9/6/2023 0 Comments Secret government programs![]() ![]() Fascinating to historians, it must have bored Parliament silly. The Mazzini affair, as the historian David Vincent argued in “The Culture of Secrecy,” led to “the first modern attack on official secrecy.” It stirred a public uproar, and eventually the House of Commons appointed a Committee of Secrecy “to inquire into the State of the Law in respect of the Detaining and Opening of Letters at the General Post-office, and into the Mode under which the Authority given for such Detaining and Opening has been exercised.” In August of 1844, the committee issued a hundred-and-sixteen-page report on the goings on at the post office. (This, a secret secret, is known as a double secret.) Luckily, old secrets aren’t secret old secrets are history. Questions raised this month about surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency have been met, so far, with much the same response that Duncombe got from Graham in 1844: the program is classified. Was the British government in the business of prying into people’s private correspondence? Graham said the answer to that question was a secret. Duncombe wanted to know if Graham really had ordered the opening of Mazzini’s mail. Mazzini then had his friend Thomas Duncombe, a Member of Parliament, submit a petition to the House of Commons. When the letters arrived-still sealed-they contained no poppy seeds, no hair, and no grains of sand. Mazzini knew how to find out: he put poppy seeds, strands of hair, and grains of sand into envelopes, sealed the envelopes with wax, and sent them, by post, to himself. He suspected that, in London, he’d been the victim of what he called “post-office espionage”: he believed that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had ordered his mail to be opened, at the request of the Austrian Ambassador, who, like many people, feared what Mazzini hoped-that an insurrection in Italy would spark a series of revolutions across Europe. Mazzini, a revolutionary who’d been thrown in jail in Genoa, imprisoned in Savona, sentenced to death in absentia, and arrested in Paris, was plotting the unification of the kingdoms of Italy and the founding of an Italian republic. An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government was opening his mail. ![]()
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