"In the early 1840s, Giuseppe Mazzini, the pioneer of Italian unity, lived in England as a political excile, and in 1844 he learned that the Home Office had been opening his letters. Worse: it had forwarded them to the Austrians, who at the time were occupying most of northern Italy and were keenly interested in uncovering subversive nationalist activities. In consequence of this betrayal, two of Mazzini's idealistic young Venetian lieutenants were caught and executed.
Irrate, Mazzini denounced this "disgracefully un-English behavior." His outrage found immediate and vociferous echoes. Macaulay accused the British government of turning "the Post Office into an engine of the police," a practice he condemned as "utterly abhorrent to the public feeling." Carlyle wrote an indignant letter to The Times that reads like a manifesto in support of privacy: "It is a question vital to us that sealed letters in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected as things sacred." He likened opening mail to picking people's pockets and to other "still viler and far fataler forms of scoundrelism." Members asked uncomfortable questions in the House of Commons, and ministers, aware that they had stepped on a taboo, lied in self-justification as ministers will and buttressed their sordid spying with the appeal that they were safeguarding national interest in revolutionary times."*
*Uit "Schnitzler's Century. The making of Middle-Class Culture 1815 - 1914" door Peter Gay. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001. ISBN 0-713-99448-7
