Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.

Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.

Dollar bills make for a bad diary.

Privacy - like eating and breathing - is one of life's basic requirements.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.