This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 18th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Protect America Act has expired.

I asked Cato Institute adjunct scholar Tim Lee, just how different is intelligence gathering

now versus last week.

Not very much. The last August Congress passed legislation called the Protect America Act,

which gave the president the power to authorize certain kinds of surveillance

activities without going to a court first.

And that legislation expired over the weekend

but one of the provisions of the law was that any

existing authorizations continue from a year from the point where

the authorization began.

So if there was a particular terrorist cell

that the president or the had already authorized

to be eavesdropped on, the authorization to spy on them would continue to be in effect at least until

August.

And so there's no reason to think that the expiration of the Protect America Act had any particular negative effect on the administration's ability to

spy on people. The other thing is that the, well the Protect America Act expired

uh... fiza which is the law that has governed surveillance for the last

30 years did not expire

and how has the media handled that

it's it's been a mixed bag it's it's gotten better I think over the week as

journalists have gotten a you know better handle on what the debate is a lot about but there

...