This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.

Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.

I’ve never been able to fit the concepts of privacy, history and encryption together in a satisfying way, though it continues to seem that I should. Each concept has to do with information; each can be considered to concern the public and the private; and each involves aspects of society, and perhaps particularly digital society. But experience has taught me that all I can hope to do with these three concepts is demonstrate the problems that considering them together causes.

Privacy confuses me, beyond my simplest understanding, which is that individuals prefer, to different degrees, that information about them not be freely available to others. I desire privacy myself, and I understand why other individuals want it. But when the entity desiring privacy is a state, a corporation or some other human institution, my understanding of privacy becomes confused.

While it’s true that states and corporations often desire privacy, they just as often desire that I myself have less privacy. What does it mean, in an ostensible democracy, for the state to keep secrets from its citizens? The idea of the secret state seems antithetical to democracy, since its citizens, the voters, can’t know what their government is doing. Thereby hang the countless conspiracy theories of our day, many of them supposing that we possess far less privacy than we actually do. Advocates of the secret state, wishing to comfort us, sometimes praise a rough and ready transparency: If you have nothing to hide and you trust your government, what can you possibly have to fear? Except that one can just as readily ask: If you have nothing to hide, what do you really have, aside from the panoptic attention of a state, which itself keeps secrets?