RESEARCH

How Does Your Opinion Match Up to the Civil Liberties Update?

According to a poll, conducted by Robert Blendon of the Kennedy School, in conjunction with NPR and the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans are evenly divided between whether it’s more important to protect individuals’ human rights and our need for security. However, in surveys conducted soon after September 11 and almost a year later, public opinion was shifting toward the civil liberties side of the issue. A sample of the survey questions follow:

Q Is it more important to ensure people’s constitutional rights, even if it means that some suspected terrorists are never found, or is it more important to find every potential terrorist, even if some innocent people are seriously hurt?

More questions

The NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School Civil Liberties Update is part of an ongoing project of National Public Radio, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Kennedy School of Government.

The results of the Civil Liberties Update are based on two nationwide telephone surveys conducted in August 2002.

Source: NPR Web site