dragnet nation discusses intelligence gathering and the right to privacy. as always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. ♪ yesterday was the final day for the state department to take public comments on expanding the keystone pipeline. more than 200 million comments -- the washington post reporting a possible sanctions against russia for actions in ukraine could affect u.s. businesses to the figure of billions of dollars. good morning. employment figures out for february. we will look at the

figures through the course of our first 45 minutes. we want to invite those of you who are unemployed to call not only to talk about the job numbers as you see them but to talk about your job search experience as well. our first 45 minutes, those of you who are unemployed, give us a call on one of two lines this morning. offer thoughts on social media as well. and sendr or facebook us e-mails. the wall street journal offering analysis of the numbers that were released yesterday when it comes to jobs figures. 175,000 jobs created. 6.7% is the unemployment number. here are some of the analysis

from the wall street journal. for the first time in 46 months, more unemployed people found a of then dropped out workforce. a broad measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time who want a full-time job and others marginally fellhed to the workforce 12.6%. the lowest level since november 2008. unemployment remains stubbornly high for many of the workers. 10.5 million americans unable to find work last month. the labor force participation rate fell to the store close. the ranks of the long-term swelled.d it is those unemployed folks that we are interested in hearing from to talk about your job search. call --ant to give us a

we mentioned the social media sites at the beginning of the program. a couple of comments being made on the facebook page this morning when it comes to this question. this is lauren -- "applying for jobs left and right for a few years. nothing. not even retail or cashier. i figure a paycheck is a paycheck but it is tough out there. very discouraging." agrees used to guarantee. now the guarantee is to the government that you will be in continuous debt for a long time ." "with the job market like 1000

applications 21 applicant, it's not easy here." that may reflect some of your experience. comment not only on facebook and twitter but on the phone lines as well. we have divided them regionally this morning. brian inrt with madison, mississippi. good morning. caller: good morning. -- i'm aence has been graduate of the university of southern mississippi. i have a masters degree. i studied the liberal arts field. it's exceedingly difficult to get a job. we need to have a national discussion on the job situation for college graduates who have been ignored. we have a lot of discontent right now in our country and all across the country we need to talk about jobs availability for

college graduates. people with masters degree looking for jobs. the lineal suppan told all of our lives to go to school and get a job. host: what is your degree in? caller: a background in political science. you can always be told that you can get a job and policy -- it's hard to get a job in anything. even in retail right now. to get ondifficult the economic ladder. we need to have a national discussion on getting jobs and student loan debt. this is a big issue that needs to be talked about. host: up next is donna. talking about job figures and job search experience. caller: good morning. i'm very frustrated.

at getting myrd ba when the country was experiencing a lot of social change. i was a french major but i was persuaded by a so-called well-meaning psychology professor who told me i was too bright to waste my time majoring in french. why didn't i go to sociology ? i listen to him. by the time i was a college senior, i couldn't wait to get out into the world. i did. i took menial jobs and i treated myself to a three-month tour of europe come a traveling through england, france, spain and italy

for three months. that was in 1973. that was when nixon was impeached. host: how is it affecting you in the modern-day? kurt in ohio. caller: good morning. glad to be on. honestly, what's going on with the unemployment is a bit ridiculous. host: are you unemployed? caller: yes. ?ost: for how long caller: about three months now. host: what was your work before you became unemployed? caller: i was a roofer. season.ofing the whole because i got laid off, i'm on unemployment. it's the hardest thing to get a

.old of anybody to talk to them even the littlest question. i believe that's where the flaw is. communication and a lack of people working at unemployment to help you. that's what i want to get across to they. host: are you currently searching for a job? no, i'm not. i will be going back to work. but the unemployment forces to look for work even if you are seasonal. explain hold of them to it to them is unbelievable. host: that's kurt from ohio. here's lawrence from pennsylvania. caller: i'm also a seasonal worker. i'm the guy that builds the bridges and your roots. we don't qualify for unemployment. 49.5%, that's why it looks

like it dropped. it's because all of us hard-working americans willing your road so that you can drive where you want to go -- host: why do you not qualify ? caller: we are seasonal workers. we don't quarter where work. we don't get the 49.5% that you make out of your high quarter and you don't qualify. the only quarter i've worked a lot of hours is in the summer. we'll have a short window to work in pennsylvania. 't work through the the wi winter. when you're not working, you're not hunting for another job then? caller: i have to. there's nothing out there. what can i do?

concrete winds freezing or put blacktop down when it's freezing. you can do these things in the cold. the government sets those regulations and then turns around and screws us out of unemployment. the numbers breakdown by sector as far as job creation. professional business services, 79,000 jobs added. construction, 15,000 jobs added. manufacturing sector, 6000 jobs added. --eral government jobs unemployment by sector. , ifhat large number of 6.7% you look at people with agriculture, there is 11.4% rate , and construction it's 12.8%. in professional business

services, eight point six percent. it goes on from there. -- in professional business services, 8.6%. in northherry carolina. hi. caller: hi. host: good morning. caller: i'm 58 and i've had several jobs. i was in health insurance for home healthnd then care for six years until 2008 when the crash of this. the people i was taking care of -- their spouses and families lost their jobs. so i lost my job. is, i was a self-employed but had paid those five years into the employment security commission thinking that something i had to do. they even issued me a number.

it, iwhenever the crash filed for benefits saying that i was self-employed and i cannot get my benefits. i argued with them back and forth. talk with these people. i even wrote president obama letter. the insurance commission out here in north carolina finally f -- i didn't get my money until last year. i never got the benefits. even though they gave me a number and took my quarterly pay for my unemployment insurance. i'm suffering from the 2008 crash. somebodyompete with that can work for $10 an hour.

i can't even get a job at a gas station. or at a restaurant. just 58 and they won't hire somebody. that doesn't keep me from trying. i don't want you to think that i'm not looking for a job. from theuffering previous administration that took all our jobs. 'm well aware of that. host: you can add your own comments on the phone lines or social media. the huffington post writing that harry reid will introduce new legislation on tuesday to restore long-term unemployment uninsurance for 2 million workers. able reauthorize the competition for six months when the benefits lapsed for 1.3 million workers. reed's plan is to use savings

from the recently passed farm bill in order to offset the cost of the measure and win republican support. made the jobns figures that were released yesterday their topic. senator rob portman commented. >> it's been five years since the expert said the recession was over. for millions of americans, it feels like it never ended. we're living through the weakest economic recovery since world war ii. a lot of folks are struggling to make ends meet. unemployment remains stubbornly high. the number of long-term unemployed is actually at record levels. these statistics only tell half the story. 11 million americans have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work altogether. poverty rates have gone up. salaries have gone down. andaverage family numbering $4000 less than they did just five years ago. wall street is doing just fine. but with paychecks down and the cost of health care, college

education and a tank of gas going up, this middle-class squeeze is strangling the american dream. fairly, the policies come out of and they don't work. congress believes we can spend our way to prosperity. i guess they still do. despite record levels of debt, the president's budget this week asked for hundreds of billions of new government spending and over $1 trillion in new taxes. the same old story. washington has tried more taxing and more spending and an unprecedented amount of borrowing. yet, here we are. host: taking a look at the keystone pipeline. the washington post has the story. opponents of the pipeline the delivered 2 million comments urging the president to the proposal.

than 500,000 advocates for the pipeline organized by the american petroleum institute have submitted comments in favor of the project. advocatesn to 500,000 by the american petroleum there is janet in florida. caller: i'm a registered nurse and i lost my job in february because my company lost their contract. my specialty is telephone triage . i had been doing that for 24 years. 30ave applied for nearly telephone triage jobs since i lost my job. my age is that working against me. i'm 64 years old. work.ntinuing to look for

luckier than most because i use my emergency fund to pay off my mortgage and pay off my car payments. being forcedng at into take social security at $1500 a month to survive from here on out if i'm unable to get a job. agepretty convinced it's my that's going to work against me in trying to get another job. host: with your triage experience, can you apply to another form of triage work? caller: telephone triage is very specific. if i want to get some other type of nursing position, it would require probably a minimum of ,ix months further education having to do a registered nurse refresher course.

of course, that is expensive, too. i don't know what else to do. .ost: alpine california jim, hello. caller: i don't think these numbers that washington keeps on spouting out are really what's going on in the country. i've been unemployed for more than two years now. the air force decided to retire raq.ecause i got hurt i i've seen homeless people all over this country. i've had a lot of jobs and hardly any of them pay a living wage. stop qualifying for unemployment, they stopped counting you. you're worried about the percentage. anywhere from 25%-35%. host: what's your

background like? caller: i spent 17 years in the military and got a bachelors degree and worked as a parole officer for a while. i was asked to resign from that because of symptoms of ptsd. i asked the va to get my job back. they did not help at all and then the air force decided to retire me. i was left hanging in the lurch. i've been forced into retirement. the jobsll work but i' aren't there and they are not helping the vets very much. host: carl from pennsylvania. caller: i was just calling because i'm retired but i take part-time job work and you can get them now. there are certain places where people topart-time

take care of the kitchens for homeless at the salvation army -- that sort of thing. now, the part-time job is people who work full-time. with all the programs the government seems to be coming alive with, they all seem to be that cause people to lose their jobs. host: some of the information from the labor department takes a look at wages. the average hourly earnings for all employees climbed nine cents to $24.31. earnings were up $.52 from a year earlier at 2.2%. workers are hardly raking in the dough. the trend in wage growth has most of ther recovery. is savings rates for workers

that inflation has slowed, providing a small gain in real spending power. you to give your experiences in hunting for a job or searching for a job. 6.7% as the current job wage rate -- current unemployment rate. morning --is morning president obama is in florida talking about the administration's opportunity agenda. here's what he had to say from yesterday. [video clip] what drew manyis of your parents and grandparents to america. we have to restore that idea for your generation. so that everybody has the same chance michelle and i did. that's why we are working on

what we call an opportunity agenda to create more jobs and train more workers with new skills. to make sure hard work is rewarded with a paycheck that is worth it. to make sure everybody can get health care when they need it so nobody has to be in financial distress. [applause] and for the students here, you may not think about these issues all the time. you're spending a lot of time on homework and sports and this and that. but you also often times your own family struggle. and you worry about it. one of the single most important that everyking sure young person in america has access to a world-class education. [applause] and firstpresident lady will stay in florida throughout the weekend. the politics discussion in the washington post writes that the

president will stay in touch with the events that are happening in the ukraine. the post torry riding the same. the decision by the first family to spend two days outside of washington does not mean in .repidation throughout the week white house officials acknowledge that the president's travel schedule is subject to changes depending on the world events. aat has become routine for president whose annual christmas to hawaii was delayed for three consecutive years. mark from new haven, connecticut. hi. i've been unemployed for over three years. i have exhausted all my unemployment benefits.

