It's long been observed that wars can drive the "state of the art" far further and far faster than any other phenomenon. Wars focus national resources -- demanding investments in new thinking, new approaches, new technologies. So it goes with the War on Terror. 
Just as the "Dotcom Boom" -- another temporal phenomenon that drove massive investment in new technology -- began to bomb, we were all witnesses to the horrifying spectacle of 9/11. The implications of that event continue to play out in the expansion of and the investment in something William Safire disparagingly calls the "Surveillance Society" in the New York Times.
In his recent review of two new books, Safire offers a one-sided perspective on "the world of surveillance and dossier assembly." Citing negative stories such as the recent revelation of ChoicePoint's hacked consumer data, Safire goes one step further to speak of the "sinister synergism" (remember, he writes the On Language column, too) between government and commercial data gatherers. Apparently, Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s ''No Place to Hide'' and Patrick Radden Keefe's ''Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping'' provide more than enough evidence, in Safire's view, to encourage us all to scream for reform and demand that we all be taken off the grid in the name of personal privacy.
It's funny. The Unibomber, who used to write pointed missives to the Times from his undisclosed cabin hideout, and Mohammed Atta, who plotted and led the 9/11 strike, would most certainly welcome Safire's unbalanced point-of-view.
On the other hand, Safire's single-mindedness is probably important as a counter-weight to all those who might abuse all the intel that emerges through our new electronic mesh of consumer and citizen information. Mr. Keefe discusses the concept of a "liberty-security matrix" in his book. We're all going to have to get serious about where we stand on (or off) such a grid.
I'd merely argue that security need not necessarily come at liberty's expense. After all, how free do I (or you) feel knowing that time is on the side of terrorists plotting to take down America's cities (and towns) with weaponized viruses and suitcase nukes?
On the consumer side, I also have to consider my options. Do I not benefit from having my product and service providers know that I am not a bad credit risk? Do I not benefit from the personalized service (and recommendations) enabled by the release of some personal data? Surely, the companies I choose to do business with would not offer the offerings they do at the prices they offer them if everyone remained in the dark on what I will call the "risk-opportunity matrix." We make trade-offs -- of information for value -- all the time. (Reason Magazine's Declan McCullagh illustrates them quite nicely in his piece on "Database Nation.")
Mr. Safire has always diminished those trade-offs in his alarmist columns on consumer privacy. And yet, I'm glad he writes (and has written) them. I just think it is the role of others to discuss the other factors he downplays.
One sober voice is that of Fred Ikle, author of "Every War Must End." In the Wall Street Journal, he writes, "The worldwide proliferation of WMD capabilities can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. It is high time that our body politic took this unpleasant fact on board. The globalization of science and technology will gradually, but ineluctably, spread the wherewithal for building mass destruction weapons. We are thus fated to confront a threat of a kind we have never faced before."
Think 9/11 multiplied by 11 -- or 11,000. That's the dark future we face if we take ourselves and our enemies off the grid. In a world that increasingly empowers small bands of barbarians, smart surveillance and active intelligence gathering may be our best defense. It makes no sense at all to unilaterally disarm.
