This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 11th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The NSA has been violating Americans' rights for years,

according to newly declassified documents.

And while that may come as no surprise, the revelations are changing many minds on Capitol Hill

about what to do about the agency's willful missteps.

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

on the latest revelation.

There is a pattern to the disclosures about NSA activities that Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor, has supplied.

Every time we learn something about disturbing NSA activities, something that's not clearly

legal or that interprets the law in a

far broader way than the ordinary person would have assumed we are assured about all

the safeguards that are in place, about the limited nature of the program, but all the things that are in place about the limited nature of the program but all the things

that they're not doing.

And then further leaks show that those assurances were themselves either false or again deliberately misleading.

And so what we see here is that from both affidavits and opinions of the FISA court that have been obtained not by Snowden

but by Freedom of Information Act suit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier

Foundation, we know that from its inception in 2006 through 2009, the rules the court established to control access to this massive

archive of every American's phone records were in essence ignored, not completely ignored, but that with

respect to a huge quantity of querying of that data, the main thing everyone was told was going to protect the privacy of innocent Americans

which is there was only going to be a query of this data when there was reasonable suspicion

connecting a particular phone number to a

...