Fully Revised and Updated in 2006 including new chapters on the PATRIOT Act and other responses to Sept.11 This book by CDT policy director Jim Dempsey and Georgetown law professor David Cole documents how civil liberties are being sacrificed in the name of fighting terrorism. Third edition, January 2006. 290 pp. Orders through Amazon.com

In this vivid and important critique of the government's response to terrorism, a prominent constitutional scholar and one of the nation's leading experts on privacy warn that civil liberties are being needlessly sacrificed without effectively protecting national security.

By comparing recent antiterrorism measures to previous abuses - anticommunist tactics of the 1950s, FBI spying on civil rights activists in the 1960s, and the investigation and harassment of government critics of U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s and 1990s - the authors reveal how the Bush administration is repeating the mistakes of the past, expanding the powers of government agencies in ways that are neither necessary nor desirable in a free society.

This fully revised and updated edition includes extensive revisions and a new final section evaluating the government's post-9/11 "war on terrorism." The authors cogently criticize the Patriot Act and the full range of executive measures violating civil liberties at home and abroad since 9/11, from ethnic profiling and data mining to preventive detention and torture.

"A much-needed cautionary note ... Dempsey and Cole demonstrate that we can lose as much in overreacting to terrorism as we can from failing to respond to it."
     - Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union

"Should be read by anyone who cares about civil liberties."
     - Victor Navasky, The Nation

"A most useful book on a delicate subject."
     - Gore Vidal

"Timely and important... This is a book every citizen should read and act upon.
     - Political Science Quarterly

James X. Dempsey is the policy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology and a former assistant counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. David Cole is a professor of law at Georgetown University, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and the author of the American Book Award-winning Enemy Aliens and No Equal Justice (both available from The New Press.)