This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, September 11th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

9-11 was a transformative moment for both the US appetite for war and for the national security state that dramatically

increased its surveillance powers over all Americans. Cato Institute Senior

Fellow Patrick Eddington discusses the dramatic expansion of federal power and the fight over how Americans

can find out about just how the government is spying or otherwise grabbing our data.

Inevitably, when you talk about 9-11 everybody immediately launches into stories about where they were and I was at work

You were at home sick when I say I was at work I was a reporter in Louisville Kentucky you were a little

closer so what were you doing on the morning of 9-11 I was actually supposed to be down

there at the Pentagon for a meeting to discuss a number of veterans issues.

At the time I was the Associate Director of Garret Relations at Vietnam Veterans America,

but I woke up shortly before nine that morning with what I thought was going to turn out to be

strapped throat anyway I felt like hell and so I let folks know that I wouldn't be in and

I turned on you know NBC which most of my life has

been my channel of choice for at least the evening news but also today show occasionally.

And it comes on and there we are with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer and you know they're cut to a

scene of one of the towers burning and then they go on to say that the plane had slammed into it and I'm looking at the sky and I'm like I didn't see a cloud anywhere, right?

So I was trying to figure out okay, major malfunction, you know, whatever, and then moments later, the second airliner slams in and in that

instant I knew we were under attack.

And I was certain it was Al-Qaeda, mainly because of what had happened overseas the prior years.

You know, we had the East African bombings in 1998 and the attack on the U.S.S. coal less than a year

before in the Port of Aidan in Yemen.

...