&#62; Coincidences do happen and if you happen to be around the area of two murders you'll have a very hard time to explain that away, whereas in a society with good privacy you would never even appear on the radar.<p>I have the perfect real-life example of exactly that
situation:<p>Portland-area lawyer Brandon Mayfield was arrested in May 2004 because his
fingerprint matched one found on a bag of detonators near the train station in
Madrid in the March 11 2004 bombing, which killed 191 people. But Spanish
authorities said the fingerprints belonged to another man, an Algerian.
A US federal court later threw out the case against Mayfield, and the FBI
expressed regret for the "fingerprint-identification error". As a former
Army officer, Mayfield's fingerprints would be on file with the government.
A law enforcement official said the fingerprints were not on file because
of any crime or as part of the government's terrorism databases.<p>The lawyer is lucky that the Spanish found the actual bomber. There are probably many such cases where the absence of privacy caused horrible damage to innocent people.