i'm barely getting by. get -- it and tried to got a security clause and they're looking at me like, how can you do anything? i'm 59 years old and i'm out there struggling. i will have to move in with my mother at 90. host: what is your experience like? caller: i've been a tractor-trailer driver and now i'm security. apprentice. i had to change to a tractor-trailer driver and then my mom got sick. i had to take care of her. i had to go on family leave and now i'm a security guard and still can't find work. from let's hear from ed

new york. -- danielle from new york. fo er: i've been unemployed since 2009 when my job was outsourced. i used to be a librarian. i have looked for every type of job known to mankind. i have applied for hotel room cleaner, cashier, things in my field. the last job i had was last summer. it was basically a minimum-wage job that lasted for about six months. i don't know where the jobs are. i have not been able to find one. i'm just kind of fed up right now. host: you said your job was outsourced. what does that mean? caller: the company i used to work for basically send the job

over to india. they started taking parts from to company and selling them companies that would do the work for cheaper in other countries. work, ao do indexing specialty of librarianship, and they found a company that was doing the exact same work in india so my department was laid off and the work was sent to india to be done. host is your background in library sciences? caller: yes. host: you seeking unemployment benefits? caller: those were exhausted while ago. i'm basically kind of still looking for work. fortunately, i have a family member who lives with me and they pay rent. that's how i'm getting by right now. host: talk a little bit about your week to week looking forward. caller: it's an internet search.

i get on all the job sites. internetccess to the and i'm looking for any type of job that i've had any experience in because i've also done medical administrative work. the resume and after a week or so if you don't hear anything, just keep moving. it's like being a moving target. you just keep moving until you hear from someone. host: that's danielle from the bronx. this is in light of job numbers that came out yesterday. 175 thousand jobs added in february. the employment rate at 6.7%. to add to the conversation, access our tweet.k page and

we referenced what was going on in russia. a couple more stories with that. the associated press saying that zescow is considering a free of u.s. military inspections under arms control treaties and retaliation in washington's -- to washington's decision to halt military cooperation with russia. move ass seeking a u.s. a reason to suspend u.s. inspections in russia in line with the start nuclear arms reduction treaty and the 2011 vienna agreement between russia and nato on confidence building measures. a story taking a look at the business side of it. particularly u.s. businesses that invest in russia. in light of sanctions via the esited states, u.s. business

fear billions at risk. sanctions will not be imposed if u.s. allies in russia resisted. for europe are far larger than the united states. the country is important to u.s. firms as well. exportsion in annual and $14 billion in direct investment in manufacturing plants and offices. it is up next in philadelphia. is up next in philadelphia. caller: could you ask them if they voted for obama and that i havee still happy echo been out of work for a year. it stinks out here. it's not getting any better. we are not -- obama is doing all these things were jobs. what happened the first two years when he had total control? he had the house and the senate.

nobody could have stopped anything. he squandered his first term. up.so fed when he squandered the first term, i didn't vote for him the second term because i knew it was not going to happen. about a week ago, you had something about manufacturing. wake up, people. that means robotics. look at gm. there is very few people in the plant in florida. it's robotics. it's replacing people. go into your local cbs. host: what's your work experience like? caller: i'm a mechanical engineer. to give you an example of how engineering -- look at the local cvs. though in there and look at the checkout. their automated now. all the stores are going for self checkout. you are limiting cashier's.

there will be less jobs in manufacturing. i would like to know if the people calling and that they are still happy about that. nevada. good morning. say -- i just wanted to them going ond to and on with the trickle-down economics and they don't want to raise the minimum wage or saving food stamps or spend the money for education and they don't like the health care law that was actually proposed in the first place by mitt romney and the republican party and president reagan. and bob dole. about -- are you unemployed? caller: yes.

i was unemployed until i finally transitioned and got into social security. i'm trying to make my point here. everybody keeps wanting to bring the president -- blame the president. he did not ever have full control of the senate. was -- they only had 59. they were not doing any voting at the time. host: alex in maryland. my experience for unemployment has been pretty bad. i actually have been unemployed now for about a year or so. the type of work are used to do -- i used to do warehouse work and i used to -- i was in the military before. i only served about two years in

the military. i got out on honorable discharge. it has been rough looking around for work. about where stories i live that. my problem is, i don't have transportation. to where i have to get to. the streets here are not too friendly with people who walk. i just got hit a couple of times. walk a mileo even from where i'm living at to go find a bus. i went up to cross the highway part -- host: and nobody to take you back and forth thh? caller: exactly. it sucks.

when i was in the military, i a navy longshoremen. host: any chance of applying that to the eastern shore or up towards baltimore? closer to i was there, i would. or if i had some better transportation. now, i'm right along the lines of being homeless. it's not good. comment that one will help out jobs. i really think there is a lot of jobs out there that require college education for crew jobs. that don't necessarily need it. of those jobs could --

they don't necessarily need that college education. that would help free up the market. host: alex from maryland sharing his experience on job hunting. the online applications don't give a person a way to sell themselves. we are taking comments from those of you unemployed because of the new numbers coming out. the topic of unemployment benefits came up during our newsmakers program which was taped this week. you can see it tomorrow at 10:00. texas gave hism thoughts on whether congress should extend unemployment benefits. [video clip] got the wrongve question. it's not how long do we spend most of these benefits but how soon do we get people into good paying jobs. the focus is wrong in that case. i actually think it's a drag up on th on the economy.

i want to turn to the jobs agenda. that's where the focus ought to be to help folks. host: that full program is tha againt 10:00 and at 6:00. next call from tennessee. unemployed. last time i went on was in august of last year. since i'm a construction worker, i use multiple states to work in . my benefits run out in november. i went to ohio to put a claim in there. they denied me because they said the reasoning i got laid off --

the job was over. i appealed that and they came back and they gave me a year to -- they said i did not have enough weeks to draw. i had plenty of weeks. $230 a week to draw unemployment. i went back and contacted the companies and got the discharge dates. with thecalendar amounts i worked las those weeks. one of those weeks was one day. that one day paid $120. i had 24 weeks. . appealed it they called back and denied it again. i finally got a hold of somebody in ohio and they said we never got anything from your north northna job or your n

dakota job. i have not worked in north carolina or north dakota in years. host: are you doing it by yourself? caller: i'm doing it by myself. going through the system. host: how do you manage day-to-day because you're not working echo how do you support yourself? caller: my niece has helped me out with house payments. ed me out.has help utilities got shut off for a while. now they are denying me because they want to change the work year and they are taking nine weeks away from my work because they admit i had the 24 weeks but now they want to change it to another quarter and and i'm again. host: that's grady from

.ennessee you can add your own experience on the phone lines this morning for the remainder of our time. sam brown on this program many times. because of a decision that was made by the kansas supreme court. the court handed down a mixed ruling on school finance friday, setting up a new round of jousting between republicans and democrats and education officials over what the state should do next. the court upheld parts of a lower court decision, agreeing ure needs toislat restore about $129 million a year in certain kinds of

equalization aid to help poor school districts pay for capital improvements and fund their local option budgets or it is to find some other way to restore equity in these two programs. you can find out the full story on lawrence journal world's website. natasha joining us from michigan. caller: good morning. for a number of years, i was a pharmaceutical rep. my company was bought out by a larger company. i did work for the larger basis, on a temporary part-time. you can't expect me to move into a job that someone else has had with the company for a long time. i have sent out numerous resumes secondaryme

investigations. got to weigh wo-wayications -- t qualifications. i've been incensed that our country has $1 billion that they can give to another country while borrowing the money from are people inere this country that have exhausted their unemployment and are not able to have any legislation passed to extend that. then come yesterday, i was listening to some talk about the

possibilities of sending liquefied gas to the ukraine or some parts of europe. my heating bill this month is $525. believe you should help at home first. it you talk about jobs, jobs, jobs, but that's all it is. talk. really looking to help people that are unemployed. i realize you have to help yourself. as i mentioned, i have applied it's, we interviews -- will call you. when they say that, forget about it. host: that's natasha from troy, michigan. you may have been watching the coverage of the opening of the senate on thursday. the dalai lama opened it with prayer.

that's video from that on thursday's event. china weighing in officially about the action and the prayer this morning saying that on friday they denounced the dalai lama's rare. the spokesman for the china ministry of foreign affairs characterized it as conniving anti-china separatist forces. stop interfering with tibet related affairs. russell, good morning. from pennsylvania. i have been unemployed for just about a year now. for a wide searching variety of jobs. i've handed out so many applications, either online or

the old-fashioned paper way. far, in a years time, i will 've only had one interview. they say, thank you for your time but we've chosen another candidate. there is a slight possibility that maybe my age might be a part of that. i'm getting close to 60 now. see benefitsto extended because i am out there trying. i really am. i am for jobs that i do qualify for. but no takers. host: your background is and what? and variousil cleaning jobs. even transportation. host: what kind of jobs are you applying for? caller: i've been applying for different nursing homes for the

laundry section or housekeeping. i've been applying a different retail stores and grocery stores, things of that nature. all things i should qualify for. host: sarah is up next from california. hi. caller: good morning. since been unemployed november 11, 2011. i've been looking for jobs in whatever i can find that i'm qualified for. currently, i'm working in a weekl store for 17 hours a for a minimum wage. to finish.started i really don't know -- i will be losing my house very soon. i have a son that i'm taking care of and i don't know what to

do. you,r as those supporting are you getting support from other people? i have some savings that i started last month. i'm taking out that money to pay my rent. host: here is cheryl from midlothian, virginia. caller: i have been listening to everyone and many of us who are over 50 are in a similar situation. i have children who are in their 20's and they have struggled, too. but they have networking that they are able to do through their friends. a lot of them have been looking for work for a long time. we can put out hundreds of resumes and use search engines

and search things such as monster and of course, it's like putting something out into the ethernet. we do not receive answers. we try to use our networking but at this stage in our life, the networking is not as effective. i really don't know if i have an answer for this except that things have changed so agetically, people our think they can automatically look at our applications. usually, we don't hear anything. all the young people i know who have compositions have pretty much done it by word of mouth. versus the people that i know has are over 50, that not been true. i'm not certain exactly what the answer is for people who are over 50 looking for work.

us i do know that some of have worked overseas because we have not found anything here. sharing her experiences with the job search. we appreciate those of you who participated this morning. you may have seen coverage of cpac as they hold their event in d.c. we will be airing the last day of that. shot just before activities take place this money. starting at 12:40 this afternoon, live coverage, including newt gingrich, and coulter and sarah palin -- ann coulter and sarah palin. our next guest joining us from cpac. ralph reed talking about issues related to religion and politics. storyon, a usa today takes a look at the house of representatives and how it handles ethics cases.

paul singer will be along later for that as washington journal continues. ♪ >> we do not have a criminal investigation. -- enforcingt role the federal securities laws to make sure wall street abides by the rules. they write the rules -- but we don't have the criminal authority. we don't have the authority to andg civil actions negligence actions against the those who violate the federal securities laws. them to jail but can assess civil penalties. one of our penalties is not as high as we would like it to be. those who commit wrongdoing to disgorge their ill-gotten gains from their

ongoing. and we have the power to bar somebody from the securities industry so that they can't live another day to the front again. , sunday nightte at 8:00 on c-span's q and a. "washington journal" continues." cpac taking place in washington, d.c. our first guest of the morning, ralph reed with the faith and freedom coalition, joining us from cpac. welcome. guest: thank you. good to be with you. host: what is the freedom and faith coalition? guest: it is a grassroots public policy organization that works to advance public policy that

strengthens the family, the institution of marriage and the sanctity of life. fiscal discipline and a defense posture that will allow us to defend america's legitimate national security interests and assist key allies like israel. we have about 800,000 members and supporters and 400 local chapters around the country. we are active in advancing the public policy and legislation at the state and local levels. host: what has your experience been like so far? caller: it's great. people are excited about some of s.ese potential 2016 aspirate that has been the main focus. you had a full program of that. in addition to that, people are really focused on november of 2014. the senate is on the bubble.

