learned that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her staff and constituents had been shot while I was washing the dishes Saturday morning. I heard my friend Peter Michaels on the radio, and his voice was shaky. He sounded rattled. I believed the news because I believe Peter Michaels. I mention this not because my personal story is important, but because it is universal. We relate to friends in more concrete terms than we relate to strangers. We believe them because we know them, and in knowing them, we know ourselves. We become through reflection and refraction. We are prisms of our basic and daily interactions with the world.

My first reaction when I heard the news was to log on. I checked to see who was reporting what; I told my friends, via Facebook. I reached out to those links for confirmation that my reality was theirs. They also confirmed that I had a task. My role was as social media editor for a Web site that bills itself as the Voice of Tucson, the voice of a city to which now all eyes were turned, a city whose name will long be associated with one of our democracy’s darkest moments. My goal was to make that voice relevant and real and useful with whatever tools I had. I posted updates for more than 12 hours and woke at 3 o’clock the next morning, unable to turn off the stream of questions: What does it mean to be a part of a community where this can happen? What can I do in this situation that matters?

The posts that I and others made about the minutia of the investigation and politicians postulating were useful in the quest for information and I, as a journalist, am not one to downplay information. But in this time, I can’t help think that it’s almost beside the point, perhaps because the attacks did hit so close. In five days of reporting, I have yet to talk to anyone who didn’t at least have a friend who knew one of the shooting victims or a story about how the victims indirectly touched his or her life. Each conversation seems so fragile, each participant so vulnerable, and I remember that it is a conversation, that that’s how we relate to each other, and that those links hold us together. Those links keep us from falling apart.

It is perhaps because I had been musing on the subject of links, networks of “friends” and “fans” and “followers,” that President Obama’s speech hit me so hard. We ought to remember that we live for each other. We owe each other. We depend on each other not only for political or economic or even cultural reasons. We depend on each other to know ourselves. It was when President Obama turned to Daniel Hernandez, the intern whose quick response may have saved the congresswoman’s life, that my nose began to run. Heroes, I think, are the ones for whom the links are closer to the surface. Hernandez surely qualifies. But if we all paid more attention, we might each qualify too.

My belief in journalism, whatever the immediate state of the industry, hinges on the link idea. It is, I think, an ability to appeal to commonality and a baseline decency that makes a good reporter. You  have to be someone to whom people want to tell stories, and stories are the link. When Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” it was in all seriousness. Much has been made of social media: that it is a fantastical money-making machine, that it can dismantle disagreeable regimes, that it cements the power of despots, that it increases our alienation from each other and ourselves. We don’t really know yet, but we know the secret’s in the links. May they be real and true.

As of now, the Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Prayers Page on Facebook is liked by almost 28,000 people. That’s 28,000 people, I’m told by the administrator, from all over the world and all political persuasions. The administrator knows this because he monitors the stats, but also because he, himself, is not a Democrat. Jason Asselin identifies as Republican and associates himself with the Tea Party. He volunteered for the campaign of Tea Party-backed Rep. Dan Benishek, who was elected to the seat earlier held by Bart Stupak. Asselin lives in Iron Mountain, Michigan, but when he heard the news that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot, he immediately thought: “That could have been him (referring to Benishek). That could have been anyone.” He immediately started to Facebook memorial page because at the time, within half an hour of the shots ringing out, it was being reported that Giffords had been killed. “When I heard she had not been killed, I quickly changed it to a prayers page,” he said.

Asselin is passionate that political bickering ought to be thrown out at times like these. “Our positions political don’t matter right now,” he said. “We need to come together as America.” He said that the motto emerging out of the 9/11 tragedy stuck with him. “United we stand, divided we fall: I try to live by that every day.” Despite Asselin’s willingness to put aside political ideology in the name of empathy, the Facebook page has been evidence that not all share his perspective. He said his ability to post updates to the page has been taken away, leaving him only able to delete comments and comment on them, and he believes the change is the result of objections from people who think he is trying to use the page to further his political views. “It’s really upsetting,” he said, describing how he has painstakingly read and moderated each comment on the page and deleted those that violate his sense of decency. “I banned like 50 people today,” he said.

Though Asselin has posted text on the site that says he can’t update it and he’s reached out to reporters, at least this one, via email, he said he hasn’t turned to Facebook for help. “I’ve been told that to Facebook you don’t exist and you can’t get a hold of them,” he said. “I’m willing to hand the site over to family if that means they can update it.”

Asselin is also a prolific creator of YouTube videos.

What do you think?