Eyes on the pries: why surveillance technology should worry even those with nothing to hide.

• Author: Pomper, Stephen
• Position: The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age - Book Review

The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age By Jeffrey Rosen Random House, $24.95

The World Trade Center attacks scared us into buying duct tape and plastic sheeting--and that's just for starters. As Jeffrey Rosen describes in The Naked Crowd, fear of future attacks also created a huge demand for new surveillance technologies.

Some of the things under development are quite amazing. For example, there is a biometric face scanner that can pick out known bad guys in a crowd. The Transportation Department is reportedly considering the development of a "dataveillance" program (in Rosen's terminology) that will review travelers' real-estate histories, living arrangements, and similar personal data, so that it can assign them color-coded risk levels--red, green, and yellow. There are fingerprint scanners, iris scanners, and even brainwave scanners somewhere in the pipeline, which can be hooked up to sophisticated databases or lie detectors as the case may be. And up atop the indignity index sits a machine tested by Orlando International Airport that would deliver a buck naked image of each passenger who wanders under its microwave gaze.

Are you outraged at the thought? I have to confess that I'm really not. Like many Americans, my first reaction to this James Bond-style technology is to embrace it, in the hopes that someday it will save my skin. As for the intrusion, it hardly bothers me; I figure I have nothing to hide. This is a trusting, optimistic, intuitive view of the world. The question posed by The Naked Crowd is whether that view is very smart.

The hook seems to have inspired by a challenge posed by Rosen's fellow law professor, Lawrence Lessig, who several years back, called Rosen a technophobic "Luddite" for expressing concerns about the widespread installation of surveillance cameras in Great Britain following the wave of I.R.A. terror in the early 1990s. Lessig suggested that, rather than reflexively resisting the spread of such new technologies, Rosen should pour his efforts into designing a technological and legal approach to surveillance that would protect both security and liberty. In answering this challenge, Rosen concluded that his first order of business should bhe to persuade skeptics that a balanced approach is actually necessary.

As a skeptic myself, I have to say, he's pretty convincing. Part of the trick here is that Rosen steers almost entirely away from partisan arguments, instead approaching the...