by Samuel Johnston 1) Privacy, from the state and from society I’m sure I do not need to explain to anyone sitting in this room today exactly why privacy is important. Privacy, above all the right to areas free from state observation and intervention, has been a much-discussed topic especially over the past couple of years – with Wikileaks and Edward Snowden pushing these issues to the very forefront of conversations about technology’s place in our lives. The right to privacy is a long-standing and recognised one. Characterised as a form of ‘negative liberty’ by British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, meaning the right to live your life free from intervention from the state. It is a key tenet of representative democracy that there must be areas of activity where it is not the state’s duty to intervene, and where individuals have the freedom to think, discuss and exist. It is, above all, important for people to not only be actually free from observation when in a private state, but also to feel that they are unobserved. To be hidden from view from the gaze of both state and society. Hannah Arendt, the German Political theorist, has written extensively about privacy in her book ‘The Human Condition’. In this book she has a wonderful phrase that describes the necessity of privacy to full social existence: ‘A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of…