i think the house has largely slipped away from the democrats fallingof obama's approval ratings after the difficulties of the obama care rollout and the website and so forth. also, continuing economic concerns. i don't think there is an overconfidence but i think for these activists, they watch the senate slip away from them it is very disappointing ways. 2012 -- some because of candidate performance and some because of strong candidates on the other side. butmap lays out very well after the last two cycles, nobody's overconfident. host: the hill newspaper here in cpac.wrote about se social issues are suddenly libertarian issues talking not so much about gay marriage and

those sorts of issues. what do you think of that headline? what do you think of the folks you represent? i would reallyuest: defer to the organizers. i spoke from the stage yesterday morning and i talked about all those issues. i talked about life, marriage -- i specifically called general holder to task for his comments before the national association of the state attorneys general two weeks ago in which he essentially counsel them that whether or not they defended their state constitutions and their laws was basically up to them. i think that undermines the rule of law. not to mention, undermining the most time-honored and central procreating socializing institution in western civilization.

namely marriage. the issue that my members care about, which is not just about dollars and cents but about weht and wrong -- believe america's greatness is not just based on our gdp or the .ize of our checkbooks it's whether or not husbands love their wives or whether m others and fathers are staying together and our neighborhoods are safe. these are moral and spiritual issues. we don't think that public policy can achieve those things. we think those things take place in people's souls and in their hearts. policy can public give those matters of the heart either headwind or a tailwind. as with other moral issues like civil rights, public policy is either helping to advance those things or hindering him. -- hindering them.

ssueou take the moral i of civil rights, martin luther king said you cannot pass a law to make a white man love me but you can pass a law that stops him from lynching me and that's pretty important. when it comes to these issues of strengthening family, marriage, community and schools, we think public policy takes a role. that has been a highlight this weekend. host: ralph reed of the freedom and faith coalition. you were invited to talk to him as well. the numbers around the screen. we have a recent survey by the public religion research institute. it talks about a single issue

when it comes to same-sex marriage. it also talks about how people view it in light of their religious beliefs. 84% of white protestants said it was a conflict of their religious beliefs. that dropped to 78% in 2013. guest: i would have to look at that survey. i can just caution you that when you are dealing with that survey of white evangelical self identified -- that subsample will only be about 25-30% of the larger sample. a movement of only six points in 10 years is statistically within the margin of error of that poll. i can tell you this -- i think what concerns people of faith is

theperception and th in dominant media that their 's roletion of marriage in creating human happiness -- this is just a social and scientific fact, they are happier and financially better off. they are emotionally better off. they are psychologically better adjusted. children raised in those marriages do better in school and are less likely to be chemically dependent and less likely to end up in the criminal justice system. what breaks my heart and breaks the heart of the faith community is this false perception -- the deliberate mischaracterization of our affirmation of marriage we are expressing hostility towards gays and lesbians. our faith teaches us -- the men

-- jesus devoted the bulk of his time to going out and reaching out and including the outcast, the despised, sexual sinners, a bold ,irst, lepers -- adulterers lepers -- he went out of his way to demonstrate that if you are ,ated, despised come outcast marginalized, those are the ones i go to. this idea that our affirmation of marriage expresses hostility towards gays and lesbians i troubling for our community. i think we are struggling with -- how do we as a community

expressed that marriage is something that should be strengthened and honored and should receive certain benefits as a matter of public policy and not be perceived as feeling any animosity to somebody who has a different view? host: phone lines are on your screen. first call is from catherine from ohio. democrats line. you're on. go ahead. caller: good morning. i have two questions. the first question is, i'm a born-again christian and i'm sanctified and filled with gods holy ghost. i believe it's the evidence of speaking in other tongues. want religion to dictate what people do? as long as i get to choose my religion, i don't want anybody from another religion telling me what i can and cannot do. i don't want a catholic or a

muslim or an indian -- i don't want a baptist because i'm not. abortion.t abortion, but i am 100% for birth control. and if people had access to birth control, most abortions would not be needed, and to hate young people and blame young girls because they are pregnant i think is morally wrong. we have to hold men responsible. i have been pregnant six times, my husband and i have. and threeee children ugly miscarriages. not one time did i ever get myself pregnant. my husband was always 100% involved. so blaming young girl or women --general -- i know that we as a woman, a 60 five-year-old woman, we are the majority, and we will either vote you out, or

we will do something because we are tired of being held responsible. host: catherine, we will let our guest response. mr. reed, go ahead. guest: that is an awful lot to respond to. let me start with the first question. i am not sure i completely understood the question, but i gathered that you are basically saying how do you decide whose religion to legislate. i think it is a fair question, but it is not a fair characterization of either my position or the position of faith and freedom coalition. we don't believe that our should beprecepts legislated. there are a lot of things that we believe as people of faith, things that we believe about the bible, that we would not seek to to the larger society. for us, it is a matter of principles, some derived from natural law, some derived from scripture, some derived from common sense that we think strengthen the family, marriage,

protect civil rights including the right to life, and we just think that you can create a better and good society by enacting sound public policy that strengthens those institutions. in the end, we just do not believe that government, however well-intentioned, can come in and do the job of those institutions when they fail. so when a mother and father failed to care for a child, government should come in and try to assist but we do not believe it can ever do as good a job as the mother and father. we do not believe the criminal justice system or the schools can do what mothers and fathers should be doing at home, and so raison d'être, if you will, is not to legislate our faith. it is to legislate the sound public policy, the many principles of which are found in our faith, but you do not have to share our faith to share

our principles. on the issue of abortion and contraception, our organization does not oppose contraception. we mostly have -- we have members, mostly catholics, who believe as members of their faith that contraception, at least artificial contraception is wrong. ima protestant. i do not share the theological view, but i am certainly sympathetic to the notion that when you decouple, sexuality from the institution of marriage that you end up with a lot of children either borne out of wedlock, and we now have 40% of all children born out of wedlock in america, and you also lead to abortion because contraception is never 100% effective, as we know, and the failure rate in some cases can be notoriously high, but we do not want to limit the availability of it, and it is readily available, often a very inexpensive prices for either men and women. as a matter of public policy, we

want to encourage and a firm sexuality within the institution of marriage and we want to affirm childbearing within that institution. but we are now pointing a finger of condemnation or judgment to those who make other moral judges. -- choices. we do think the evidence is pretty well in that both abortion and out of wedlock birth rates are not good for the child. in a case of abortion, the child loses their life. we think many women are permanently as a matter of health, future childbearing, and other ways are harmed, and we think children being born out of wedlock -- we think that debate is really largely over. i think the verdict of social science is in, and so again we are not condemning people who make a different choice, but we are saying if you look at the way the sexual revolution played out, and if you look at the social and cultural carnage that resulted from people saying well, it really does not matter. if it feels good, do it.

has worked.nk that so that is why we advocate marriage and family. up, robert from kentucky. republican line. hi. caller: good morning. i just want to say to mr. reed that i've seen him speak many , really likereally what he has to say. i'm going to get off the subject of religion and kind of hop on education, if i might. and what i was wondering is maybe you can opine about this on what we can do about the crisis that we have in our education system will stop my son goes to the number one ranked school in reading and the number two ranked school in our district in math. in 2012, he was given as a an election quiz,

and question number three on the election was stated that the president was the one that makes lots. -- laws. of course we all know the president is not make laws, he is the one who signs the bill into law. so i went to the school system, and they are very nice, and try to get this changed on his quest to allow them to learn the facts , and they basically told me i was being too hard and that he would learn this stuff in the fourth, fifth, six grade the right way. well, that did not separate well with me. and here is what he goes to -- for the first time in our history, we reelected a president with 7.8% unemployment, 44 million people out of work, and $3.25 gas. how do you accomplish that? you accomplished by not having a good curriculum in our school systems. host: robert from kentucky, thank you. mr. reed. guest: we strongly support

education reform, specifically standards-based education reform. we are not big fans of common core, primarily because of the way it is laid out and we think some of the standards that have been offered by common core are off-base. we don't want a national curriculum, frankly. we don't have a problem with standards and saying that everybody ought to be able to read and write and everybody ought to be able to add and subtract and perform basic skills, including at this point computer skills and internet skills, but we are not excited about that being imposed at the national level. in any event, even though it is not as popular as it was, maybe 10, 15 years ago, we do belief that students should be tested. we do believe -- we do not think they should be over tested. we do not think they should be taught merely to test. but if we are spending all this money on education, and in the district of columbia, it is over

$30,000 per student, we ought to know whether or not they are learning. so we support that. we also support reforms and the teacher tenure. we think the teachers ought to be evaluated based on whether or not they are doing a good job in the classroom. we certainly stand behind and beside teachers. we think they are heroes in our society. they are out there every single day on the front lines caring for children. are dealings who with difficulties at home or where a mother or father may not be there or may not be doing their job adequately. we think teachers are the unsung heroes in our society, so we are not seeking to criticize them, but we do think that if there is a teacher in a classroom that is not doing their job, we don't think they should be guaranteed a lifetime job anymore than anybody else in society. finally, we support charters. i should preface this by saying that i don't believe that school

choice is the answer to everything that ails our educational system. k-12. i do not think it is a panacea. i do not think it is a magic wand, but i do think if you look at what is going on in louisiana with the program that's governor bobby jindal has implemented, you look at what has happened in milwaukee, new york city, and here in d.c., before president obama tried to terminate funding for it, we had a scholarship program here in the district of columbia that we have been able to reinstate some funding for, and we know that these students, or lowerhom are poor middle class, most of whom are minority, we know that they learn more, they do better, they score better. there is a charter school in new york city that mayor -- newly elected, inaugurated mayor bill de blasio is trying to kick out of a public school building. he cannot close the school, but he is trying to basically make sure they don't have anywhere to

meet. and if you don't have a facility, you can't really have a school. and that school has the highest schoolof any fifth grade in math in the entire state of new york, so we know the students do better. all we are saying is let's create more of a marketplace where children and parents have more choice. we do not think it solves everything, but if somebody is trapped in a school that is failing, where they are not safe and where they cannot learn, we think this is not just an educational issue, it is a civil and human rights issue. twitter, reed, from there is this question for you -- would you be willing to admit that most people would like their government to make their laws based on reason and not on faith? does that make sense? is a: well, i think it false dichotomy. as i have said, we are not asking anybody to take the book of leviticus in the old testament or numbers or

deuteronomy, which is the mosaic law -- or we are not asking any ready to take the sermon on the mount, which is the new testament of jesus, and put a bill number on it and pass it. i think everything that i have expressed this morning and everything that faith and ,reedom coalition stands for natural law, common sense, reason, call it whatever you want to -- saying that children are better off when their parents get married, that is just a fact of social science. it also happens to be something that is taught in my faith, but you do not have to share my faith to share my public policy views. there are people in or organization that are jewish, , people muslim, hindu who don't have any faith at all, but they share our public policy view. pew researchd, center put out a poll recently taking a look at millennials,

and one of the things that they asked millennials was about the religious beliefs. 36% said the phrase "a religious person" describes every wall. compared to 55% of the baby bloomers, and they're religioustly less than their predecessors, the gen xers. what do you think about this trend? guest: first of all, if you look at that poll and you drill down on it, the more secular views of the millennials, the rise of the ne," it is now about one out of every five americans does not profess to have any religious affiliation at all. i think there is a little bit of over interpretation of this data. if you actually talk to those same people, the vast majority of them say that they believe in god.

