Have many in the media and the public blown out of proportion the story about phone record information? That is what Andrew McCarthy contends.

He is a former Assistant United States Attorney and is probably best known for his prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in conjunction with the first

attack on the World Trade Center.

In a recent column, Andrew McCarthy says that some of the reports “wildly exaggerated” the government’s collection of telephone records. He has a

point, but there is something to consider even in his response.

He reminds us that the government is collecting the phone records. They are not wiretapping telephone conversations. That is a critical distinction.

He also reminds us that the Fourth Amendment does not protect telephone record information. Phone records, he says, are very different from the content of

telephone conversations. I would agree, to a point. Here is where I would disagree.

If I have your phone records, I probably don’t know what you said in the phone conversation. But I might have a reasonable guess. If you called the

local pizza parlor, I wouldn’t have any idea what type of pizza you ordered. But if you called the local Planned Parenthood on a number of occasions, I might

assume you were trying to schedule an abortion. If you called the campaign offices of a candidate, I could probably guess who you would vote for in the next

election.

Of course, you might argue that such information is irrelevant to the government since the goal of such data mining is to search for trends, patterns,

associations, and networks of terrorists. In other words, your phone record information wouldn’t be made public because it isn’t relevant to catching bad guys.

Tell that to the National Organization for Marriage that had their confidential IRS information leaked to a liberal group.

The real concern is not with Big Data. The concern is what Big Government is going to do with Big Data. The scandals over the last few weeks don’t

inspire confidence that bureaucrats will always do the right thing with our telephone records.

Throughout the media coverage of the NSA scandal has been the refrain about the need to balance liberty and security. It is a comforting line, even if I doubt it is true. We are led to believe that government officials are writing rules and establishing procedures so that we use just enough surveillance to catch the bad guys without infringing on the liberty of the good guys.

The question I frequently ask on my radio program is: Can anyone give me an example of when the government refrained from doing surveillance? If we are to believe that government bureaucrats are trying to find a balance, surely there was some time when someone said: “No, we can’t do that.” If not, we really don’t have a balance between liberty and security. We have government doing whatever it can, whenever it can without any thought about the impact on our liberty or privacy.

Another way to look at this is to compare rhetoric to reality. Senator Barack Obama and presidential candidate Barack Obama was very critical of the Patriot Act. One would think it was worse than the Espionage Act. President Barack Obama, however, has now used features of the Patriot Act to spy on Americans in ways that exceed what was done when President George W. Bush was in office. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have even used the Espionage Act to label a Fox News journalist as a possible co-conspirator in espionage.

Perhaps you are seeing a trend. When President Bush was in office, his supporters weren’t too worried about overreach because he and Attorney General John Ashcroft were in charge. Those who weren’t in power (such as Senator Barack Obama) were harshly critical of what the Republican administration was doing to fight the war on terror.

Is the government too concerned about balancing liberty and security? I don’t think so. Moreover, it seems like those who are concerned about government overreach are the ones out of power. Once they are in power, they are convinced everything’s just fine. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Despite what you have heard, Christian young people are not doing fine. That is the conclusion of Stephen Cable in his new book, Cultural Captives:

The Beliefs and Behavior of American Young Adults. Stephen Cable serves as Senior Vice-President of Probe Ministries.

His new book not only analyzes the survey Probe Ministries did with the Barna Group of emerging adults but also analyzes all of the other major

surveys (National Study of Youth and Religion, Baylor Religion Survey, General Social Survey). He discovered that even though commentators sometimes cite

these other surveys to prove that young people are doing well, all of the surveys are actually quite consistent. When you dig deeper into the data, you find they

all paint a bleak picture.

As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, the percentage of people generally who check “none of the above” for religious preference is

increasing. That is especially true of young people. In fact, the percentage of emerging adults who do not claim any affiliation with Christianity rose from 20% in

1990 to over 37% of the population today.

Stephen Cable found that only 14 percent of born-again, emerging adults combine a biblical worldview with biblical practices, such as reading the

Bible or attending church. He also found that less than 2 percent of born-again, emerging adults apply a biblical worldview to life choices. In other words, only

this small percentage has biblical beliefs on topics ranging from abortion to sex outside marriage to science and faith.

