This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 29, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The National Security Agency dropped a gift under the tree this year,

a Christmas Eve acknowledgement of several specific

instances of employees making use of NSA tools to stock love interests

among other abuses. Patrick Eddington a policy analyst in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute,

spent his holiday pouring over the documents.

Our friends at the National Security Agency on Christmas Eve decided to put a series of reports out there that have been the

subject of litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information

Act.

And again, this is essentially a follow-up on something that Senator Chuck Grassley had initiated

back in August of 2013 when he sent a letter to NSA saying how many intentional violations essentially

of US law and NSA protocols have folks engaged in and he got a letter back in

September of 2013 that outlined at least a dozen of these,

you know and some of this is what we've heard before in terms of folks going after

individuals going after the information on their ex-wives or their girlfriends and things

of that nature.

And so this data dump that occurred just before this Christmas 2014 was a whole series of reports that go back to 2001, the very late 2001 time frame

and then from that point forward.

And the verge, you know, had some really good coverage on this.

And as they noted in their lead,

if you want to release something no one will pay attention to

...