the overwhelming authority thing that they pray regularly. -- the overwhelming majority say that they pray regularly. a lot of memory the bible, many e bible is thee word of god, but they say they are not a religious person. so there issue is not with god or faith, but their issue is with religiosity and religious institutions. there has been a loss of affection and admiration for institutions across the board, whether it is organized boards because of the steroid scandal, wall street because of the scandal, washington, and this is also affected the church. it has affected the catholic church because of some of the difficulties that have gone through, and the evangelical world as well. i'm confident that as we do a better job of making it clear that what we are really talking about in terms of our faith is

something that will make them happier, make them more fulfilled, and allow them to be closer connected to their creator in their god as they understand him to be, that those folks will come home. so we have got to do a better job of that. the other thing i would say, and you are right that it was higher for the gen xers. it was also higher for the baby boomers. but you have to remember that religiosity tends to go into a valley when people are off of college or they are in their late teens and early 20's. then they do two things. they get married and they have children. their religiosity or their faith quotient increases. we have seen this with every generation. what has happened with this generation that has affected the religiosity is they are delaying marriage and they are delaying childbearing. when i was getting married away yearsyears ago, -- 27

ago, the average age of a female getting married was 21 and the average age of a male westway six. today, the average age of a fema getting married today is a 26 and the average age -- of a male was 26. today, the average age of a female getting married is 26. so the result is they are getting to church later. that is usually what brings them back to church is getting married and having children. host: ralph reed from the faith and freedom coalition joining us. he is the founder and chairman, part of cpac, which you can also see on c-span. covered starting at 12:40 this afternoon. randy from california, you were up next. independent line. hi. hi, pedro. it has been a long time. i am taking some fresh air because i am nervous. the last time i called in, it was on a friday. that i like to say really feel privileged with speaking to ralph reed because i

remember him from the christian coalition, and he is very eloquent and i like what he has been saying today. when i got in here, the subject matter was about homosexuals, and i am not a homosexual, but i feel nothing is wrong with them, but i do have to admit that the had ted haggard as their leader, and i saw a documentary a year later after he had gone through his problem or situation, and it brought tears to my eyes because it appeared as though he was not being forgiven. there were posters and newspapers on people's lawns. i felt that was the wrong decision to make. it really was not christlike, and pedro, just apprise me and give me a question. reed i will let mr. respond if you had a specific question for him, sir. caller: well, i am just wondering if you would be

evangelical or fundamentalist aat he would now forgive possible homosexual, bisexual ted haggard and what he did because he changed both of the is still married. host: we will let our guest respond. guest: i do not know all the details of ted haggard's journey. i know him. i do not know him well. i think the short answer is our faith teaches not that i am better than you or if you become a committed christian that you are perfect and everybody else wrong and going to help. we actually believe the opposite. we believe that we are flawed individuals that are sinners saved by grace and we all make mistakes, and the reason why we come to jesus is because we believe we need forgiveness for our shortcomings and our sense. not because we are good but because we are not good. proceede you can

through a process of becoming a better person and developing better habits, you are still -- after you make that faith commitment, you are going to come short of the mark. you fall short of your own goal and god's expectations of how you want to conduct yourself. we all do that. some in more grievous ways than others. but the good news is there is mercy and forgiveness. there is mercy and forgiveness jesus,d through faith in and there should be, you are absolutely right, there should be forgiveness for others -- and from others. certainly i forgive ted. he did remain with his wife. i think they sought counseling. i have many other friends who have come up short. we have all come up short. the beauty of a story like that is what he gives us is through that pain and the media attention around it, it allows us to tell the story that we are not about condemning or judging

or stoning or harassing people who come up short or make a mistake, but we are about them being able to seek forgiveness and redemption. now, they need to change their behavior. what did jesus say when they wanted to stone the adulter ess? two things. let he who is without sin cast the first stone. so he basically said to people who were judging her, wait a minute, you all have things in your life that you are ashamed of. you may be hiding them, but the only way you can judge her is if you are without sin, and they all walked away. he second thing that he did was after she said do you not condemn me, and he said no, i do not condemn you. i do not condemn you, but he said go and sin no more. he told her to go read a different kind of life. so that is the message of our faith. takingness, redemption, a very painful story and turning it into a beautiful one, but

then changing the way you were acting that caused that pain and live a different kind of life. host: mr. reed, religious freedom laws. in arizona, it was vetoed by governor brewer in mississippi, a vote pending in the legislature there. give your thoughts on these two events and overall what you think of them. host: we were disappointed by governor brewer's veto. we think that the technical amendments -- first of all, arizona already has a religious freedom restoration act. it has been on the books for years. governor brewer's veto does not change that. she is a great governor, she is a good conservative, but we just disagreed with this veto. , my home statel of georgia, our bill, which did not make it out of committee and make it to the floor this time will come back again in a bill in ohio and some others. because of the controversy around the arizona bill, none of those became law during these legislative sessions. we supported them. those bills, by the way, are

virtually identical, and in the case of the georgia bill, word for word, i mean, as if you took the text of the law and just cut and pasted it, put a new bill number on it and passed it at the state level. identical language to the federal religious freedom restoration act, which was passed in 1993. the lead sponsor was chuck schumer of new york, a very liberal democrat. it was reported out of committee and really shepherded to the who was ted kennedy, probably the most liberal member of the u.s. senate of the time, and signed into law by bill clinton. and it was a very bipartisan thing. it was aborted by the aclu, it was supported by the southern theist commission, i was in christian coalition -- we supported it. and all it says is that if someone is forced by a public by a private individual acting within a public policy arena were under

to law, forces someone violate their religious teaching, that that person has a claim in court based on the first amendment that their religious practice was up in front upon. what's in french upon. it absolutely does not allow someone who is a perfecting christian to her priest -- to refuse to survey gay lesbian customer. to the best of my knowledge, no professing person of faith has asserted that right under the law and certainly ted kennedy, who was probably the most gay rights member of the u.s. senate, neither he nor any of the people who voted for it, the legislative history is not what not if the pope was -- is what that is the purpose of the law. if you are a christian or a muslim or a jew or another faith, and you were -- if you are in the armed services or you were in a federal prison or you were in a school and you were seeking to practice your faith and there was a policy that in

french upon that, that you had andding to go to court assert your right. they did not guarantee that you would be able to, it is not guarantee that you won, and in fact, for example, in case of observant and jews who want to wear a llama caught in the school or in the military, the courts have -- want to wear a yarmulke in the school or in the military, the courts have voted against that. throughout american history sadly religious minorities have been oppressed and persecuted . it is a sad chapter of our history. it was done to catholics. it was done to mormons. it was done to some evangelicals in early america, and we think they deserve protection. that is all these religious freedom bills due. now, as these laws get litigated, it is no guarantee that the person asserting the religious right is going to prevail. in new mexico, for example, there is a religious freedom act

, and there was a photographer evangelical, who was asked by a gay couple to photograph their wedding and said to participate in that wedding would violate my religious belief. i went to court, it went all the way to the new mexico supreme court, and the supreme court's ruled that the photographer had to participate in the wedding. so in some cases, the person of faith with the case. in other cases they lose the case. but all we are saying is the first amendment right to practice your religion and to engage in religious faith should be protected and should have standing in court. host: our next call for ralph reed is from sandy and south dakota. democrats line. good morning. caller: good morning. i am wondering how you can say you are from -- that you have faith. i am a christian, and you have all these speakers, but they all .his awful stuff about obama

i can see where they do not agree with him, but to call him names, about what he wears, and all this, i do not believe -- i have never been in a church where this is christian behavior. host: mr. reed. guest: well, i did not specifically know what you are referring to here in the context of cpac. i can tell you that in my remarks, i was very tough on this administration, very tough on the president, very tough on eric holder. i even called for eric holder to resign as attorney general because as i said earlier, by telling state attorneys general that they could decide themselves whether or not they should defend their state with the constitutions and laws in court was up to them -- i think that undermines respect for the rule of law and i think it is entirely inappropriate for the chief law enforcement officer of the united states to counsel other law enforcement officers to ignore the law.

was three tough, but i did not engage in name-calling. i will say something else. i was at a faith and freedom coalition citizen action seminar in delaware a couple of weeks ago. we had people from new jersey and is of any and maryland and delaware who were all there. we were training them about how to be effective citizens, how to get involved in the party, how to run the party of their choice, and how to get involved in voter registration and so forth. in my remarks, i pointed out that the bible, specifically the book of second timothy, that the apostle paul tells us that we are called to pray for those in authority and intercede for them and ask that things would go well for us as a result of them being good leaders. that is not me just democrats if you are a democrat. it means that when george w. bush was president, you needed to be praying for him. and for me, i am personally a republican.

i need to be praying for barack obama, and i will tell you that if you do that, if you pray for people with whom you disagree, and if you pray for people who are on the opposite side of the political divide from you, i will tell you it changes how you talk about them. i think what we really need to do -- you want to solve the bitterness and the partisanship that is going on in our country, we need to be a praying nation because we would still strenuously disagree. that is fine. that is what freedom is about. but we would not be so that her and hateful about it. host: ralph reed, someone from twitter wants to know what you think of the new pope. guest: i am a big fan of pope francis. day, a survey the other not that this is a popularity contest, but that he is the most popular vote since john paul the second, which is not that long ago, but i think speaking as an agent -- as an evangelical, i

can tell you pope john paul ii had a huge impact on our community, and we felt a tremendous commonality with him, probably more than any other pope in my lifetime. i think pope francis is on that level. i think he is talking about our need as believers to be humble, to be brokenhearted, to care for about socialcare justice. in other words, to have economic and political systems that put a premium on people not being in permanent and endemic and hopeless poverty. i agree with that. i agree with it very strongly. we are called as people of faith to care for the poor and the outcasts and the despised and the marginalized and the left behind. and i think he is doing a tremendous job in part because of his background in argentina, which has suffered terrible poverty in terms of a permanent underclass, but i do not agree with those who argue that or

suggest that pope francis' in this respect represent him or the catholic church breaking from the historic teaching on marriage, on the sanctity of life, and on the family. i do not see any evidence of that. i think what he is saying is that we need to be merciful, we hat he is saying is that for him and the church and individual believers, we need to be pastoral. that is to say that instead of pointing the finger of condemnation and judgment, we need to be extending a hand of mercy and grace and love. i think that is important because i think that as those of us who are part of the church have asserted what we believe is right as opposed to wrong, sometimes we are perceived as judgmental or hateful, and i think that hurts the church's message. i think he is doing a great job and i am a very big fan. host: what about consideration

of gay marriage or civil unions or topics like those? guest: i think, again, i have not read that full interview. i think the one he gave to an italian newspaper -- i think it was published earlier this week, and i have not been able to read that full interview, but i have read the other full interviews where a entirety liberal media a lead or a large takes a snippet out of context and said that the pope is saying that the catholic church is retreating on th- do not see and i that. i think what he is saying is that we need to show ursa, we need to show grace, we should not be condemning -- we need to show mercy, we need to show grace, and we need to be pastoral. i am not a pastor. and involved in politics public policy. but if you are a priest or a

rabbi and you have a pastoral role and you get up and say this conduct is wrong and the bible or whatever your sacred text is teaches against that, if you say that in such a way that you make those who are involved in that conduct feel unwelcome in your church or in your synagogue, and mosque, or other house of worship, then you are driving them away and you are not making it possible for them to come in and for you to welcome them and minister to them. as i have read the pope's comments in their full context, that is what he is saying. he is not saying that the church is changing its doctrine or is changing its view on what is right or wrong. host: ralph reed because we are at cpac, let's talk a little but about politics. looking to 2016, is there someone that it goes to your ideals or shares your belief and your organization's? guest: well, i think there are a lot of them.

