This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 12, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, believes the CIA has been overseeing the

overseers, spying on Senate staffers as they try to get through

the bottom of likely CIA abuses.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, says the revelations give lie to the notion that intelligence oversight

by lawmakers has been both rigorous and effective. It's very gratifying to see

that Senator Feinstein has finally discovered intelligence community spying she is upset about.

It's not the bulk acquisition of phone records of millions of innocent Americans, but as she alleges, the CIA's spying on the activities of her

own Intelligence Committee staffers as they were attempting to prepare a report and investigate the CIA's enhanced

interrogation aka torture program. We learned here that the CIA had insisted that instead of being given the

documents, staffers come out to Virginia to a secure location to review documents

to fulfill their oversight role in a facility there.

But they promised that this would be a segregated network that Senate staff would have access to

so they could conduct their work and not be monitored by CIA and it now appears,

at least according to Senator Feinstein, that that is not the case that the work of

the Senate staff was monitored and that indeed some documents after had already been provided

to the Senate staff were then removed.

Most controversially of what was called the Panetta Report an internal CIA assessment that, again, supposedly

found or at least acknowledged some serious CIA wrongdoing, acknowledged that the conditions and the harshness of these interrogations

was in fact much worse than had been publicly acknowledged.

This is all in connection of course with a Senate report that is apparently extremely critical of the CIA program and which the CIA has blocked the release of for some time now.

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