This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 24th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It was a retroactive fix in an attempt to make legal surveillance activities that the U.S. Attorney General

refused to authorize.

And now we know how it happened.

Julian Sanchez, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses this surveillance authority fix that had to travel back in time.

There is a famous showdown between essentially Alberto Gonzalez and John Ashcroft, when Ashcroft was attorney general. and White House, Gonzales wanted authorities to engage in certain surveillance, and Ashcroft sat

up in his hospital bed and said, no, you can't do that.

And now we have learned that the Bush administration traveled back in time in a sense to give greater powers to the federal government to engage in surveillance.

So what happened?

So this is a fascinating story.

It's probably one of the most dramatic moments,

at least it's been made public in the post-9-11 evolution of the surveillance state.

This was a dispute while John Ashcroft was hospitalized,

James Comi, now FBI director, was acting attorney general, and had found a bit of a hitch in the Stellar Wind collection.

This is what was originally revealed as the warrantless wiretap program that the New York Times

disclosed in 2005, but as we now know was broader than that, was not just warrantless

wiretapping, but warrantless collection of internet content and metadata as well as telephone metadata and all of this

circumventing the statutory process laid out for intelligence surveillance in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance

Act or FISA.

And after an initial phase, we know when John Yu had developed a theory that essentially Article II powers of the President

allowed him to effectively ignore legislation at will, a somewhat more measured legal

...