Cabinet noir
In France, the cabinet noir (
Outside France
By the 1700s,
A black chamber was also employed by Anthonie Heinsius, Grand pensionary of the Dutch Republic, during the War of the Spanish Succession under the direction of his private secretary Abel Tassin d'Alonne. They used the services of François Jaupain, the director-general of the postal system in the Southern Netherlands to intercept the diplomatic mail of France and its allies.[5]
In 1911, the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition took the view that the cabinet noir had disappeared, but that the right to open letters in cases of emergency still appeared to be retained by the French government; and a similar right was occasionally exercised in England under the direction of a Secretary of State. In England, this power was frequently employed during the eighteenth century and was confirmed by the Post Office Act 1837; its most notorious use was, perhaps, the opening of Mazzini's letters in 1844.[3]
Such postal censorship became common during World War I. Governments claimed that the total war which was waged required such censorship to preserve the civilian population's morale from heart-breaking news up from the front. Whatever the justification, this meant that not a single letter sent from a soldier to his family escaped previous reading by a government official, destroying any notion of privacy or secrecy of correspondence. Post censorship was retained during the interwar period and afterwards, but without being done on such a massive scale.[6]
The US
See also
- Black Chamber
- Black room
- Bulgarian medieval cryptography
- Postal censorship
- Secrecy of correspondence
References
- ISBN 978-0-5823-1837-3.
- ^ "Black Chamber". Everything2. 2001-01-14. Retrieved 2012-12-24.
- ^ a b Chisholm 1911.
- S2CID 151126570.
- S2CID 162387765.
- ^ Demm, Eberhard (29 March 2017). "Censorship". International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1). Archived from the original on 2014-10-14.
- ^ a b c "U.S. Customs Opening International Mail". Schneier.com. 16 January 2006.
- ^ "Feds Use Border Search Exception to Nab Pedophile". Volokh.com. 2006-08-29. Retrieved 2012-12-24.
- ^ mininggazette.com[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Minutes of the Mailers' Technical Advisory Committee". United States Postal Service. 2002-05-02. Archived from the original (Word document) on 2009-01-15. Retrieved 2012-12-24.
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Cabinet Noir". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 920. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
External links
- "Back when spies played by the rules" by David Kahn, published in The New York Times - a history of black chambers
- AT&T Whistle-Blower's Evidence
- Discussion of cabinets noirs and Napoleon[usurped]