And though few even look so much as scruffy these days perhaps they have still got it.

Identities such as Philip Adams, Anne Summers and Michael Kirby will attend the launch of Dirty Secrets on Wednesday night at Glebe's Harold Park Hotel.

Each was once secretly monitored by ASIO. Their meditations on their since declassified files are collected in this new book.

Former state MP and the book's editor, Meredith Burgmann, says the nature of the event drew interest from local police who called the pub.

"The event had been flagged for policing," Ms Burgmann said.

Police confirmed they were aware of the event but denied they were planning to send anyone.

One expects this news may disappoint the hearts of many who are old enough to remember the night in 1986 when dozens of police interrupted another reading at the same pub by dragging barefooted novelist Frank Hardy off to Long Bay jail for unpaid parking fines.

But the reality of living under surveillance in Cold War Australia was rarely so exciting as parking tickets. No job was too pointless for the spooks of yesteryear.

Not even the subversive activities of early feminist Lucy Woodcock's four-year-old son Jonathan escaped attention. ''[He is] an active school propagandist,'' the spooks surmised, ''[who] organises groups away from teacher's grasp.''

The spies even kept an eye on Apple Juice, the horticultural magazine produced by ex-Gardening Australia host Peter Cundall for the Tasmanian YMCA in the 1960s.

They even noted the day film critic David Stratton wore a red tie.

At least one secret agent was not so serious: "They wasted a lot of money taking photos of me at the beach in a bikini," academic Verity Burgmann said.

(It's one of history's ironies that these mines of banality have probably found use for the first time in the hands of historians of the left.)

Meredith Burgmann notes that ASIO continued watching her press conferences after she had entered State Parliament in 1986.

But surely this kind of paranoiac detail-hoovering went the way of reds under the bed?

Perhaps not, argues former High Court judge Michael Kirby, who will launch the book.

The spooks opened a note on Mr Kirby when, aged 12, he went to Taronga Zoo with a left-leaning step-grandfather.

They later and perhaps imperceptively had him down as ''brainy but reactionary''.

''The need for effective official accountability … is much greater today because of the new information technology and the huge systems of undifferentiated surveillance,'' Mr Kirby emailed.