OOPS !
In the age of the internet, a sensationalistic story can be broadcast around the word before all the facts are availabe. I try to avoid this, but I’m afraid I get caught up in it as well . . .

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece about a 16 year old homeschool boy who had been arrested under the PATRIOT Act. I may owe my readers an apology. As Paul Harvey would say, I should have waited for, “the rest of the story“.

According to Fox News, the mother of the boy who said she didn’t have any idea why her son had been arrested, knew about some activities that her son was involved in that might have made him a target.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519570,00.html

  When a North Carolina woman accused the federal government last week of abusing the Patriot Act to imprison her teenage son for allegedly making bomb threats, the mother’s allegation caused quite an uproar, including calls to free 16-year-old Ashton Lundeby.“His mother knew that he was making calls, because she’d come on the microphone when he was talking and tell him not to do any bomb threats because the house was going to get raided,” the student told Wired News.

An Australian college student who told Wired News that he tipped off the FBI about Ashton said Annette Lundeby knew exactly what her son was doing.

Annette Lundeby admitted to Wired News that she knew Ashton had been making “really funny” prank calls, and that he’d made bomb threats, and that he’d received money for some of the calls — but she said it was all just a joke.

“Tyrone” allegedly moved on to bigger things, according to Wired News, which says he began calling in bomb threats and pretty soon was being paid for them via a PayPal account.

Videos of him doing so, often with profane and offensive language, are on YouTube.

Ashton Lundeby was charged under a long-standing law against making threats, and “this charge is unrelated to the Patriot Act,” the statement says.

Bloggers on both the left and right of the political spectrum had come to the boy’s defense, calling him a victim of government oppression, prompting the U.S. Attorney’s office to issue a statement Thursday refuting the mother’s claim.

Last week the boy’s mother, Annette Lundeby, went on local TV and called her son’s arrest a violation of the Constitution. She said Ashton, who’d been home-schooled and lived in a house full of American flags, was innocent, and that others had “hacked her son’s IP address.”

But a new report by Wired News suggests that, not only was the teenager an online superstar in rogue tech communities for his prank phone calls, but his mother may have known all along that the boy was conspiring with others to make bomb threats.

Lundeby, known online as “Tyrone,” allegedly had progressed into selling his services as a threatmaker, charging schoolchildren from across the country $5 apiece to place threatening, Internet-based phone calls that would cause administrators to shut down their schools, Wired News reports.

“I heard the prank phone calls he made,” his mother, Annette Lundeby, said in the Wired report. “They were really funny prank calls.”

On top of that, the U.S. Attorney’s office handling the case says her story about abuse of the Patriot Act was false.

On March 5, FBI agents took Ashton Lundeby into custody at his Oxford, N.C., home and placed him in a federal juvenile facility in Indiana, where he remains on charges he made bomb threats against Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and other schools.

This is not to dismiss or lessen legitimate concerns about the growth of the “police state” mentality in general or the abuses of the misnamed PATRIOT Act in particular. We must continue to stand up & speak out against these. But, I — and all bloggers — need to be more dilligent in making sure we give all the facts and both sides of the story.
There are plenty of real outrages and abuses to get upset about. We need to keep the tea bags, torches, tar & feathers in reserve for them. Also, it is important to focus on foundational principles at least as much as particular violations or conspiracies. 
Sensationalistic stories & conspiracy theories may be good for selling DVD’s and increasing traffic to sites/ blogs; they might even be good to forment revolution; and, specific, legitimate outrages certainly have their place in giving people a rallying point and serving as real life examples of the foundational issues / principles we are trying to explain. But they are no substitute for the real need.
Worshipping God in Spirit and in Truth. Living out our faith. Learing to apply not only the principles of liberty, but the wisdom of God’s Word to ALL of life. Speaking out for truth. Serving & loving our neighbors. Laying the ax to the root. Hearing the cry of the fatherless — and responding. Restoring the Foundations. And working for Christian liberty at the state & local level. These are the foundations for lasting reformation.

We do not need merely to stoke the fires of unrest. We do not need revolution built on shaky foundations that will likely only lead to more tyrrany in a different form.
We need the WHOLE Gospel of Christ to come again to our land in Word and in Power — and for God to grant us repentance, revival, and reformation.