This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 10, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. The massive

scale of government requests for American cell phone records, including outright wiretaps,

is only beginning to be shared.

And in many cases where the government demands information about activity on your cell phone,

providers are prohibited from disclosing to you or anyone else that the government ever asked for that

information. Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

When we talk about government surveillance of cell phone users, there are a lot of different

pieces of data that government could be asking for.

We're also talking about different levels of government asking for things, and we're talking about some very different

circumstances under which the government at some level could be asking for one of

these multiple pieces of information.

So help us put into perspective what we're talking about,

we're talking about government surveillance

of Americans cell phone activities.

So it used to be that if you were monitoring cell phone

there was a fairly limited amount of information you could get.

You could learn who the subscriber was and what their address was, what credit card they were using.

You could with a little bit more legal authority from a court get a list of the people they

were calling and when they were calling them and then with a lot more

authority you could get the power to actually wiretap those phone conversations.

But in 2012, a telephone is a much more sophisticated piece of equipment.

It is, in a sense, a tracking device.

...