This is a major reason why Probe Ministries has developed an integrated strategy aimed at reversing these trends. The learning experience involves

an entire church congregation over a seven-week period and includes sermons, videos, original music, and additional material for individuals and small groups.

Stephen Cable’s book is a wake up call to the church. We need to reverse these ominous trends and do it quickly before the trends become even

worse.

Last week a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled that police can routinely take your DNA. It can do so if you have been arrested (but not convicted)

and use that DNA to see if it matches any samples in a national database. This procedure is certain to become routine since more than twenty-eight states

and the federal government already employ DNA testing for anyone arrested.

Supporters argue that it is merely the 21st century version of a fingerprint. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of

the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

Justice Antonin Scalia disagrees. He wrote: “Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a

national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

Both sides of this debate acknowledge that collecting DNA will help solve crimes, but Justice Scalia does not believe that is sufficient justification for

the practice. If this is the legal justification, Scalia say we could just a easily justify “taking the DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the

Transportation Security Administration needs to know the identity of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school.”

John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute writes about such overreach in his new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police

State. He paints a chilling portrait of a country where surveillance cameras, drug sniffing dogs, SWAT team raids, roadside strip searches, blood draws at DUI

checkpoints, drones, and GPS tracking devices become common place. Each day we move another step closer to a police state in America. Taking your DNA

and adding it to a national database is one more incremental step.

American citizens were upset at the news last week that the National Security Agency was secretly collecting phone record information for all calls on the Verizon network. Under the terms of a “blanket order,” the numbers of both parties, the location data, the call duration and other information was being collected.

While it is true that the contents of the calls were not recorded, people were understandable concerned about the amount of information that was collected about them. Information on any call to, from, and within the United States was in the database.

Many members of Congress have also complained. Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall protested to Attorney General Eric Holder. They said: “There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

How should we respond to this intrusion into our lives? Even before the NSA spying scandal, Joseph Farah was suggesting that Congress use the NSA to investigate the government. Essentially he has been calling for Congress to turn the tables on the Surveillance State.

He says that Congress doesn’t have to wait on the White House, the IRS, the Justice Department, or the State Department to turn over documents related to Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Reportergate, or the IRS scandal. He says Congress should subpoena the National Security Agency for the information they already have. After all, they monitor phone calls and emails. Congress doesn’t have to beg the perpetrators of these crimes for information they may never hand over to congressional committees. Nor does it have to battle over executive privilege.

This would not only be a way to collect the information necessary to investigate these scandals. It would also give Big Brother a taste of his own medicine. If NSA phone records and emails of the government were made public, I think there would be a loud outcry from government officials about the intrusive nature of the Surveillance State. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Sometimes when you fill out a form, you are tempted to check the box that says “None of the above.” More and more Americans are checking that

box when asked about their religious affiliation.

In the 1950s, around three percent checked the “none” box when asked about religion. Today that number has grown to 20 percent. The Pew

Research Center reports that the percentage of nones is growing rapidly, especially among the young. A third of adults under age 30 are religious unaffiliated.

This is the highest percentages the Pew Center has ever polled.

The nones include two groups. There are the 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics, who are nearly 6 percent of the U.S. population. Then

there are the nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation, accounting for 14 percent of the population.

The rise of the nones is one major reason for the current conflicts over religious liberty. The number of people who go to church has remained

constant over the last few decades while the percentage of nones is increasing. These two groups have strikingly different views about the place of religion in

public life. One group talks about freedom of religion while the other group talks about freedom from religion. Conflicts over public displays of religion (crosses,

Ten Commandments) and public expressions of religion (public prayers, biblical references in speeches) are inevitable.

The conflict is accentuated because a higher percentage of nones can be found in the media. News reporters are less likely to report religious people

and their ideas correctly. Hollywood producers are more likely to cast religious people in a negative light. Christians, therefore, often feel that are not

represented accurately in the media.

