[lbo-talk] Secrecy and slavery

[JOANNA A.]

I remember when I was translating Augustine in Peter Brown's class at Berkeley, his telling us that being "secretus," having privacy, was considered a key characteristic of nobility in the classical era. The poorer and more powerless you were, the less right you had to privacy. Slaves, of course, had no privacy whatsoever. 

I wonder, in that context, how much the universal spying going on, transforms everyone into a "slave" having no right to privacy. 

I also wonder, given the prerogative of wealth, whether the rich can actually protect themselves from NSA stuff. I don't know enough about how the spying is done to understand whether current levels of encryption are enough. Snowden seemed to suggest that they are not. 

It would be interesting to talk about modern slavery in these terms. 

Joanna