This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 14, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What we now know about the scale and uses of surveillance of everyday Americans is truly chilling.

There appears to be some movement toward ending. of everyday Americans is truly chilling.

There appears to be some movement toward ending a great deal of that surveillance.

Patrick Edington, a policy analyst in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute evaluates proposals for scaling back surveillance now on the table.

We've recently learned that the DEA, years before 9-11, almost a decade before 9-11, had its own method for collecting phone calls,

primarily phone calls between the U.S. and foreign governments that covered a hundred

countries and what does that tell us with respect to terrorism and acts of

terrorism that may occur in the United States.

Well, I think it's quite the statement on that particular program that you're referring to,

which began actually during the very late days of the

George Herbert Walker Bush administration back in 1992 it's quite the statement on the

program that it apparently had essentially no impact on the drug war,

had no impact ultimately in stemming the flow of drugs into this country.

But it also ultimately served essentially as a template for what would ultimately become

this Section 215 of the Patriot Act telephone metadata program and also probably some of the other programs that we don't even

know about.

And that's the other thing to kind of point out about this USA Today story from earlier here

in April, is that this entire thing was not on anybody's radar screen. I certainly had never heard of it. I've encountered no one in the Civil Liberties community up to this point that had heard of this specific program for this period of time and

that just raises questions about all the other programs that may be running out

there surveillance wise we have no clue about right now.

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