“The dream of Internet freedom is… dying,” said attorney and civil liberties expert Jennifer Granick during her keynote speech before a major computer security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

Granick, formally the civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and now the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, was addressing some of the world’s foremost technology experts attending the annual Black Hat information security event this week.

“Centralization, regulation, and globalization,” Granick said, have wrought havoc on a space once thought of as “a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law.”

The dream is dying, she said, because “we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness.” And governments, for their part, have capitalized on the fear of “the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers” to push for even more regulation and control, she added.

Granick’s dire pronouncement, which echoed similar assertions made by security experts and civil liberties groups, comes just over two years after National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden cracked open the seal on the U.S. government’s online spying capabilities and revealed just how little security and secrecy remain on the World Wide Web.

Late last month, Snowden himself made a direct plea to technologists to build a new Internet specifically for the people.