This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 10th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown. Federal surveillance of domestic activist groups,

journalistic enterprises, and policy groups. of domestic

activists groups,

journalistic enterprises, and policy groups, and others.

It's far from unprecedented,

so to what extent is happening right now?

Cato's Patrick Eddington is asking Congress to dig into this potential surveillance.

We spoke yesterday.

So on the basis of a large and ongoing Freedom Information Act project trying to ferret out the scope essentially of domestic federal surveillance, not just by the FBI but by multiple organizations but the current work is heavily

focused on the FBI on the basis of 23 specific responses that I received that are known as these glomar responses and we can

get into what that word glomar stands for but they are the so-called we will not confirm or

deny whether or not we have national security or

intelligence related files on your organization based on just a number of

those and the fact that they were issued on domestic American groups or domestic

American media organizations. We have basically asked Congress to engage in an

investigation and I will I will say that next week the

week of the 14th of January 2020 I do expect a number of other groups, including some that I've received these glomars on, but other groups that are

equally concerned about the issue, will put out their own request to Congress and seek meetings with relevant staff and so on and so forth to try to get an actual investigation off the ground.

So based in part on work you've done previously and work that others have done over the years, this

kind of surveillance of domestic policy groups or activist groups is by no means unprecedented.

There is a 100 year history of this on the part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and I think that's that's exactly why I'm so

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