consulting rooms in which we work, together with our reasonable assumptions and our tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1967) about their acoustic properties, historically enabled us to maintain the privacy of consultations, and thereby to protect their confidentiality. This protection has never been absolute, and in cases where there is targeted surveillance by the state of individuals who are suspected of terrorism or other serious crimes, it can be broken without our knowledge or consent. Nevertheless, in countries where covert local surveillance by means of microphones or cameras planted in buildings is not considered normal, psychoanalysts and their patients have been able to rely on tacit knowledge, everyday experience and common sense to assure themselves that their in-person conversations are private. In countries where covert local surveillance is a fact of everyday life, privacy has always been more difficult to achieve. For psychoanalysis to be possible at all, however, it must be the case that psychoanalysts and patients are able to find local ways of avoiding surveillance and creating private spaces in which to work. 4.3 Loss of privacy in telecommunicative settings Modern telecommunications are inherently vulnerable to electronic interception and eavesdropping without the need for separate local access to premises, access being provided by the telecommunications device itself (i.e. the telephone or computer). From information made public by Edward Snowden in 2013, we know that telecommunications are subject to routine surveillance on a massive scale and that the contents of many private conversations are stored for potential use in protecting national security, fighting terrorism, etc. 8 In addition to routine surveillance by the state, telecommunications are increasingly vulnerable to various kinds of criminal interception for financial, political, or personal motives, including by individuals who are known to the person who is being targeted. Privacy in telecommunications can be protected to some extent by careful use of encryption, although it is unclear whether any of the currently available methods of encryption are completely secure. 9 Many software packages and hardware devices offering encrypted communication are also either known or suspected to have ‘backdoors’ which allow access to decrypted contents by the suppliers, or by police or security services, and which are potentially vulnerable to others. A particularly intractable problem, and one that is widely overlooked, is ‘endpoint security’: the need to ensure that communications are not being intercepted before they are 8 Greenwald, G., MacAskill, E., Poitras, L. (2013). See also: MacAskill, E., Dance, G. (2013); WikiPedia (2018a); University of Oslo Library (2013-17); Snowden Surveillance Archive (2018); The Internet Archive (2015). 9 There is continual conflict between government agencies seeking potential access to any communication, and those who, for commercial, political, or ethical reasons, seek to preserve privacy by means of encryption (see Abelson et al., 2015). The FBI-Apple encryption dispute of 2016 was an example of this conflict breaking out in public (see Wikipedia, 2018b).
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