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

Shipler, David K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400079284 ISBN 13: 9781400079285

Publisher: Vintage, 2012

Synopsis

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 traveling the midnight streets of dangerous neighborhoods with police, listening to traumatized victims of secret surveillance, and digging into dubious terrorism prosecutions. The law comes to life in these pages, where the compelling stories of individual men and women illuminate the broad array of government’s powers to intrude into personal lives. Examining the historical expansion and contraction of fundamental liberties in America, 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. And, in Shipler’s hands, each person’s experience serves as a powerful incitement for a retrieval of these precious rights.

About this title

From the Author:

A Letter from Author David K. Shipler
During research for The Rights of the People, I asked a communications class at Stetson University to write their answers to a few questions, including whether “you expect that your e-mails, phone calls, letters, checking accounts, conversations in your rooms, credit card use, computer hard drive, personal items in your home, etc. will be, or should be, beyond the reach of government investigators without judicial authorization.”

Most of the students were adamant about their privacy, others were reluctantly resigned to losing it, and a few endorsed the surveillance for the sake of security. But one response jumped out at me, from a young woman who wrote:

“Do I want the government breaking down my doors to interrogate me? Of course not. Something in the middle, however, is not outrageous for our protection. I wouldn’t mind if they peeked into my life as long as I don’t notice them there.”

She captured perfectly the warring attitudes that coexist in the country at large. Violations of the Bill of Rights are considered outrageous when they are obvious and physical, but when they are out of sight, they are out of mind. That leaves government with latitude to do invisible electronic searches without generating much public opposition.

I came to understand the issue as a problem of perception, illustrated neatly by Publishers Weekly, which called electronic surveillance “less intrusive” than pedestrian frisks by policemen looking for guns. Those visible violations were “shocking.” Yes, but if investigators without showing probable cause can wire your bedroom for sound, copy your daughter’s hard drive, tape your phone conversations, read your e-mail, monitor your Web browsing, collect a decade of your travel and medical and financial records, and follow your location through your cell phone or a GPS device planted secretly on your car, how is that “less intrusive?”

Most of those steps were taken against the innocent lawyer Brandon Mayfield, whom I profiled in the book. I’ll bet, if offered a choice between those and a one-time frisk, Mayfield would have picked the pat-down.

I ended this project worrying about complacency. If we cannot mobilize sufficient concern about what we cannot see, then the invisible surveillance will continue undermining the Fourth Amendment without the resistance required to preserve our rights.

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1400079284
• ISBN 13: 9781400079285
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496