The rights of the people : how our search for safety invades our liberties

From the best-selling author of The Working Poor, an impassioned, incisive look at the violations of civil liberties in the United States that have accelerated over the past decade—and their direct impact on our lives. How have our rights to privacy and justice been undermined? What exactly have we lost? Pulitzer Prize–winner David K. Shipler searches for the answers to these questions by examining the historical expansion and contraction of our fundamental rights and, most pointedly, the real-life stories of individual men and women who have suffered. This is the account of what has been taken—and of how much we stand to regain by protesting the departures from the Bill of Rights. With keen insight and telling detail, Shipler describes how the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings play out on the streets as Washington, D.C., police officers search for guns in poor African American neighborhoods, how a fruitless search warrant turns the house of a Homeland Security employee upside down, and how the secret surveillance and jailing of an innocent lawyer result from an FBI lab mistake. Each instance—often as shocking as it is compelling—is a clear illustration of the risks posed to individual liberties in our modern society. And, in Shipler’s hands, each serves as a powerful incitement for a retrieval of these precious rights. A brilliant, immeasurably important book for our time. Content: 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. From a Pulitzer Prize winner and the bestselling author of "The Working Poor" comes an impassioned, incisive look at the violations of civil liberties in the United States that have accelerated over the past decade--and their direct impact on our lives. Abstract: From a Pulitzer Prize winner and the bestselling author of "The Working Poor" comes an impassioned, incisive look at the violations of civil liberties in the United States that have accelerated over the past decade--and their direct impact on our lives