This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 8, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

National Security Agency Reform Legislation is moving through Congress, having moved quickly through

two House committees. Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, says it is a positive

first step toward reigning in surveillance abuses.

Real substantial reform of the national security agencies' surveillance authorities

just got much closer to reality as the House Intelligence

Committee unanimously passed out the USA Freedom Act, which the day before had been voted out of the Judiciary Committee also unanimously.

This is legislation proposed by Representative James Sensenbrenner and Senator Patrick Leahy and actually first announced

at an NSA conference we held here at the Cato Institute last year by Representative Sensen Brenner.

The version approved by the Judiciary Committee is not quite the robust and comprehensive

and far-reaching reform of surveillance authorities that the initial version was.

Compromises had to be made to get the Intelligence Committees and the administration to sign on.

But given the alternatives, given an alternative bill that the Intelligence Committee

had proposed that would in many ways have actually expanded an essay authority to monitor our phone and internet records. This is really a kind of

of substantive limitation that six months ago I think seemed completely unrealistic.

It does not, as the original version did, deal with the full range of different NSA authorities.

The original version, for example, included some limitations on what's called Section 702

surveillance.

This is the authority under the FISA amendments act of 2008 to target foreigners outside the United States

including their communications with Americans under what the founders would have regarded as general warrants with

individual NSA analysts deciding which actual email accounts and phone

numbers to target. The original version would have limited what are called

...