No Place to Hide, by Robert O'Harrow, Jr., is a very frank and scary picture of the amount of surveillance that goes on in the United States. It starts off with the the commercial sector and ends up with Big Brother, our government.

It turns out that we are being constantly watched and in most cases with very little regard for civil liberties. All our transactions are recorded. If you use a bank, credit union, credit/debit card, or even solely cash, the things you buy are being catalogued and loaded onto massive databases, the intent of which is to identify who is a "reliable" customer from those who are not. Companies who sell products to the general public want to maximize their advertising dollars to target big spenders. Their databases contain billions of records.

Since 9/11, the US government and to a certain extent local government, read police, has collaborated with these very same corporations to sift out what they consider suspicious behavior. Unfortunately there is tremendous room for error and violations of our civil rights. The book details, in several extended anecdotes, the paths taken by various individuals toward a society that has no real knowledge of the amount of surveillance that is being done. 9/11 has spurred tremendous leaps in technology. This technology is frequently classified as secret on the grounds of national security so that even if most Americans wanted to know about this we couldn't get access.

The book is easily read and quite informative. It should be a must read for all Americans and especially for those concerned with the erosion of our civil rights.