A History of Privacy - From 1844 to the NSA

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.

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.

He suspected that, in London, he’d been the victim of what he called “post-office espionage”... more