An accountability world, says Geer, "is a surveillance world," in which whatever one does is inexpensively logged and stored, available for analysis or for later use as evidence. "You can do anything you like," he says, "but if you screw up badly enough, someone will find you." He cites a New York Times piece he read last year about the spread of street and building surveillance in England. "In fact, its main purpose may be to get people to feel like someone’s watching them. Which ain’t a whole lot different from what the church was teaching a thousand years ago: You can’t hide from God, and there is ultimate justice in the end."

But the transformation of the world?from one based on managing permissions to one based on enforcing accountability?will be propelled by economic, not religious, fervor. If the invading of privacy through pervasive monitoring "is so clearly economically preferable, you’d have to make a really principled argument to say that we’re not going to do that." In this matter, Geer counts himself sadder but wiser when he invokes the British strategic retreat at the Battle of Dunkirk. Perhaps, he says, the best recourse for privacy will be to "make the fight over the misuse of gathered information" rather than the mere fact of gathering it.

"I’m not a sociologist," he says, "so I don’t know where this all goes. But there is a social impact to growing up not expecting privacy, to being always under surveillance. I mean, I am certain that parents in my youth would have taken their kids out of school if they thought there were cameras in schools. Nowadays, people will take their kids out of school if there aren’t cameras. I don’t know what to say about that. But this is a privacy question, not a security question. People who say that privacy and security are one in the same are wrong."