This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 26, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We now know some new details in the form of government documents

about how the feds have used secret surveillance to spy on reporters. Julian

Sanchez is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. We discussed the newly released documents and what they mean.

What do we know or what have we known about the degree to which reporters have been spied on

by the US government and some you know some of the

rationales and and product of that. It's a possibly the most common rationale

for spying on reporters and I'm using that to include not just

wiretapped style surveillance but also the acquisition of

email and phone records that reveal who people are talking to and how frequently

is in connection with leak investigations at least that we know of publicly.

Maybe the most recent controversial instance of this

was the New York Times reported Ali Watkins

had years worth of her email metadata, her email records

see and phone records seized going essentially back to her college years as part of a leak investigation targeting a congressional

staffer that she had been romantically involved with. But there were, during the Obama era, of course, a number of pretty high profile controversies

about government monitoring of press conduct.

There was an incident where some months of telephone records on I think quite a number of different lines at the associated press

were subpoenaed as part of a leak investigation. That was a controversial and significant part because they were really trying to focus on

one or two reporters and one potential leaker, but also potentially gathered information

that would reveal the news gathering activities of the organization as the the whole many other reporters.

...