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About transparency

During our research on the constitutionality of the Internet we bumped into a very relevant aspect. A mistaken assumption that the '68 generation made, that has repercussions until today: the idea that all political work should be open and transparent.

Apparently, during the Age of Enlightenment, as the concepts of today's modern democracy were formulated, with all the fresh experience of absolutist rule, the idea of Secrecy of Correspondence may not only have been about giving a right to the citizen, but to ensure that alternative democratic thinking has a chance to form and grow before the government in power can inspect and influence the process.

Lack of transparency seen as a prerequisite for proper democracy.

Given such a perspective in a world of XKEYSCORE and KARMA POLICE it is maybe not so surprising that we hardly ever see alternative democratic thinking actually manifesting itself in government. But it is exactly government politics that we should expect to be executed in open and transparent ways whereas all non-governmental and innovational thinking should happen in an environment safe from scrutiny – and in these days of globalization that means to protect citizen and organizations of citizen from all governments including their cloud-based helpers which have been forced by law to comply in a process of bulk abolition of the secrecy of communications.

But such secrecy is a precondition of a healthy separation of powers, quintessential to the principles of democracy: an omniscient executive can no longer be held in check by the judiciary and legislative bodies, allowing for a slippery slide into forms of oligarchic control disguised and apparently legitimized as democracies.

Whoever says they have nothing to hide may, seen in the eyes of the 18th century, be walking all over their respective democratic constitution with their dirty feet – because they are impeding others from bringing renovation to the democracy the way democracy is intended to have it. Opposition and majority win-over should be the way to renovate democracy, not lobbyism and further oligarchic capture.

Therefore secushare attempts to restore the Secrecy of Correspondence that the citizen should feel obliged to respect rather than consider it a dispensable privilege, and help to protect democracy from becoming a form of oligarchic rule by intransparent forces, possibly the kind that have enabled 62 people to own as much as half of the world's population, creating the greatest condition of injustice ever experienced in human history. A functional democracy may choose to let rich people be rich and foster development, but within reasonable boundaries.

We have currently failed the main aim of the philosophers of enlightenment, to have a form of governance ruled by reason and rationality. Let's fix this. Privacy is an important first step in the right direction.