This article is based on Amitai Etzioni's latest book, The Limits of Privacy, just published by Basic Books. He teaches at George Washington University. He can be reached at etzioni@gwu.edu.

Despite the fact that privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution, and that it was only shoehorned in some 34 years ago, it is viewed by most Americans as a profound, inalienable right.

The media are loaded with horror stories about the ways privacy is not so much nibbled away as it is stripped away by bosses who read your e-mail, neighbors who listen in on your cell phones and E-Z passes that allow tollbooth operators to keep track of your movements. A typical headline decries the "End of Privacy" (Richard A. Spinello, in an issue of America, a Catholic weekly) or "The Death of Privacy" (Joshua Quittner, in Time).

But what is too often ignored is the other half of the equation -- the half that defines a good society: concerns for public health and safety that entail some rather justifiable diminution of privacy.

Examples of the debate

Take the HIV testing of infants. Evidence recently published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine shows that a significant proportion of children born to mothers who have HIV can ward off this horrible disease but only on two conditions: that their mothers not breast-feed them and that the infants immediately be given AZT. For this to happen, mothers must be informed that the children have HIV, a status of which an estimated two-thirds are unaware. Civil libertarians and some gay activists vehemently oppose this mandatory testing as a privacy infringement. But what about the benefits?

While New York State, after a very acrimonious debate, enacted a law that requires infant testing and disclosure of the findings to the mother in 1996, most other states have so far avoided dealing with this issue.

Recently a suggestion to use driver's licenses to curb illegal immigration has sent the Coalition for Constitutional Liberties, a large group of libertarians, civil libertarians, and privacy advocates, into higher orbit than John Glenn ever traversed. The wrote:

This plan pushes us to the brink of tyranny, where citizens will not be allowed to travel, open bank accounts, obtain health care, get a job, or purchase firearms without first presenting the proper government papers. The authorizing section of the law ¿ is reminiscent of the totalitarian dictates by Politburo members in the former Soviet Union, not the Congress of the United States of America.

Meanwhile, others protest the fact that Wells Fargo Bank is introducing a new device that allows a person to cash checks at its ATM machines because the machines recognize faces. Rapidly coming is a whole new industry of so-called biometrics that uses natural features such as voice, hand design and eye pattern to recognize a person with the same extremely high reliability provided by the new DNA tests.

In praise of biometrics

It is true that as biometrics catches on, it will practically strip Americans of anonymity, an important part of privacy. In the near future, a person who acquired a poor reputation in one part of the country will find it much more difficult to move to another part, change his name and gain a whole fresh start. Biometrics see right through such assumed identities.

Will Americans be stripped of anonymity?

But instead of rejecting such a consequence immediately, Americans should work to make sure that it is not abused. One may hope that future communities will become more tolerant of such people, especially if they openly acknowledge the mistakes of their pasts, and truly seek to lead a more pro-social life.

Above all, while biometrics clearly undermines privacy, it promises substantial social benefits. Specifically, each year at least half a million criminals become fugitives, avoiding trial, incarceration or serving their full sentences, often committing additional crimes while on the lam.

People who fraudulently file for multiple income-tax refunds using fake identities and multiple Social Security numbers cost the nation between $1 billion and $5 billion per year. Numerous divorced parents escape their financial obligations to their children by avoiding detection when they move or change jobs. (The sums owed to children are variously estimated as running between $18 billion to $23 billion a year.)

Then there is the ID question. Professional and amateur criminals, employing fraudulent identification documentation to make phony credit-card purchases, cost credit-card companies and retail businesses an indeterminate number of billions of dollars each year. The United States loses an estimated $18 billion a year to benefit fraud committed by illegal aliens using false IDs.

A 1998 General Accounting Office report estimates identity fraud to cost $10 billion annually in entitlement programs alone. People hired to work in child-care centers, kindergartens and schools cannot be effectively screened to keep out child abusers and sex offenders, largely because when background checks are conducted, convicted criminals escape detection by using false identification and aliases.

Biometrics would sharply curtail all these crimes, although it will fall short of wiping them out singlehandedly.

Taking privacy for what it is

The courts have recognized that privacy must be weighed against considerations of public interest, but have tended to privilege privacy and make claims for public health or safety clear several high hurdles.

In recent years courts have become more concerned with public safety and health, thus lowering the privacy barriers somewhat. Given that these often are matters of state law, and that neither legislatures nor courts act in unison, the details are complex and far from all pointing in one direction.

But, by and large, courts have allowed mandatory drug testing of those who directly have the lives of others in their hands, including pilots, train engineers, school-bus drivers and air-traffic controllers, even though such testing violates their privacy. In case after case, the courts have disregarded objections to such tests by civil libertarians who argue that such tests constitute "suspicionless" searches, grossly violate privacy and -- as the ACLU puts it -- "condition Americans to a police state."

This is a positive trend because we have a need to recast privacy in our civic culture, public policies and legal doctrines. We should cease to treat it as unmitigated good, a sacred right (the way Supreme Court Justices Earl Warren and Louis Brandeis referred to privacy in their famous article and many since), or one that courts automatically privilege.

Instead, privacy should rely squarely on the Fourth Amendment, the only one that has a balance built right into its text. It recognizes both searches that wantonly violate privacy ("unreasonable" ones) and those that enhance the common good to such an extent that they are justified, even if they intrude into one's privacy.

The Fourth may have become the constitutional foundation of privacy a long time ago if it was not for the fact that Roe v. Wade is construed as a privacy right, and touching it provokes fierce opposition. The good news, though, is that even the advocates of abortion rights are now looking to base their position on some other legal grounds, especially the 14th Amendment.

We might be ready to treat privacy for what it is: one very important right, but not one that trumps most other considerations, especially of public safety and health.