In the tradition of research on political tolerance and democratic rights in context, this study uses a national survey of Americans conducted shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on America to investigate people’s willingness to trade off civil liberties for greater personal safety and security. We find that the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberti...

For the past two hundred to three hundred years, science has played a major role in the development of western culture. Societies have capitulated to the demands of "progress" and have disregarded the costs as expedients to the industrial revolution (Etzioni, 1968, p. 208). Unfortunately, the costs have mounted quietly, and perhaps because the awareness has been so long delayed, there is a stro...

report describes antiterrorism practices undertaken in two components of the nation's infrastructure-federal court facilities and mass transit systems. We present information on the current roles and responsibilities for antiterrorism policies; managers' perceptions of domestic terrorism threats; existing risk-assessment activities to identify threats and the criticality and vulnerability of as...

Empirical studies often use Freedom House ratings for Political Rights and/or Civil Liberties as institutional proxies for the degree of democracy. In this study, Granger-causality tests are used which reveal that Political Rights tend to precede Civil Liberties, but not the reverse, in a panel data set of former Soviet Republics. For transition nations, Freedom House also publishes a separate ...

This article presents an overview of the history of medical and public health responses to syphilis in the 20th-century United States and briefly evaluates the relevance and significance of these approaches for the AIDS epidemic. The parallels are numerous: they relate to science, public health, civil liberties, and social attitudes concerning sexually transmitted infection. The strengths and l...

• While we must better defend our societies against cyberterrorism and Internet-savvy terrorists, we should also consider the costs of applying counterterrorism measures to the Internet. Such measures can hand authoritarian governments and agencies with little public accountability tools with which to violate privacy, curtail the free flow of information, and restrict freedom of expression, thu...