This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

There appears to be little appetite in Congress to hold James Clapper, the Director of National

Intelligence, accountable for having lied to Congress about the extent of NSA collection of Americans information.

And a leaked draft of an NSA Inspector General's report is shedding even more light on the extent of that agency's

gathering of Americans data.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

The latest round of leaks on NSA surveillance from the Guardian have revealed a bit of new information about both

NSA metadata surveillance and the broader warrantless wiretap program or stellar wind that President Bush authorized after the 9-11 attacks.

One thing that was confirmed here, we I think suspected already, but has been verified, is that it's not just a question of American phone call records being obtained in bulk, but also internet metadata, meaning at least some

kind of information about IP addresses connected to, so that might include things like the

websites people are visiting, as well as email,

header information, not the contents of the subject line or the message, but the to and

from and date and time information, which again when you think about the differences between how we use the internet and how we use phones can be a lot more revealing.

You get a much more kind of blow by blow picture of, for example, a conversation that might be taking

place on a political list serve.

So we know now that that program went on until at least 2011 that it was for unspecified reasons discontinued at that time and that through some kind of other mechanisms the United States does continue to get at least

international internet metadata which again because the internet is global will implicate

American communications a lot of the time. We also learn that the initial warrantless

wiretap program seems to have been rather broader than even has been revealed

to date. The description of it has traditionally been that has been this is a surveillance that was targeting specific people in

communication with foreign known terrorist targets.

In fact, it appears that the authorization treated all communications between the U.S. and Afghanistan as of potential foreign

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