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 decadeand their direct impact on our lives.How have our rights to privacy and justice been undermined? What exactly have we lost? Pulitzer Prizewinner 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 takenand 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 Courts 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 instanceoften as shocking as it is compellingis a clear illustration of the risks posed to individual liberties in our modern society. And, in Shiplers hands, each serves as a powerful incitement for a retrieval of these precious rights. A brilliant, immeasurably important book for our time.From the Hardcover edition.