if you look at where we stand, not that these are the only issues that we care about, but these are the ones that often get discussed in the context of these races, you know, namely the sanctity of life and marriage, the republican party intform reflects a belief both life and the institution of marriage. i don't know of anybody who is going to be on this podium behind me or has been this weekend that is not firmly believe that. in some cases has not been a very vocal and strong advocate of it. if everyone who is looking at running in 2016 were to actually go -- i think it would be a win- win for the folks who are members of my organization. if you look at jeb bush or chris christie or rand paul, marco cruz, you look at ted governor scott walker, governor rick perry -- i don't want to

leave anybody out. mike huckabee, rick santorum, sarah palin, bobby jindal of ohioiana, john kasich in has been mentioned. i mean, i could go on and on. ofe pence, the governor indiana. it is a very long list. i know most of them personally. in some cases, i have been for over 20 years with some of those folks. they are people of faith. they want to appeal obamacare and replace it with a market- oriented, consumer-centric solution and a replacement that will give people greater choice, lower premiums, and end all these ridiculous mandates that are driving up premiums and adaptable under obama care. they want to lower taxes and rein in spending. they believe that america ought to have a military second to none. i hate to say this because you do not want to just act like a

referee who is just going to call foul, but i think we ought to let these folks run around the track and let them -- let's see who the stronger horse, so to speak, is, but we are holding up a standard of issues, and we're very comfortable and very confident that the candidates who are here this weekend and will be, by the way, at the faith and freedom road to majority conference in june. a lot of these candidates will be there for our delegates. i think they are doing a good job. host: part of cpac, ralph reed with the faith and freedom coalition. he is their founder, chairman. thank you for your time this morning. guest: you bet, pedro, thank you. host: this from the associated press. warning shots and fire saturday as pro-russian forces refused to let a military mission in turk romeo. a group of multinational military officers from a security operation in europe attended to enter the embattled peninsula from the north but was stopped by armed men. we will take a look at congress

and specifically how would investigate cases in the house when it comes to ethics. all singer joining us for the discussion. later on in the program, how far would you go to protect your privacy? julia angwi julia angwin will talk to us about her expenses. she is the author of "dragnet nation." we will have those segments coming up as "washington journal " continues. ♪ say most oft to health policy really is not help policy at all -- it is andntially budget policy, just docs on so many of the big issues and ends up putting together something that in the parlance of washington might be called a patch. maybe it is an extension, maybe

it is called a stopgap, but the fact is, it ducks the big issues. they repeatedly ducks the big issue. particularly on medicare when you have 10,000 people eligible for medicare everyday, there is a very real cost attached with that. so now the challenge is to try to find a way to move beyond this fixation on budgeting. it would be one thing if it was found budget policy, but so indicated, we do not get the structural kinds of issues, and move beyond this sort of lurching from one kind of budget calamity to another and come up with some sensible budget policy. >> this weekend on c-span, senate finance committee chair ron wyden on the challenges facing medicare in hospitals this morning at 10:00 eastern. and all booktv, the historical

and cultural ties between russia and ukraine sunday at 5:45 on c- span2. on c-span3's american history tv, the grounds and architecture of george washington's mount vernon sunday night at 8:00. "washington journal" continues. host: next guest, paul singer from "usa today." he is the politics editor. thank you for joining us. we want to learn from you about the process in which the house of representatives investigates ethics charges. you took a look at a five-year anniversary of something called the office of congressional ethics. can you set this up as what this is? guest: yes, the office of congressional ethics was created five years ago, six years ago is when the bill was passed. to create an ethics process. there has been a committee in congress that polices ethical issues for years, but it does it in private. publicized incidents

unless they are extraordinarily serious, and nobody ever knew whether or not anybody was investigating allegations of wrongdoing. so they decided to move this out as part of a public-private to the ethics process. they created this office, and the office's job, the office of congressional ethics, is to look at news reports and other public allegations of possible ethical wrongdoing, review those cases, and the ones that look like maybe a problem, send them to the ethics committee and have the ethics committee then begin his process. the trick here is the difference between the two boards, the office of congressional ethics make its -- makes its reports public, which the ethics committee never did. now you have this process where not only are they tapping the ethics committee on the shoulder and say you need to look at this

, but after 45 days, that report gets released to the public, and so the rest of us can see exactly what this independent panel things member of congress x did wrong. that has been highly controversial. host: give us examples of some of these cases. does it depend on who holds the power in the house as to who gets investigated? guest: this is independent and bipartisan. there was a big investigation of a lobbying firm called the pma group. it was a big lobbying firm in washington and the allegation was that they were making campaign donations to members of congress in exchange for legislative favors, what we used to call earmarks. a congressperson with ao, $1 million for your little project over here. the allegation was that this particular lobbying friirm had a process where they made donations in exchange for

favors. democrats and republicans were investigated on both sides. the office said this is a real problem. there may be a real lobbying broken here. at least it is very widespread. the ethics committee, which has become traditional in these proceedings, said nah, everything is clear, nothing happened, it is not a big problem. the only reason we know an investigation took place at all is because the office of congressional ethics existed and published this report. the fact the ethics committee did nothing if not all that surprising and is part of the controversy here. were as far as the offices concerned, talk a little but about the investigation process. what goes on? guest: their investigations are not all that unlike a really good journalism investigation. they do not have subpoena power. they are not a judicial operation. they are an independent board that is by and large getting public information.

let's say they say oh, pedro, it looks like you took an improper campaign contributions. they can look through the records, the timing of the thing, and they can call you and say we would like you to come in and talk to us about this. you can refuse or you can agree. it is up to you. they can call the donor and say we would like you to come in and talk about this. the donor can refuse or can agree. they gather information, they draw conclusions. to some they look like a grand jury. they can be their board, and they can say here is all the facts, what does everybody think? if the board agrees, they send a note to the ethics committee with a full report. this is what we found, we think you should investigate further. so those ethics -- and so the ethics committee, they have subpoena power and authority. this is more like a journal investigative unit without the legal power. host: so someone is being investigated, and those results are made public no matter what kind of charges or severity of

the charge -- one at that lead to a smearing of the name or at least, you know, a smearing or scandal, downgrading of a name? is theyes, and that controversy. this is one of those things that i think your viewers and voters theld consider, that allegation against this new ethics process, the complaint is that anything you do wrong public. becomes oh, there is a congressional u.s.s report with a represented on the front of the report. even if the report is really small. there was a group from taiwan that was funding congressional it was very consultative exactly who was paying for and which laws apply. members of congress clearly under the rules were not supposed to take this trip. they took the trip, a democrat and a republican. they both paid it back once it

became clear that there had been a mistake in the way that it was paid, and there is no doubt that the organization in taiwan that was organizing this travel was laying began with the rules and knew they should not be doing this. not congress knew was a different issue, and how much penalty today deserve for that. should they be playing -- paying back and being told this is the kind of travel you should not accept, or should there be a headline "congressman and ethics scandal taking money from the taiwanese"? that is a judgment call that people have to make for themselves. that they should be publicly outed for ethics problems that may be less severe than, say, stealing, robbing, raping, killing. middles no sort of ground with these ethics reports. once it is public, congress is investigating your ethics.

host: if it goes nowhere, it is still out there. guest: if you are never penalize, congress is still investigating. and the ethics committee itself takes a long time to process these things, so it may be just --re is a report against you and then there is never a resolution, so your voters, and the opponent in the primary, are waving their arms thing, there is an ethics investigation. and we do not know. office itself, is a current members of congress to investigate? who is in charge? guest: it is a collection of a half-dozen people, former members of congress. host: david skaggs and porter. guest: porter goss was a director of cia. a couple of numbers of the board are experts in this type of

things. they have back roads and policy. they are trying to make it -- they have background in public policy. they're trying to make it a group of public officials, not a bunch of flighty, sort of watchdog types who are trying to make headlines. these people never appear in public. they were never quoted in the press. i did my story -- none of them would talk to me. attempting to be a very clean hands type of her fashion organization. of professional organization. they're not always viewed that way. there are people that think they are biased, they are show blows, they are unfairly targeting members of congress. there are others that say -- host: paul singer is joining us from "usa today." he is there to talk about this office of congressional ethics. you may have questions specifically about the office or the process. here is your chance to talk to them. democrats, (202) 585-3880. republicans, (202) 585-3881.

and independents, (202) 585-3882 . reach out to us on twitter as well. first call is john, new mexico, democrat line. you are on with paul singer. good morning. caller: good morning, pedro. thank you for allowing my call on the greatest conversation in the world. i really feel like the ethics in the house and the senate are nonexistent. i mean, you are talking about a secret committee that is not report publicly to anybody. you try to report on what they say, and what did they do? they stifle you. it is a big problem. senator al franken visitor tom udall for my state have been circulating a petition for about a year to get money out of politics to repeal the citizens united act. that is a good start and would be a good start. as long as all the prostitutes are inside the beltway and set about here in the rest of the country, we are going to have a problem. guest: the caller has an excellent point, which is this

-- these roles, these ethics rules are created and enforced by lawmakers themselves. you have every right to be skeptical of the process that is created by congress to police the behavior of congress. you can't imagine any other circumstance where this is done. normally, you have some sort of independent, outside party that enforces the laws. that is not the case here. i will say, of course, the justice department does have the authority to go and file criminal cases against lawmakers who break the law. is exceptionally rare. there are people who would argue that the problem, the very problem with the office of congressional ethics is that it is too independent, that it is not governed by congress, that it is not controlled directly by congress. and that congress should be the one managing its own investigations of its own people. but i think the caller has hit that excellent point

congress is not necessarily want all of the campaign donations investigated, congress does not want all of the stuff reported. i mean, the senate, they have that refused to require the campaign donations be reported electronically. in the senate, it is still done on paper. why? because it is harder for you and i to see it. that is the only legitimate reason. to make it harder for us to investigate. host: the people who staff the office of congressional ethics, are they chosen by the house speaker? guest: the house speaker and the minority. it is a joint process to appoint these people. again, the office of congressional ethics is only in the house. it applies only in the house. in the senate, the ethics process still occupies a committee of its own that is highly secretive, not transparent at all. host: john from georgia, republican line, hi. caller: good morning.

