The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 was the first, and, without a doubt, the most comprehensive reform of U.S. asset forfeiture laws since civil asset forfeiture law as we know it was first enacted in 1984.  The grass roots struggle to reform asset forfeiture laws began in 1992, the year FEAR was formed. A strong impetus for the reform movement was the 1991 publication of the serialized forfeiture expose Presumed Guilty, by Pulitzer prize-winning journalists Andrew Schneider and Mary Pat Flaherty. The series was published by the now-defunct Pittsburgh Press, and was reprinted in over a hundred newspapers nationwide.  Many of the members who later came to be leaders and Board members of FEAR were sources quoted in Presumed Guilty.  When FEAR was only months old, its members reached out to the sources quoted in Presumed Guilty, and many of them joined the organization or its Forfeiture Roundtable.