The division between those with religious commitments and the nones also surfaces in politics. A recent Pew study found that the nones are the

single most ideologically committed group. The only other group as committed is Evangelical Protestants.

The nones have changed the cultural and political landscape.

It may be tempting to think that the current IRS scandal is nothing more than politics as usual. After all, hasn’t every administration had an enemies

list and used the IRS to intimidate people they didn’t like?

First, it isn’t true that every administration used the IRS against their political opponents. Richard Nixon did. That was Article Two of the

impeachment drawn up against him. Bill Clinton did. Just ask Joseph Farah of World Net Daily. But even Nixon and Clinton were more selective than what we

have seen so far in this scandal.

That, in fact, is the real issue to this scandal. Every day we are learning more and more about the IRS targeting of conservative groups. The IRS

subjected many to intrusive questions guaranteed to delay or deny them tax-exempt status. Others who already had 501(c)(3) or a 501(c)(4) status were

audited. We are also learning that it wasn’t just one IRS office doing the targeting. It also now appears that some have been trying to cover it up the scandal.

It is also worth noting the political affiliation of those involved. The president is a Democrat. The Senators who wrote to the IRS urging scrutiny were

all Democrats. Even those at the IRS involved in the targeting were favorable to Democratic candidates. Tim Carney in an investigative piece in the Washington

Examiner looked at the campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. “In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President

Obama or liberal Senator Sherrod Brown.”

Peggy Noonan is rightly concerned about a scandal she calls “systemic, ideological, and focused on political ends.” She asks: “What does it mean

when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as

targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads?”

I believe this scandal will have long-term effects. The IRS already had a poor public image. This scandal has made it so much worse.

What will our digital future be like? Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have an idea and express it in their book, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. Eric Schmidt is the Executive Chairman of Google. Jared Cohen is the Director of Google Ideas and was formerly with the U.S. State Department. The books illustrates the adage: you hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Our high-tech future will automate our lives and improve them with new computer-controlled devices. We are talking about much more that having your coffee maker turn on at the appropriate hour.

We will also have access to so much more data, which they believe will make us wiser and more discerning. They promise a “new accountability.” We will be less likely to be misled by charlatans or dictators.

But they also warn of a darker digital future. Although they acknowledge that the Internet is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” they also see how authoritarian regimes have walled off sections of the Internet they don’t want their citizens to see. They predict a “Balkanization of the Internet” where more and more leaders in these countries close off onramps to the information superhighway.

Their book describes three types of Internet filtering systems: the blatant, the sheepish, and the politically acceptable. In previous commentaries, I have talked about how governments have stepped in to prevent their citizens from accessing various Internet avenues. Sometimes it might be minor. Years ago, a French court told Yahoo that is had to “make it impossible” for web surfers to purchase Nazi memorabilia.

Often the filtering is blatant. The authors call China “the world’s most active and enthusiastic filterer of information.” Communist China has constructed a firewall that prevents their people from reading articles about Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or dozens of other topics.

Their book is a reminder that our digital future will not only be influenced by new technologies but by old political realities.

Wesley Smith argues in a recent commentary that the “biggest threat to American freedom, in my opinion, comes from the erection of an

unaccountable bureaucratic state.” You might expect him to say that since he has written about medical ethics and patient power. But he goes on to quote

from left leaning law professor Jonathan Turley who essentially says the same thing.

Jonathan Turley is a professor at the George Washington University Law School. He recently expressed his concerns with the government

bureaucracy in a Washington Post column. He says: “The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the

vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed,

unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major

regulations.”

Think of that for a moment. Congress passed over a hundred laws, but the federal agencies created nearly 3,000 rules. While we might have some

recourse through elections to change Congress, we have no ability to affect any meaningful change on the government bureaucracy. This is rulemaking with

little or no accountability.

The federal bureaucracy not only has superseded the legislative branch. It has also replaced a significant part of the judicial branch. Jonathan Turley

explains that when an average citizen goes to court, he or she is more likely to have a case heard within the bureaucracy.

He says: “As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create

administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court.”

The fourth branch of government is growing in both size and influence. Liberals and conservatives warn it is eroding our liberty.