i guess when you're swimming in a sea of corruption, it is hard to know where to start. guest: that is true. united, that is nothing. it is a non-issue. there is nothing wrong with that in particular. that is not the problem. the problem is people not getting involved in politics, not understanding politics, not being connected to their representatives and having relationships with them. and because of that, they become more subject to influence from special interest -- if people want to get a real inkling, a little bit of history of what led to this financial crisis, for instance, look at the video on youtube -- "who repealed glass-steagall act?" guest: the financial crisis is a great question on where this is questionable. i believe there was a bank bailout bill about four or five years ago, and several members of congress who were on the

finance committee who were heldng this bill fundraisers at around the same time for members of the financial community to come and give them donations. and people looked at that, and we reported on it, i was at roll call at the time, we did some reporting on it, i am sure "usa today" did reporting on as well. the office of congressional ethics looked at this and said we cannot do this. you cannot fund raise from the people who are directly affected by legislation that is sitting on the floor in front of you the same week, basically. and the ethics committee said no, it's not a problem. and they said it is not a problem because they could not prove any direct connection between the fact that the financial organizations came together to make it a luncheon -- to make a donation and the members of commerce went to the floor and voted for the bill.

well, thist was financial services group fundraiser was organized months before. nobody had any idea the legislation would be coming up at exactly the same time. he timing was very coincidental. you and i might look at that and say -- quit the dental? -- coincidental? really? that is absurd. of course this is a deal. but they cannot rule that is connected. they cannot prove there was a quid pro quo no foul. twitter -- how do they know when to start an investigation? guest: that is a great question. the ethics committee can launch an investigation on its own, and members of congress have to ask for an investigation of some yells. that is why nobody else got investigated. the office of congressional ethics can do almost any investigation they want to. if they see a paper that

interest them, they can started preliminary investigation. they have to to go to the board at some point and say ok, we see things that need to be looked at, we need to start the clock on a formal process. but the office of congressional ethics can start an investigation essentially on anything. they get a phone call, a tip, they see something in the newspaper, they can get it started. host: paul singer to talk about the ethics process, the office of congressional ethics. if you want to ask him questions about specifically the office or the process, one of the key is is a democrat michael.husetts, michael ca guest: one member asked him to lead a bipartisan task force to figure out a better way to do the ethics process. andy katz wars was the one that recommended creation of this office of congressional ethics. andll tell you that that --

he task force was the one that recommended this creation of the office of congressional ethics. i will tell you that republicans have not endorsed in some of them have complained it is a dumb idea, but he led the charge, led the task force, and he now is on the ethics committee, and we talked to him about the five-year anniversary, and he said he thinks it is working the way he expected it, and he says he has gotten some pretty good response. program,was on the and here's what he had to say back then. [video clip] and respecto know the institution known understanding life that we live, what the institution to be viewed by the general public as one who polices its own members, knowing full well that when you get 435 people, you will probably have a handful of bad actors. i have no idea. i may get into the gray areas once in a while. most of us do not want to, but the rules are not always as clear cut as everybody thinks. so the once people read about

for the most part, they are very public, and people like me, even as a member of the house, i cannot tell my constituents, i cannot tell you -- i do not know who is and who is not being investigated. that is not to presume a conclusion, that is simply to say there is a process and it is working and the whole idea behind this concept is to provide a process that people will at least have some faith in that it is reviewing members who have been charged or alleged to have done something of significant wrongdoing. of whatul singer, one he says that the rules are not as clear-cut as people would think. is that a fair statement? guest: it is. and the rules are not as clear- cut as people might think for a very good reason. if the roles are clear-cut, it is clear when you have broken them. rulesss wrote these to not be clear, so it is never entirely clear when you have broken up. if you wanted to stop people from speeding, you would put up a sign that says 55 miles an

hour is the speed limit. if you don't want to actually punish anybody for speeding, you put up a sign that says reasonable and appropriate speed at any given time. congress ethics rules are written the same way. they're written to be like well, you know -- there is an ethics manual, and the viewers can go online and look it up. it is an ethics manual for congress, and i challenge you to find any rule in there to find "thou shalt not." they all say thou shall not really unless of course possibly you might. the rules are written to be essentially unbreakable. that is why you get into these problems. it is never entirely clear whether you have broken a rule. the strategy time, was part of nancy pelosi. she said she was going to drain the swamp. put some context to that as far as what drove that. guest: the ethics committee

itself had grown to a halt. the republican and democratic chairs in the committee did not like each other, did not work well together. the staff was sort of bogged down. nothing was getting done in the ethics committee process. there was a campaign in 2006 that the democrats wanted to win the house back from the republicans, and their theme was ethics. partly because, you may never or member this guy tom foley, there was a scandal -- is that the right name? i think it was foley. he was accused of molestation. this can do with a big deal because republicans already knew member of congress accused of molesting pages, and so the democrats what i'd said scandal, scandal, republicans are bad. this is also in the wake of jack abram off, the lobbyist, who had been accused of buying, paying favors, taking money from indian

tribes to pay off numbers of congress. you had all this stuff going on, and that was the message of the democrats, we are going to drain the swamp. we are going to drain the swamp by creating this office of congressional ethics to offer a transference he and the -- transparency. whether that has worked on not is the question. host: don from ohio. hello. caller: i have two things i want to go over real fast. one of them, when you had the romney-ryan convention in florida, they -- the koch brothers started up a recycling company to clean the convention center down there. and they put out $60 million is all they reported. they did not go through cpac. 's, and to01(c)4 me that is a kickback.

i cannot find out if they kept it there. maybe you can. leadthey were going to that recycling company in florida, therefore they will get a bunch of their money back. and on the xl pipeline, when it comes to canada just north of the tar sands, they have hundreds of acres of sweet oil that they're going to run into the pipe because they cannot move the tar sands because it is like a jar of peanut butter -- guest: let me stop you for a second there. you come to an interesting point here, which is this -- i assume that everybody involved in politics from the outside, that is every end up in a company or every organization, every third- any of the organizations that you see on c-span making an advocate pitch. i assume they are spending money

in politics because they want some outcome. i assume they're not just tossing money into politics for fun. i assume that if you are making a campaign donation, you are making it because you want the candidate to do something. presumably vote on the issues you agree with, but possibly also support a project that you are expected to make money off of. i assume that is your goal, and i assume that is your motivation. what i also should be able to the lawmakert if receiving your contribution is not being affected in their decision-making by your donation, and that is not what drives them. and when you talk about all this outside money, i don't fault any outsiders from spending money in politics to shape the system under the rules that currently exist. why wouldn't they? what i fault or could vault is a member of congress who acts out of interest to continue that pipeline of money or a member of

congress who breaks the rules and takes money they are not allowed to take. that is where i look. i do not care that outsiders are spending money. activity thousand sixr nothost: census. florida designed at that time -- resigned at that time. jeff, good morning. talking about how the house handles the ethics process. missouri, independent line. caller: i was wondering if the gentleman knew about maxine waters who is on the ethics committee. is it right that she was going to sue all of the people on the and wasommittee

exonerated and have not heard from her sense. do you know anything about that? >> that case was a disaster. the shortened urchin, the caller that allegations against maxine waters is that was not happy and a congresswoman helping her husband's bank, it is for her personal profit, not for the good of the country. all the ways weird through. maxine waters had been to several members of congress and said i do not think i should be involved in this case because my husband is on the bank boards. other members of congress said you are right, do not get

involved in this, let me look at the issue. from that point on it became very confusing what happened. it is clear maxine waters chief of staff took actions to help the bank. the chief of staff is also her grandson. do not get me started on how that is possible. there are leaks in mishandling of information. figuring out what happened to a case. two.st've been a year or and finally concludes maxine waters probably did the right thing by saying we should not be involved here, and apparently, telling staff, stay away from the case, we do not want to get involved anymore. the staff went ahead and did something they should not have

done to organize a meeting between maxine waters husband and the treasury regulator and the ethics committee found the staff member to have done wasthing wrong and basically admonished in public and there is a trial. that case was a mess. also true that maxine waters alleged a violation of her rights by the committee, which was never fully proven either. independent investigators said there rights were not violated that said that the committee handed the whole thing wrong. >> if you go to the usa today website there is a listing of keep pieces for the congressional ethics committee. there is a wide range of cases that this office handles. reports on 32iled or 33-- against dirty two

different members of congress. whole different issues. the -- traveling and doing it per diem and taking contrabass -- campaign contributions they should not. one held a hearing that as a friend of his that is invested in a business proposition with the congressman's wife. oval range of issue. whole range of issues. this is up to the ethics committee to decide when the rules have been violated. the congressional ethics just raises red flags. frank from indiana on the democrats line. caller: hi, pedro. thank you for taking my call. i would like to say the ethics committee sounds like they

botched watching the henhouse. you say they they have no screen and are in the congress, so it sounds like me they can do whatever they want to and sweep it under the rug, keep the american will in the dark. and then they scream out punishable remarks about our president. issa on the committee. and let me ask you a committee --= me say i am a member

of congress and i call pager to . thean i go on a trip ethics committee will save from the facts you gave us, i think you can take that trip or cannot take that trip. that is what the committee is supposed to do. it is an advisory process. this is where we get to your thoughts. is it right to have a committee that is advising also being the committee that is enforcing. are they enforcing on their own bad advice sometimes because there have been cases where the members of congress have been told an ethics committee that what they were doing is ok. but then if i called them and say i took this trip, and i am not sure it was a good idea and a six committee says that was not a good idea, you should not have taken that trip, you need to pay that back, should that be public. should they announce?

of the crux of the matter. i know the ethics committee is doing exactly what i just described. i know they are calling people and saying you did something you should not have done and need to fix it that i also know they are not telling the public when that happens. i doer that is a good idea not know. host: how far does it extend? guest: it can go to staff or other office. they do not have any authority for those not in congress of the moment. that matters because for instance a guy named rob andrews, congressman from new jersey was investigated for using campaign money allegedly for personal reasons. that went to the ethics committee. they had convened an investigation to look more deeply into that allegation. before they concluded the work,

he took a job off the hill. he is now a lawyer in philadelphia. there has been no case against him. when he takes the job, the ethics committee loses all jurisdiction. that results in this and never goes public. the limits of the authority really begin and end at the dome. once you are at the dome, they cannot reach you, and early february kathy meant more as -- cathy mcmorris rodgers. reporting a possible house ethics committee investigation that started at congressional ethics office as well. guest: yes. we do not know all of their details about the report. that is one where the office of congressional ethics was looking into her, republican from washington i believe.

they had concerns about her mixing her official congressional office funds with campaign resources and not properly segregating the two. they investigated that and sent into the ethics committee. they announce february 6 they were looking into this. they have 45 days to decide what to do now. do they decide it is worth investigating further, in which case we will not see any more details for a long time, they decide there is nothing to see here, no violation, and if they do that, everett -- he comes public about moment. they only put out reports after the ethics committee is done. if they investigate and they find nothing wrong, that never becomes public. if they investigate and tell the ethics committee they have investigated and so find nothing wrong, that is never publicly released.

