This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 1st, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

Three provisions of the Patriot Act governing warrantless surveillance of American communications

expired overnight, but the fight over suspicionless domestic spying is far from over.

Patrick Edington is a policy analyst in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute.

He comments.

So the extraordinary Sunday session of the United States Senate did not produce a resolution on the three

expiring provisions of the Patriot Act so at midnight of May 31st, 2015 they did in

fact expire and these are of course the telephone

metadata program which is a big controversial one and the roving

wiretap program also controversial but perhaps more justifiable and then

finally the lone wolf provision which hasn't been used one time in 14 years.

And people like Diane Feinstein or say that this is these are all important provisions of the Patriot Act.

Yeah, well it's really kind of amazing and has been so for so very long with this entire debate

is that all the evidence has basically shown us that these programs have never worked in 14 years.

And on May 21st, the Department of Justice

Inspector General Office released a report

that covered the period from 2007 and 2009 on this section 215 program which is broader than just

the metadata.

I mean this encumbers is your medical records and other kinds of business and financial

records so it's actually quite sweeping.

And they could not, when they talked to FBI agents, they could not connect a single terrorist plot disrupted or detected to any of this stuff.

So you have members of the United States Senate going to the floor one after another saying

...