This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 24, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Advocates of an ongoing warrantless surveillance state, won around in Congress as federal surveillance

authorities have now been extended for two years and in some ways made worse

for Americans liberties. The fight for requiring warrants before the feds can go snooping through Americans

data among other reforms now moves back to the courts at least as far as the Cato Institute

is concerned.

Cato's Patrick Edington explains what happened.

Pat, I want to set the stage with an event that you point to in a blog post that you wrote in

which an FBI agent searched campaign donors of a particular

congressional campaign among thousands, tens of thousands of other searches with essentially

what appear to be no oversight. And this is all private information.

This is warrantless surveillance of Americans

and it's not clear that that surveillance had anything to do with even a suspicion of a crime.

Caleb, this is what happens when government bureaucrats, in this case, law enforcement government bureaucrats in this case law enforcement government

bureaucrats are given vast investigative powers

without any kind of meaningful oversight whatsoever. And in this whole recently

concluded for now battle over the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act or FISA.

I think many of us thought that that incident that you just described which involved no less

than 19,000 U.S. person donors to a congressional campaign. I think a lot of us thought, okay, that has to be it.

That's got to be the one that motivates Congress to actually finally impose a warrant requirement on any searches of the stored communications

...