Edward Snowden: Privacy vs. Transparency, Ancient and Modern

Why do we value our privacy? Why do we believe we have a right to it? And is it consistent to demand privacy for ourselves but transparency from others? This colloquium will begin from current debates about privacy, prompted by recent cases involving WikiLeaks, the NSA, and News International, and go on to explore the ancient and modern roots of our opinions about privacy, according to two foundational texts: Plato’s Laws and Hobbes’s Leviathan. We will pay particular attention to the tension between the ancient and the modern understandings of privacy in the Western tradition, and to the implications of this tension for privacy in this age of electronic surveillance and publicity.

Privacy, Ancient and Modern