This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 14th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal government has been collecting a great deal of information about Americans and the director of national

intelligence, James Clapper, has dramatically understated the volume of that information collection.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute,

offers his thoughts.

You know, I actually think there is no other appropriate word

for this other than lie.

It was a yes or no question. Is there any program under which the

NSA collects any form of data explicitly not email contents not phone conversations

any form of data about millions or hundreds of millions of Americans and he

asked this because the current head of the NSA

had at a conference recently publicly said,

we don't keep dossiers on millions of Americans.

This is a crazy fantasy.

And he said, well, I don't know what a dossier is.

Is there any form of data that's kept on millions of Americans?

And the Director of National Intelligence gave a yes or no answer.

He could have said, it's not appropriate for me to discuss anything about the scale of

our collections operations in a public setting.

He said no.

And I don't know how, in light of the revelations about bulk collection of metadata that we

now have

...