This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 15th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When NSA officials speak about the relevance of data to an investigation. They don't mean it the

way the police or the FBI would mean it and that's a problem for your rights.

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

NSA's continued wordplay.

Traditionally, there's a reasonably broad but not unlimited authority and ordinary criminal investigations to subpoena records

that are relevant to whatever the government is looking into and that's

understood somewhat broadly but not in an unlimited way.

It's interested to be records that have something to do with the specific investigation.

It's not understood to mean we want to get all the records that are out there and then sift through them to see if we can find something suspicious in them.

That is the definition of a fishing expedition.

And the government is arguing now they recently submitted their motion in reply to a lawsuit brought by the electronic privacy information center,

trying to argue that relevant to an investigation

means anything that is relevant to a process that can be used to

facilitate the investigation and so by getting all the records to analyze the the whole database to be able to do this. Now that's actually not clear at all.

The FISA court that approves in secret these orders

seems to have bought this claim of necessity

without much scrutiny, the question is, well necessary for what?

It's obvious that the government can often make connections between terrorists and identify

them without this kind of massive database, and the

record of actual success with this database is incredibly thin.

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