However, Hannah Arendt wanted to make a fundamental political division between public personnae and private personnae, where the essential arena of the political is public. Existentially, this division was convienent for her since what she attributed to her private domain was her standing as a Jew and her relationship to her own identity, which I think she didn't consider a political domain. It was in a concordance with the enlightenment division between church and state, a private and public life. She thought (or I think she did), that we could not be political unless we were public.
But those ideas or issues are completely obliterated by the mass surveillance state.
Are we slaves? I would say yes in a particular sense that we have no rights to our personhood or a concept of the the private personnae. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as the presumption government officialdom has decided it does have a right to its private protected realm in total contravention to its role as the political body of the state. Forget it. These are precisely the people who have no right to private acts because they are by law public officials.
Snowden's crime was violating the privacy of the National Security Administration. Who desparately needs privacy more Snowden or the NSA? According the NSA, they do. A public institution, a whole complex of public institutions has decided that they need to act behind closed doors. Does that correspond to any concept of a state that was theoretically created of, for, and by the people?
I think you have to make this twist or turn around in the dialectic of public and private to see just how absurd this situation has become. We are told, if we have nothing to hide, we should have no worry. Well if NSA has nothing to hide, it should have no worries. Right?
CG