On privacy and democracy

Of all the non-surprises in the much-hyped WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, none was less revelatory than the predictable fact that she had preached the gospel of limited disclosure, behind closed doors.

“If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least,”she told the National Multifamily Housing Council in 2013, apropos the legislative sausage factory. “So you need both a public and a private position.”

This was perfectly in character for the famously wary pol who declared, in 2003, that “I believe in a zone of privacy,” then acted on that belief six years later, when she became secretary of state, by using a home-brew email server instead of the official system as the rules required — followed by a fumbling coverup.

American moralism and electionyear politics being what they are, her remark played as a confession of two-facedness - though it was mightily and, from Clinton’s point of view, blessedly overshadowed by the awful caught-on-tape sexual transgression of Donald Trump.

What really would be surprising, and pleasantly so, would be if the WikiLeaks raid on the Clinton campaign’s e-archives led to a more mature, differentiated debate about the uses of publicity and privacy in democratic politics.

Transparency is the ultimate guarantor of democratic accountability. Like all good things, however, transparency can be taken to an extreme. Recent events — including the convoluted spectacle of a democracy’s presidential candidate’s internal communications being stolen and selectively publicized by a totally nontransparent organization of computer hackers, perhaps backed by a foreign dictatorship’s secret intelligence service — suggest that we may be reaching that point.

The same technology that enables all of us, politicians included, to communicate globally nearly instantaneously is also exposing everyone to near-instantaneous disclosure, also on a global scale, of pretty much anything they might do or say. “In this world today you should have no expectation of privacy,” former George W. Bush political adviser Karl Rove remarked recently, with chilling accuracy.

This is a positive development with respect to wrongdoing, such as police brutality, that may no longer hide in the social shadows, because everyone with a cellphone — or, say, a video camera built into their eyeglasses — can be a documentary filmmaker. It is positive, too, in the sense that political chicanery and outright corruption may be more readily deterred.

To the extent that Clinton’s career-long quest for a zone of privacy has really been about securing protection for her husband’s philandering, or other questionable activity by herself and her associates, it is self-serving and reprehensible, as her critics say.

But one person’s corrupt bargain is another’s transactional politics. Much if not most of the internal Clinton campaign deliberations exposed by WikiLeaks were of