(FORTUNE Magazine) – In wartime, Winston Churchill remarked, the truth is so precious that it must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. In unconventional wartime, public safety is so precious that it must be protected by the phalanx of private enterprise.

If the war against global terrorism is more real than rhetorical, then a new alliance must emerge between business and the state. Global enterprise and small-town entrepreneurs alike will become agents of the state for the emerging era of national security socialism. Both tacitly and explicitly, private markets and public servants will be called upon (or pressured, or inspired) to cooperate to preempt terrorist activity.

A foreman in a Karachi factory is overheard saying that his son, who's going to study in America, spent two years in Afghanistan as a military liaison to the Taliban. Should the American multinational employing him report that to immigration authorities? What if the company is French, German, or Japanese? The answers won't determine whether we will win or lose this war: They simply determine whether more or fewer innocent people will die.

Car rental companies worldwide might be asked to digitally photograph and thumbprint their customers; the information would then be batch-processed nightly through an INS-FBI-Interpol database. Flight attendants both domestic and international might be encouraged to submit the names of passengers behaving suspiciously. Credit card companies might be given special software and told to alert authorities if certain purchasing patterns appear. Universities that decline to aid in the monitoring of student computing and financial activity might discover difficulties in their public funding.

These are obvious first steps that an evolving public/private partnership could take to deter terrorists while minimizing impositions on the law-abiding. The convergence of national security and public safety inevitably turns private industry into a surveillance extension of the state. After Sept. 11, no flight-training school in America or Europe will view a student applicant holding a Middle East passport in quite the same way. From a public-safety perspective, the tradeoff is between the loss of innocence and the loss of innocent lives. From a national security perspective, the choice is starker: Anticipate threats better and faster or respond better and faster to destruction--ex ante vs. ex post. Even the stupidest businesses recognize that the costs of prevention are cheaper than those of recovery.

This role of private enterprise as snitch is neither bold nor romantic. It's the sadly logical extension of the compliance culture that has evolved in the West. In America, you can't hire a foreign-born nanny without being legally responsible for knowing her immigration status. In France, Germany, and Japan, of course, legal immigration is monitored much more rigorously. The coming shift from passive compliance to proactive reporting may be voluntary or compulsory in origin. That will likely be a function of how many casualties society is forced to endure.

So the notion of customer-centric companies vanishes. The argument that global corporations are citizens of the world, not of nations, is revealed as wishful fiction. Choices must be made. In war, employees who are more loyal to their companies than to their countries may prove complicit in the deaths of thousands. Companies more loyal to customers than to public safety become witting conspirators in plots that can ultimately destroy them and their employees. Consider the looming specter of trading companies that provide short-selling services to terrorist front companies, only to end up being blown to smithereens by the weaponry purchased by those profits. Then again, there are always individuals and institutions utterly confident that they can make good money dealing with the devil.

In a wartime environment where information-sharing and proactive disclosure becomes the rule, however, the exceptions increasingly stand out. The public knowledge that some firms--global or local--are deliberately undermining efforts to prevent the destruction of innocents provokes understandable outrage. Winning that battle is paramount to winning this war.

Michael Schrage is co-director of MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and the author of Serious Play. He can be reached at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.