Big Data holds the promise of extensive monetization opportunities for unexploited assets. Particularly, entrepreneurial bankers have even fused their clients’ exposure to SaaS and Big Data by inventing a creative new term: DaaS, or data as a service. If regulators and the public follow the recommendations in Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battle to Collect Your Data and Control Your World,” (W.W. Norton & Company ) the coming Big Data crash will make the collapse of SaaS company valuations look like a minor market adjustment.

When it comes to what government and business are doing together and separately with personal data scooped up from the ether, Mr. Schneier is as knowledgeable as it gets.An expert in cryptography generally and security specifically, Mr. Schneier has encyclopedic knowledge of not just the uses and abuses of data collection around the globe but the dizzying array of laws, regulations, international accords and not-so-secret orders governing these practices. A half-dozen members of Congress invited Mr. Schneier to brief them about the unpublished Snowden documents.

Mr. Schneier’s use of concrete examples of bad behavior with data will make even skeptics queasy and potentially push the already paranoid over the edge. Mr. Schneier writes clearly and simply about a complex subject and is most convincing when arguing that the subject demands at a minimum a more public and transparent debate about how and what lines to draw.

When it comes to his specific policy recommendations, however, Mr. Schneier becomes significantly less compelling. And the underlying philosophy that emerges — once he has dispensed with all pretense of an evenhanded presentation of the issues — seems actually subversive of the very democratic principles that he claims animates his mission.

The author is at his most vehement in his opposition of all forms of government mass surveillance. He claims that data mining of undifferentiated bulk communications sucked up by our national security apparatus is “an inappropriate tool for finding terrorists.” “Whenever we learn about an N.S.A. success,” Mr. Schneier informs us, “it invariably comes from targeted surveillance rather than from mass surveillance.”