“The debate about privacy ‘to some extent transcends liberal/conservative ideology,’ said Solove, who graduated from Manheim Township High School in 1990 and Yale Law School in 1997.

“In fact, he added during a recent phone interview, the entire electorate should be concerned.

“The government has taken liberties — the USA Patriot Act, with its wiretapping provision, is a landmark privacy-invasion vehicle, Solove points out — and the courts have let it.

“When privacy and security clash today, Solove writes, ‘the scale is rigged so that security will win out nearly every time.’

“One result: Police rifling through a handful of riders’ bags on the New York City subway system, which transports about 4.5 million people a day.

“Solove blasts this kind of ‘security theater’ as pointless and wasteful.

“A society should shield privacy and freedom most staunchly when terrorism threatens, lest that society be warped by fear and insecurity, he adds.

“He’s not opposed to security, of course; in fact he believes it’s vital to the nation’s future. But he says security procedures must be pursued with meaningful regulatory and judicial oversight.

“That’s going to take a lot of work, given that executive branches are notorious for hanging on to power once they obtain it.

“The system had ‘severe problems before the Patriot Act,’ Solove writes, and it must be reformed so it’s ‘flexible enough to respond to emerging technologies.’ Not to mention existing ones.

“A prime example is the ever-growing network of video cameras in public places.

“As Solove notes in the book, ‘government surveillance can chill speech, dissent, and association; it provides great power to the watchers; it can be abused. The law should face these problems and get to work on fixing them.’

“Solove, meanwhile, the author of two previous books on information privacy, is hard at work in a related realm. He has co-founded a company, TeachPrivacy, that advises schools on how to manage personal information and confidentiality.

“Schools have access to ‘information as sensitive, if not more sensitive, than most businesses have,’ said Solove, who became interested in cyberlaw when he was a student at Yale.

“‘I was fascinated by this phenomenon. I thought, This is really the future. How does the law deal with the Internet?'”

[Editor’s NOTE: We have shared our concerns about the surveillance cameras in Columbia in this previous post: The shadow knows.  A reader comment on the Fourth Amendment post wisely observed, “As we all know, the Patriot Act negates much of the Fourth Amendment.”