I agree that is why I said SECRECY defended LIBERTY rather than privacy defended liberty. The location of the slaves and the safe houses had to be kept a secret to protect life and liberty. If the slaves were captured they may have been killed and certainly would have been put into slavery. So unless somehow we deem slavery as more moral than secrecy then how can we argue for absolute transparency?

Secrecy seems to be necessary because there is no evidence that humans in society (historically) will do the right thing if they have maximum transparency. Slavery happened and the slaves only escaped that condition through furtive means. To the slave master in that scenario perhaps secrecy was evil but to the slave trying to be free perhaps secrecy was good.

See the point I'm trying to make?

Consider how transparency can also be the ultimate facilitator of oppression. If we look at the holocaust there is the story of Anne Frank. Anne Frank was being persecuted by her government. She had to hide as all jews were being persecuted and had to hide from the SS and other groups. In this case the stakes were even higher than slavery, this was genocide.

Here is a challenge for you. Show me how transparency could have protected the life of Anne Frank? Prove to me that anything other than secrecy would have saved her life. Because I'm convinced she died because of transparency.

> Acting on tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man, and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the “secret annex” working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.


References
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1. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/anne-frank-captured