Hillary Clinton has recently come under fire for trying to protect her privacy as Secretary of State by using a private email account.
We associate the word privacy with an important American value, as represented by the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.
Because of this, privacy sounds like a right, as something that protects us from the nosy and the pushy, the neighborhood busybodies and the big-bad gubmint. Privacy seems like the default setting of a free society, one in which we may have nothing to hide, but it’s also nobody’s business what we’re up to back behind the woodshed.
What we don’t like in a representative democracy, though, is "secrecy."
Secrecy, in contrast to privacy, sounds like the default setting of the privileged and the elite. Secrecy has connotations of the cover up, of something fishy going on, of collusion and conspiracy. People wouldn’t want secrecy, we think, unless there was something shameful or bad going on back there behind the woodshed.
So secrecy among elected officials makes us feel like the fishy stink has reeked to the highest levels. And that’s a legitimate concern: we keep the balance of power in The People’s favor by keeping tabs on what happens in our name.
But I can’t get past the idea that privacy for us and secrecy is for them, however we formulate the difference.
It isn’t hypocrisy exactly, but it does reveal the biases of who we trust and why.