if it says it needs to be investigated further, it will be publicly released at some point but depends on when the committee begins the process. and think, if i am being investigated, and make sense that the background and allegations should not become public until the investigation is complete. that is usually what happens. you can go and look on the site and they purport activities by number. they will say we have 35 investigations, 20 turned up nothing and eliminated them. what is the ratio of investigation started in punishable versus the ethics committee? guest: that is a funny number. not quite zero. committee has not quite taken punishment. pretty much never. in part because they would argue

that these are small cases, that the members of congress have artie repaired the damage by or the rulesravel have been changed to fix the problem. the rules were not clear the ethics committee will say. the ethics committee does not frequently punish members of congress. what they will tell you -- they do not actually talk to you but what overcome -- what will happen is they do take action. maybe members of congress will pay this back. maybe the rules were changed to make it clear you should not do this. maybe private punishment was taken where they were told, knock it off. never becomes public, so we do not know what the punishment has been. the american public gets some

view into the process that otherwise is totally behind closed doors. host: holsinger joining us. paul from florida. republican line. -- paul singer. myler: it has been experience that 90% of the democrat inspired investigations a tempest in a teacup. 90% of the gop investigations are legitimate. press in thee white house. no one says a word about that. flat outhave to disagree with you. there is -- neither party has cornered the market on corruption. one of the reasons i love my job because if you take the arr andd of congress, you

do nothing to change the likelihood that that member of congress is cheating, or that member of the administration is cheating. 20 yearsent investigating wrongdoing in washington, and i can tell you that it makes no difference who controls the house, senate, white house. i will find cheaters. that is all there is to it. one more call. clerk from new jersey, independent line. question andve a either a statement or another question. penalty ising the the defender and? guest: yes. the public exposure of the defender.

that the public exposure, even if they are not accused of a major wrongdoing, even if they are never punished, that report comes out with the seal of the house of representatives on the front of the report. that is the punishment. i would like to give you a website to verify what i am saying. if you could google frontline, the episode call the warning and watch the video you will verify what i am about to say. elizabeth warren when she headed the committee, to investigate oft happened in the collapse 2008, you could tell that she knew what would happen but never said who did it. she never said the actual events that transpired. is there any punishment for her? guest: this comes back to the point of, if you are a member of

congress particularly in the elizabeth warren was not of the time but now she is, can you make the allegations publicly and be confident that you are not violating the privacy rights of the individual, which is some of the arguments of people of the office of congressional ethics. they will say you are violating the rights of the individual by making public allegations that are scarlet. they do not amount to much but there is a public shame. that is a policy question for which i am on both sides of the fence. for a living i publicly humiliate members of congress. that is my job, and i enjoy it. whether that should be the role of a member of congress or independent investigator, i do not know. i do not necessarily care or take a position on it, but i will tell you come a what i do for a living is tell you when members of congress have done

things that are interesting and i write about them. my pleasure. thank you for having me on. our next guest spent $2000 to protect her privacy. the next guest will be on to tell us why she went through the trouble. that is next. ♪ [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> c-span, we bring public affairs events from washington directly to you, putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events and briefings and conferences in bringing you complete gavel-to-gavel coverage of the u.s. house. c-span, created by the tv -- cable tv industry 35 years ago and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. like us and follow us on

twitter. not have a criminal investigation rule. one of the things the agency does is to enforce the federal securities law. we also write the rules for wall street and broker-dealers and investment advisers but did not have criminal authority. we have the authority to bring civil actions, civil fraud actions and negligence actions to those who violate the so -- the securities law. anyone to jail but we can assess civil penalties. there is legislation in congress to give us the ability to assess higher penalties. win can commit those to disgorge the ill-gotten gains, the profits they make from wrongdoing and the power to bar someone from the securities industry so they cannot basically living -- live another

day to defraud again. white sunday night at 8:00 on c-span's q and a. " washington journal" continu es. host: our next guest is the author of " dragnet nation." welcome. guest: great to be here. host: your first sentence is this -- thanyear i spent more $2200 and countless hours trying to protect my privacy. could you tell us why you did that? i have been writing about privacy issues as a journalist for several years, and then i decided it was depressing. so i decided to try to protect my privacy to see whether i

could pull it off. so that is the premise of my book. i spent more time and money than i expect it. the sad part is i was probably only marginally successful. host: give us a sample of that time and money. guest: some of the things i did that were most expensive is i bought a phone that is a separate phone that is not in my name. it is a prepaid disposable phone . it is expensive to buy it and have a monthly plan. i got a cloud service that is encrypted. service.an encrypted like $200t this for with an encrypted service. and i bought a clean laptop on ebay because i wanted to run

special encryption programs and was worried my main computer was compromised. i have a $150 used laptop. i have a lot of different things that i ended up being four. then there were things that took insane amounts of time. i try to figure out where was my data. trying to figure out which data brokers have my information was really time-consuming. can only remove data from about 90 of them. even though i try to remove my data, many do not offer the -- offer the opportunity. host: what did you learn about the type of information they are collecting and who recollecting? >> the error are hundreds and hundreds of them bunnies collecting data. not easy to say it is just google or facebook or the companies you know of. there are hundreds of companies behind the scene that you have never heard of that are

assembling information about you. some are big eta brokers who have your name. taey used to sell -- big da brokers who have your name that used to use it for mailings. there are hundreds of companies onlineack where you go and mostly for advertising purposes. on the webpage you visit there will be tracking companies that you are there and now they add that to the list. >> as far as the information and who shares it, is it your personal information such as name and location? metadata or how far does it go? guest: everything. for instance, gmail scanning the content of e-mail. it is not a human reading it but

a machine rating it, and that is how they generate advertisements off of it. then there are people who just notice what websites you visit. you might call that metadata. that is just the traffic of where you go, the location. it can be really revealing. when i looked at my google search history tom i thought it was among the most revealing data sets i had ever seen. minute by minute what i was thinking. leap from a topic for work research and then would leap to planning something for my daughters school and then planning a lunch meeting. an hour time. imagine they have every hour of my life dating back to 2006. that host: is a lot of information. host:what is the worst-case scenario of people having this information? worst caseink

scenario, we are starting to see that this data in held by commercial entities is not as benign as it might seem. the reason we know that is because the snowden lakes. -- leaks. first of all, the prison program where they come to the companies with sacred orders and hand over the data and it is not clear how well the companies can challenge the orders in court. we saw pretty shocking revelations that they have to into the company. once they seeough the information is out there, they will get it one way or another? when you have a government that reachcomplete and total into everything everyone is doing, that is the ingredients a veryfor what could be repressive regime. i think we need to make sure we have the oversight and checks in

place to make sure that does not happen. host: you talked about your personal experience and what you spend. op-ed has a curious title. what is suggested by it? going to be are people like me that are tech savvy mentor going to buy their situation out of this. they will be smarter and savvier. i worry that means there will be have and have-nots -- have-nots. essentially what these people want is information about your behavior so they can sell you things you possibly do not need and possibly a price too high. i worry that the people who are not as savvy will be what i call a giant sucker list. youe are the people that can find them at the moment they are most faux marble because the information will be there.

once all the information is available. so i am worried this will become a luxury good in that sense as well. host: our guest is a senior here to for pro-publica talk about her privacy concerns inter-book and what she found out about it, you can ask her on the line this morning. fromirst call, bernadette new york, democrats line. the morning. question is is says on the site it produces journalism that shines a light on the failure of those with power to vindicate. theexample of this now is government refusal to address the government proving the third

tower to fall on 9/11 was brought down in a controlled demolition. why aren't the writers doing more to it china light on this issue. there is an organized campaign about this issue. you can address it or move on. guest: i am unaware of the issue. question,re is my someone has all this information about us. so why the government need more information even though they already have it. can you answer this question, please. of how muchea information the government has on us and if they need more. because great question, they do have a lot of information. the irs tax records, social security information.

the government has strict controls about how the data can be shared within agencies. it is not always available to the intelligence agencies. it looks as though each agency sometimes operates on its own, and the nsa mission is very aggressive. it requires, in their mind, a lot of information, so what we have seen is how far they have get as see if they can much data as they can find. book, talkin the about concerns with that. is it seems sos innocuous. of course you want to know hominy people live in your what i found is since the information has been abused around the world repeatedly by governments

including our own. we use the information to ok japanese and put them in camps in two. after 9/11, the census data ended up being shared to identify muslim population so the fbi could keep a closer watch on them. we have seen in the information has been used to target and profile certain racial groups in the past. the next call is from just in tennessee. caller: we are early in the snowden debacle. there were several lawyer where the nsa evidently transferred to local police authorities and arrested people that were involved in drugs or whatever, and not advocating byaking the law, but

utilizing illegal wiretaps, which the nsa was doing, they transmitted that information to local authorities and then arrested people in america. you anyndering, have information further on how those types of information's are transpiring where local authorities are getting the information through the illegal wiretapping. thank you. is a great question. one thing we do not know is how often that information gets transferred to state and local federal law enforcement officials. it says in some of the documents that it can be transferred if they see evidence of a crime, --t they can pass it on and as a crime. there have been cases they have reopened recently and said we have to disclose to the defendant that this information

came from the illegal wiretaps. there has only been a few identified. this is one of the open questions from the snowden leak. host: there is a viewer that says this -- guest: gathering of the information is not legal but stalking and harassing someone usually is. local police get to prosecute those cases but usually there is a statute and most cases that would say they have the authority to prevent people from harassing you. in your book you talk about being hacked. you can be watched in your own home or in the bathroom. there are cameras in our phones and computers and what we

have in finding is more and more hacking rings have been found remotelyinding ways to activate the cameras. there was an extortion ring where they activated cameras of many teenage girls and extorted them with pictures of i took this picture of you in your room while you are changing. this is becoming a threat that most people that are have a -- savvy put computers -- stickers over their computer. if you want to use if they can't take it off and put it back on. the bathroom extension, it was a school laptop and the camera was turned on. can you expand on the story? a school that had issued laptops to the kids of the school, and the kids did not know it had been installed with spyware that could

remotely activate the camera. one student found out he was being watched when he was called into the administrator and said we saw you doing drugs in your room at home and we have evidence. turned out they had seen him taking some pills. ikeaid they were mike and candies. the story quickly moved on to wire you watching me in my room? turns out they have remotely manyd on the cameras and students have been filmed and intimate settings. republican mine from south carolina. kathy from south carolina. r: hi. when i look at this, i think gott the fact that the irs

into people's business. people should think about that, because there may be people in that may do the same thing for one. for two, if it is illegal for someone else to tap in, it should be illegal for our government to do the same thing. and i do not think it is right if they tap into this information and our rights, according to the constitution is the right to bear arms, how do we know they are not going to do this and say guess what, we are going to trace it -- if you own a gun we will say you no longer do. true government power can be abused. we have seen that over and over surveilling fbi was

martin luther king and sending him tapes trying to blackmail in into showing him situations they thought would embarrass him and urging him to commit suicide. we have seen the nsa, there have been people there who have been caught spying on x lubbers -- exlovers and spouses. it is not supposed to happen, but it does happen. this is a big concern of the is beingre data gathered indiscriminately by the government and commercial entities is there are bad actors in all of the places and sometimes the bad acting is sanctioned. either way, we have to make sure we have checks and balances in place because there has never been more data host: than there is now. host:you-- than there is now.

