Joseph Mornin

The opening of Mazzini’s mail, like the revelations that the N.S.A. has been monitoring telephone, e-mail, and Internet use, illustrates the intricacy of the relationship between secrecy and privacy. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves. Mazzini considered his correspondence private; the British government kept its reading of his mail secret. The A.C.L.U., which last week filed a suit against the Obama Administration, has called the N.S.A.’s surveillance program a “gross infringement” of the “right to privacy.” The Obama Administration has defended both the program and the fact that its existence has been kept secret.

These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.

We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent.

Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.

There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly, more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Global Voices Advocacy (GVA) are jointly seeking two interns to work from EFF’s offices in San Francisco for summer 2013. University students and recent graduates with excellent writing skills and a deep understanding of free expression, openness, and privacy on the global Internet are strongly encouraged to apply.

Interns will focus on individual cases of bloggers, hackers, and social media users facing threats of censorship, harassment, arrest, or worse because of their activities online. Interns will work on a variety of projects through which they will document and analyze these cases, developing a range of skills along the way.