Privacy v Security: The PATRIOT Act 2.0

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

His response is along the following lines: say you swipe your ID pass as you enter the elevator at work; soon after you pop down to Coles for a $4 "coffee and muffin" deal, paying with your Visa card; at lunch you fuel up at Golden Arches, buying a McValue Meal with a tap of your debit card on a reader and on the way home (using your registered Opal or myki cards), you visit a pathology lab to test for liver function, offering your Medicare card and signature in place of a cash payment.

Every move you make, every reader you swipe and every medical test you sit leaves a digital footprint from which a pathway to understanding and in turn mapping your lifestyle is the next very small step. Not only can your life be mapped, that mapping can be shared far and wide, often without your knowledge, let alone your (chuckle, chuckle) consent.

Daniel Solove is both alert and alarmed. But he is no peacenick.

In Nothing to Hidehe continues his decade long investigation into the moral and legal questions that modern technology poses for privacy. Unsurprisingly of the four parts of his book, the most fascinating one is the last: technology.

Solove's offers a refreshingly clear lens with which to view the privacy-security continuum.

He resists defining privacy, implying that there are no sufficient conditions for the correct application of the concept, in contrast to many civil libertarians (both in the US and Australia) who chronically argue that "privacy" must be protected at all costs. But is their definition of privacy shared by others? Hmmm.

Solove surveys the results of the US government's data mining activities and finds them coming up short. They are, he feels, useless at predicting whether someone is or is not disposed to be terrorist and the costs of falsely identifying citizens as "dangerous" may be high.

Nothing to Hide is well argued, relevant to both American and Australian readers and is penned by one smart guy. One can only hope it's on our parliamentarians' reading list.