Story highlights In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed the scope and scale of the National Security Agency's massive surveillance program

Jimmy Wales: We should pardon Snowden because he was critical to reinstating privacy as a core value in our society

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, sued the NSA over the agency's mass surveillance of international communications. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) Wikipedia is founded on a bedrock principle of neutrality, seeking to describe all relevant sides without taking a political stance. As an individual, I, too, try to stay out of most political debates -- except where they directly impact my personal passion for the free flow of information. This is one of those times.

When I founded Wikipedia in 2001, the Internet was a place where ordinary people could freely create and share with one another. Wikipedia emerged from that egalitarian spirit, as a community committed to the free exchange of knowledge. Our mission was and continues to be to collect the sum total of all human knowledge and make it available to everybody in their own language.

Jimmy Wales

Since its founding, Wikipedia has become one of the most popular websites in the world. And we zealously guard the privacy of our users, both the 75,000 people who write the encyclopedia and the half-billion people who read it. In 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the scope and scale of the system of mass surveillance that had been built by the National Security Agency and other national security agencies, we were horrified.

It is thanks to Snowden that we can now participate in an informed and democratic debate about how the US government subverted the power of the Internet in the name of mass surveillance. As a result of what he disclosed, people began to realize their privacy had been massively eroded over the past decade, and not just by the NSA. They recognized that their personal information was being collected, stored, analyzed and shared. Text messages, emails and phone records they thought were private were actually up for grabs, easily accessed by the US government either directly from major tech companies or by tapping the cables and switches that comprise the Internet's "backbone." And all of the surveillance was done without a warrant.

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That is why I've signed onto the campaign asking President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden. Without him, ordinary people around the world would still know little of the growing dragnet stifling the Internet's enormous potential for good.