This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 26, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Some of the broad vacuum cleaner style surveillance powers authorized by amendments

to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are up for reauthorization

with just days left before they expire.

This is roughly par for the course given that the feds rarely debate the effectiveness of these largely unchecked powers.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, says the feds can't or won't really even

tell us how many Americans are having their communications

intercepted. So as 2012 comes to a close we also see the expiration of the

FISA amendments act of 2008 pending and perhaps surprisingly this

close to the expiration of that broad surveillance authority, Congress has not yet moved to reauthorize the law. Partly this is because

Senator Ron Wyden has been trying to hold up the passage of that bill in order

to get some amendments considered.

But I think predictably, we're going to see a pattern

we've seen again and again with intelligence legislation like this,

including every time the Patriot Act comes up for reauthorization, certainly

something we saw with the predecessor of the FISA Amendments Act, the Protect America Act, which

actually lapsed briefly and we heard the sort of panic, you've got to reauthorize it immediately or

we're going to be you know blind and in the dark and unable to spy on our enemies.

But this was after repeatedly promising oh we will, I mean, the Obama administration and Congress

promised we're going to have hearings on the Patriot Act.

Hearings never occur, and then it's a rush to get something passed.

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