Origin of "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide"?
What is the origin of the phrase
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
I see it occasionally bounced around, sometimes as an authoritarian slogan. Brief research indicates some think it was coined by Goebbels, some by Orwell.
Is the true origin known?
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
The phrase - widely used in discussions of Internet security and uttered by Pius Thicknesse in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - is most commonly attributed to Joseph Goebbels in 1933.
However, there is an earlier precedent. Upton Sinclair used an inverted version in 1918 in The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation:
Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends—people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: ‘If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.’