This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 10th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. The leaks that implicate the National Security Agency in so many violations of Americans' rights have also opened

up legal challenges to the mass surveillance.

Laura Donahue is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

We spoke at Cato's Conference on NSA Surveillance,

held yesterday.

What is the legal status of bulk data collection

right now as we understand it?

And I guess how sustainable is our current regime of this.

You have no privacy interest in information you give to a third party in light of what has

happened with the NSA over the past few months.

So the claim that you have no interest, no third party, sorry, the claim that you have no interest

in third party data that's been given to, for instance, a telephone service provider,

that comes from a case called Smith v. Maryland, which is a case from 1979 when there was an

individual who had been robbed, who gave a description of the robber to the police

as well as the 1975 Monte Carlo car that she had seen at the scene of the crime.

She subsequently was called on her home telephone by an individual who said he was a

a robber who then told her to go out onto her front porch where he drove

slowly by the house in a Monte Carlo. The police then saw this car in the

neighborhood, found out the license plate, and

used it to figure out who owned the car, and then asked the telephone company to place

a pen register on his telephone. Now this case Smith First Maryland, within 24

...