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Government hates anonymity, the public hates surveillance. And so the tension between privacy and security never seems to let up. Where should the boundary be? How about a flexible signpost? Here's what you might call the seesaw solution: clamp down to meet a threat, then relax when the threat subsides. The key is to be quick and responsive.

Total anonymity is not advocated by anyone. Real estate is openly owned everywhere, cars are registered to someone in particular, government contracts are issued to a well-defined entity. Most people would feel uneasy about placing their life savings in an anonymous setting. If the need arises, they can never prove ownership. Billions of dollars anonymously deposited in numbered Swiss bank accounts before the Second World War were eventually stolen by the account providers, and only recent pressure from the U.S. State Department has partially stopped this theft.

After all, who desires anonymity for large amounts of money? Thieves with ill-gotten spoils, that's who. So most of us are behind the government in its effort to shine the spotlight on big-time transactions.

The true battle for anonymity rages elsewhere, and the issue is not one of ownership of wealth but of behavior, conduct, and lifestyle. Today, the Patriot Act gives the government the tools to analyze our behavior: where and when we go places, what we eat, what we like to do. Our credit card usage spells it all out. The government exposes all of us with the argument that by doing so it can catch the very few bad guys among us. Here a balance is called for.

The targeted bad guys, mind you, have already figured out how to evade the dragnet created by credit card data mining. Stolen identities are used, but not abused. Indeed, the victim's credit rating even improves as a result of the theft. The perpetrator gets a credit card in the name of the victim, but pays his bills on the dot. All he gets out of this scheme is throwing off the government hounds by confusing the data miners.

In extreme cases, authorities have found that prime targets spend no money at all. Instead, they are accompanied by a team of spenders that rent, lease, buy, and purchase for them anything that's traceable. At the same time, the data gathered from point-of-sale terminals around the country can be intercepted anywhere along the way and modified so that the central computers that analyze the data reach faulty conclusions.

So what is the public gaining, and what is it losing, in this non-targeted crusade against anonymity? Our streets and public places are covered post to post with ever-running video cameras that capture ordinary citizens in their daily routines. You might pay cash for "Bomb Building for Dummies," but that surveillance camera will trace your facial features and check you against the government database.

The only true anonymity left is public-use Internet stations where service can be paid for with anonymous prepaid cards. And that's provided no camera catches you either buying that card or using that computer. Also, by controlling the denomination of these cards, the government can keep anonymity at bay.

Ideally, the government should have to take targeted action to violate someone's privacy rather than cause the wholesale exposure of every one of us. We had that in the era of phone surveillance. We lost it on the Internet and through wireless, where anyone, not just the government, can harvest privacy-violating data bits from most of us.

Because only a few people operate this mass violation of privacy, their actions are mostly computerized. A faulty or misaligned data-mining "rule" would send an innocent person to a list of suspects without him ever knowing about it. The victim simply is denied jobs, and credit, or even the ability to board a plane. And just try to get off that list once you're on it!

In other words, when we tell the government that it is okay to spy on us, because we care about our security more than our privacy, we also open the gates for mistakes, abuse, and harassment. And innocent people get falsely fingered.

Anonymity should be recognized as a legitimate need in a free society, not a vanity or a whim. Society should build the framework for anonymity-based transactions and control the level of such transactions on a targeted, flexible basis that is threat-driven.