This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 18th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New legislation winding through Congress would give the government new powers

to vacuum up all sorts of information about you, hang on to it for a long

while and share it with lots of new groups.

The government hasn't even made the case for why the threats are worthy of the intrusion. according to Jim Harper, Director of Information

Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

The cyber security debate is hot this week and next on Capitol Hill.

And it's interesting to observe how that debate is going.

For the most part, it has two framings.

On the Hill specifically, the framing is, which bill is the best? Which one should we pick? the the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, Mike Rogers Bill out of the Intelligence Committee.

But which bill to pick is just one framing?

Another framing to the issue is what privacy tweaks will make cybersecurity legislation acceptable.

And that's been one of the dominant motifs of this week.

So what changes are being made?

What changes have been offered?

Are there actually changes being offered? It's unclear still. Though some of the talking

points suggest that compromises being made, I haven't seen it. But I think

either those framings are actually inappropriate. The real question is whether

the case has been made for legislation in this area. Along two dimensions, I don't think that the case has been made for legislation on

cyber security. The first is that the threat to our country is vastly overblown. The problem is not as substantial as most

people have been led to believe in Washington DC D.C.

...