This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 10, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A court case this week has narrowed the range of people who can effectively challenge

the government's collection of their private information.

The feds have already provided immunity for telecoms that help them engage in this legally dubious data collection.

And even when our elected representatives are asking for a rundown of what they've been doing,

Intelligence agencies basically stonewall.

The bottom line is that you're right against an unreasonable search and seizure as being carefully,

if not systematically diminished by the federal government.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts. Very little that the government does is as secret as electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency.

But one of the rare exceptions to that rule was the Al-Hara main Islamic Foundation, which thanks

to an error basically by the government, learned that it had been subject to the warrantless

wiretapping program authorized by President Bush after 9-11.

It actually won about $40,000 in damages in a suit against the government after it learned about this.

But this week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

struck down that damage award.

It ruled that in the statute governing violations of federal wiretap law

the government had waived sovereign immunity, the government's privilege

against being subject to lawsuits without its permission

for illegal use and disclosure of wiretap information, but it hadn't explicitly waived sovereign immunity for

the mere collection the mere illegal collection of that information.

So the upshot of that

...