This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 26, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Despite his best efforts, Democratic U.S. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon

can't seem to get the federal government to give him even

a ballpark figure of how many Americans are having their communications harvested by the feds.

He detailed the trouble at the Cato Institute yesterday.

The importance of the events of last week are essentially twofold. The first is, last government has admitted that there is a violation of Fourth Amendment of privacy rights that has taken place.

That's essentially the first significant news from last week.

The second part of those news is this is the first time that the government

has stated that the FISA court has reached the judgment that the spirit of the FISA Amendments Act has also been violated.

So these were the important findings in my view of last week.

They came about largely because I asked the intelligence community to declassify statements that I believed were true.

I asked them in a classified way, so you get a sense of how sensitive and

arduous a task is to constantly push these efforts to

declassify documents and have some transparency and have some accountability is.

So I submitted them in classified form.

I asked that they be declassified.

And the two statements that I've given you reflect essentially what the government was willing to

declassify that for the first time they've admitted that there has been a violation of Fourth Amendment

constitutional right to privacy and also for the first time they have said that in

their view what the FISA court has stated that the FISA

Amendments Act, the spirit of the law, has also been violated as well.

...