--t: you write in the book can you expand on that? guest: the fourth amendment describes that you have rights to papers and affect in your home. the supreme court has interpreted this as in your actual home. when you have papers stored outside the home on someone's server like google or like with microsoft, you have fewer legal rights. this is called the third-party doctrine. is with ainformation third-party, you do not have the same expectation of privacy so government can get it with much less regal standard. this is a question becoming more urgent. we do not know yet whether the supreme court will take it up. last year the justice wrote a

concurrence where she mentioned it might be time to rethink the doctrine. our guest with us to talk about her book " dragnet nation" julia anglin who joins us. colleen on the independent line. caller: i wanted to say we might have to put secret stealers in the secret prisons. i am really cloud -- glad someone young has gotten into the subject because i was afraid you all had become immune to it that you all just walked around with big brother. my problem is that -- i forgot your name. you say we are not militarized, but the small community we live in in tennessee has gotten a vehicle. why would we need something like that down here? we also have that we haveams

drones flying above us. the other caller said we have so much information on us, we have no freedoms anymore. i would like to hear more about your book, also. >> is there a generational approach to the idea of privacy, especially in the age we live in? guest: there is a myth that young people do not care about privacy but the data does not support it. it shows young people are more active in managing privacy settings and more likely to not it seems toapp if privacy invading. they are big users of new your chatsthat let disappear after you send them so they are leading the way in finding ways to live in the data saturated world but to control the data. some of the controls they are using may not be perfect.

haveimes you think you adjusted them the right way and turns out maybe you have not, but at least they are sophisticated in trying to find out ways to live in this world. one thing i would say is they care about do not privacy. i say they care about privacy from you. you are the nsa to your kids. -- do nott want to want their parents to know what they are doing. kathy on the republican mine. caller: hi. it is jackie. i am retired from the federal government. by the fbi vetted before i could go to work. keepwondering, do they that information forever, and is thee any way to view freedom of information to find -- thet what the heck is

government has on you? guest: it is true that data retention that is a big deal with the government. madepeople die they get public and you can tell they are keeping them for quite some time. i try to get my files from the government. i did a privacy act quest, slightly different than the read him of information act to the fbi. they said they did not have anything on me. they said but it does not mean you're not on the watchlist. get thele to information from records of border patrol. it is surprising how detailed those records were. i was blown away by the information i found. i think it was 30 pages long. realize is that airline reservation systems have essentially been sending every

contact you have with the airline to the government automatically. so if you call and say i want vegetarian meals, it was in my file. with these extensive records, a one thing i found was my employer was sending some of the internal records and i would ask my boss for permission to take a trip, that ended up in the government files. the journal was shocked when i told them this. they had to change their whole system so the information was not sent to the government automatically. host: a colleague writes in -- what is your risk?

guest: your phone records are every associate. phones amazing about the database revealed by snowden, your social networking be mapped by your phone calls. if you have a map of everyone in the country's social network, you can really build on that. that is incredibly powerful information. the east german secret -- secret police work conducting some of the most repressive surveillance we have seen in modern history. -- when ied him showed him the social network maps you can create from the linkedin profile, he was blown away. host: of you were makes this eight minute -- a viewer makes this statement --

guest: i could not agree with you more. perfectlywould be happy to give away my privacy if i was not giving away my right. i want the right to say no, you used the data in a way i do not agree with, and i want to be able to sue you or want some rights over this. the no-fly list is the worst example. when you are put on the no-fly list, you can never find out what they do lead to you being put on the list. so we have data that is being used to deny you the right of tribal -- travel and you can never find out the legitimacy of it in court. that is what i worry about, that if you have no rights to fight over the data that it can be disempowering. where has congress been on

this and agencies like the federal trade commission been on issues like this? congress has been trying to grapple with this. looks like they might be able to thisup with something like to limit it. on the commercial side there was an effort to do no track bill that has not gone as far. right now the only agency that is only empowered to police the data of economy is the federal trade commission. unfortunately their mandate is about deception and unfairness. essentially, if the company says i will do good things with your data and then do bad things, than they have a case. if they do not say what they will do with it and then do bad things, it is a harder case because there is no deception. unfortunately that incentivize is companies to not say what they will do with the data and

that is why the privacy policies are so vague. basically say we can do whatever we want in that way we do not have to worry as much about a case. guest host: did you read the agreements and go through the fine print?' ultimatelyd but realized i had given away my rights. i tried to make choices from twitching away from companies that i considered unfair policies too much better ones but there were not that many to choose from. for instance, i switched off of google search because i did not like the fact that they stored every search and used that to tailor information to meet. duck go.ch to duck they did not have information about where i am located.

it is true, when i do research, it does not have any idea what city i am in so i often have to write new york. it reminds me how many things you do not have to type into google. in a few cases, but there are not that many to choose from. host: our guest is with us to talk about her book " dragnet nation" in topic of policy. john ram north carolina. in a previousoke interview about when you went to , encryption information. you became a suspect of the government. did i get that right stucco guest? guest: what i was referring to is some of the documents released by snowden is the nsa

is not supposed to collect documents on americans before and espionage but they have a section -- but they have expects exceptions. i had to struggle, which is i want to use encryption because that means no one can read my e-mail but also makes me a suspect in some ways. i decided to use encryption anyway because i do not think that is the right choice. i do not think just by using encryption i should be a suspect. host: how are you perceived by those were the efforts you are -- to to your privacy protect your privacy? what do they say about you? guest: most people think i'm doing something they would never

do. i have gone to links that most people would not go to, and i do not expect anyone would take all the measures i take, because it is not a reasonable way to live. the reason i did it is to show it was not a reasonable way to live and maybe there is another way we could protect our privacy because sitting around and trying to opt out of every single location tracking cell phone service is not right. we should not have that burden. part of it was a demonstration, but i also am surprised. do you know who really loved what i was doing? my kids. use encryption. they love secrets and having secrets from me. they were really into it. on the democrats line. caller: i do not mean any harm that you need to take a pill. i do not know if you are

paranoid or not, but the fact of the matter is the government has since tom -- since time began they have been tracking information for taxes in this that and the other. you offenders of tracking information on individuals is big business. when you buy something, they want to know what your habits are and that sort of thing. so governments collect information. plan theiro know to budgets and plans for defense, all that sort of thing. you are not doing anything against the government. i do not think you should have to worry that much unless the government exposes something about you that is contrary to your belief. i do not think people have a right to protest -- we can protest in america because that is our basic rights, but i do

not see where you have anything to worry about. have aas a journalist, i lot to worry about. one thing that is upsetting about this world is it is very difficult for journalists to come -- promise any kind of reasonable confidentiality to a source. whether it is a really sensitive story or not, there is so much of the digital trail left behind with any kind of communication these days that it's turn a list are in a very difficult situation and already has produced a chilling effect in journalism. we have seen more leaked prosecutions of journalists and we have never seen -- that we have ever seen before. the reason is it is now possible to find out who they were talking to. there was not always a digital trail before. how would you make the initial contact? the phone call that for we know there is a giant database of every phone call. e-mail, that is being tracked.

go to their house? you can be located by your found. the location of your found can reveal you were there. hard for journalists. that is not just a problem for my industry but the country. journalism, we are the watchdogs of democracy. if we cannot serve to prosecute corruption and keep the government honest, then where is the country going to go? inould say all of that addition to your very right that i am very concerned about commercial tracking. i do not have friends on facebook. i have a lot to say about that topic. i want to remind everyone we need to worry about keeping our watchdogs of democracy and business. if you are asked if you got rid of all your loyalty cards? host: i did get rid of all of those. -- guest: i did get rid of all

of those. i decided they were not big enough to enter my name into the databases. i got my data broker files from a dozen of them out there. i was shocked at how incredibly granular the information was about what i had purchased, and i wanted to remove as much could about those. so you can get that information? very hard to do. only 13 would give me information. that is a very small number. on the other hand, some of the biggest and best-known in the business. it was very good data. they had every address i had ever had, including my dorm room in college. it was a pretty amazing exercise. june from virginia.

independent line. caller: sounds like a very fascinating set of data you have pulled up there. since knowledge is power, i am very concerned about the fact that more and more information in this country is only through the internet, which means we are to the -- susceptible fourth amendment violations were the government knows everything about us. that picked up one of your key phrases, your thought profile. the fact that they can figure out where you are, what you're doing and have this go into and i believe indeed happened, elections. i think we are just starting to find out how this will affect the political process.

you are right that the internet be soabled tracking to much easier. not as if this was not happening before come up but it was so much harder to do. in the old days if the government wanted to know where you were, they had to follow you in a car. now much easier. so many tools they can use to track people. that is what i think is a challenge of this, that i do not want to live in a world without the internet. i love the internet. what i want to see if can we keep the good parts and minimize the bad parts? i think a lot of that has to do do with making people who collect data accountable. says why notr register on websites with false data? guest: i do that all the time. a big part of my strategy is called data pollution which is i use fake names.

i have a program called masked me that's generating a new address for each website i go to. i even set up an additional profile of a whole other identity. mine, aa hero of journalist around the turn-of-the-century, and i gave her an online identity. she has an amazon account, opentable account. use her for my purchases. i want to separate my purchasing behaviors through another name. host: jan from massachusetts. go ahead. is last one thing november i was told by my going to awe were medical system where everything was now in the computer. healthold by my mental

therapist that everything was going onto the computer, and she apologized to me for that, which made me very worried and made me feel funny about going to therapy. on another note, i own my home, i bought my home and land. i feel i have the rights to own the air in my yard. it does not interfere with the sec and i do not think anyone should be able to film in my land or air without permission. i do not think google should be able to look down on my house. it is true that when -- one of the many ways the notion of privacy has changed is the fact that technology allows invasion of what we consider personal space. inside the home used to be a private space.

computers him if they are a channel of you think you are sitting alone but it is sending in formation out, sometimes to places you want that often to places you are not aware of. we have drones and people can fly them into your backyard and take a picture. interesting that this violates social norms in a way that the only privacy norms is many states have started passing laws to prohibit the use of drones because it seems so visceral to people. --t: another jan saying guest: it is a full-time job. thing that is still rolling and does not take as much work, but i compare it to being vegetarian.

so my life is a little harder every day. liz from maryland. almost out of times so go ahead with your question or comment. caller: quickly, i was blocked from getting through on book tv. isn't that something? i want to say the u.s. post office is also tracking our mayor -- mail. a letter that was returned to the electronic cross information system. thank you. suggestions for people if they're interested, maybe not to what you take into account for privacy but what would you suggest as a starting point? would suggest, please change your passwords. even if you do not agree with me you should worry

about becoming hacked. i do have strategies on my website about how to protect your privacy and build better passwords and i would say the other thing that is pretty easy to do is choose to use different tools online. choose to use a different rows or four different searches or online blocking tools i have on the website. " dragnetbook is nation." thank you so much. guest: thank you. a statement from the state department concerning the down the airline. the extend our deepest condolences to the loved ones online malaysia airlines flight. thatis time we can confirm three u.s. officials were on board. officials from the u.s. embassies in kuala lumpur and beijing are in contact with individuals families. do not forget, when you go to bed tonight, daylight savings

time goes into effect. set your clock one hour ahead. our show still starts at 7:00. a look at the topic of the president earned income tax credit. calling for the expansion of it. two guests to talk about it. jason fitchner and eugene steuerle. we will also, -- talk about the latest on the situation in ukraine. that and we will look at the calls -- take a look at the papers and take your calls as well. we will see you then.

at the federation of american hospitals talking about health care choices facing america. all loads by mitch and other speakers from the political action conference. then let coverage of the last day of this year's see pack -- cpac conference with newt gingrich. senate finance committee ron wyden spoke tuesday about health choices facing the united states. he spoke at a conference hosted by the federation of american hospitals. the chairman and president also spoke eared this is about one hour. -- spoke. this is about one hour. [applause] good morning. it is hard to follow ray charles. if that does not bring a chill down your back, nothing will. i and the president