The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties

An impassioned critique of breakdowns in civil rights in the United States throughout the past decade explores specific causes and their impact on everyday life while sharing the stories of innocent individuals whose lives have been painfully challenged. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Arab and Jew. 75,000 first printing.

\David K. Shipler reported for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 in New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C.. He is the author of four other books, including the best sellers Russia and The Working Poor, and Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Shipler, who has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has taught at Princeton University; at American University in Washington, D.C.; and at Dartmouth College. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

The Bill of Rights — Saving the Constitution. The state religion ; Deviations ; Secret suppression ; Criminal acts ; Lawyers versus the rule of law ; Taking changes — Another country. Frisking pedestrians ; Profiling cars and drivers ; Obtaining consent — Defending the system. An indifference to perjury ; Discrediting the police ; Sowing reasonable doubt ; The airtight arrest ; Subtle shortcuts — With warrants and without. Home invasion ; Deterring the police ; Undoing the exclusionary rule ; Suspicionless searches — Patriotic acts. Sneak and peek ; Junk forensics ; Secret surveillance and self-deception ; The investigator's toolbox — The law falls silent. The continuum of intrusion ; Data : destroy or disseminate ; Mission creep ; A bigger haystack ; Contempt of court — The right to be let alone. the poetry of privacy ; The tyranny of technology ; The surveillance-industrial complex ; The privatization of searches — Life, liberty, and the pursuit of terrorists. Rorschach tests ; Terrorism and the Bill of rights ; Conspirators and wannabes — The High Court of history.