This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 1st, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The feds like their informants, but asking people in sensitive job positions like professors or medical professionals to inform

on their students and patients is alarming.

Cato's Patrick Eddington discusses what the new relatively hidden federal program looks like.

This idea of countering violent extremism, it sounds very rational and reasonable on the surface and when you hear proponents talk about it

They speak in terms of trying to find a way to

identify folks who might become so pro-IS and the concern here of course is with Americans, not just necessarily young Americans, but Americans generally who might be

seduced, if you will, by the ISIS ideology and cross a threshold from simply talking about

it to actually doing something about it.

And so this concept of counter-violent extremism basically posits that there is a profile,

a number of so-called indicators that can reliably tell you who is more likely or

most likely to go down that road and go from being a talker to a killer.

And the problem with it is there's no scientific basis for it at all.

Sociologist, criminologist, criminologist, and so on

have been trying, literally for decades to come up with a profile

of who would become a bank robber or in this case a terrorist and it's just not out there.

So it's a discredited notion but it's gained a lot of traction because of course in Washington

the government always has to do something, even if it's a terrible idea for the sake of being

seen as trying to do something.

And the latest wrinkle in this whole countering violent extremism business

is a little something that the FBI has cooked up called

...