This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 20th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The defenses of the NSA's broad surveillance of Americans have been at times contradictory,

they've misstated facts and display the large measure of disregard for individual privacy.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow in the Cato Institute,

discusses the NSA's missteps,

and the enabling behavior of the agency's

overseers.

The most recent set of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave rise to a report in the Washington Post detailing an internal

audit that found just in one year and just looking at collection at NSA headquarters

and other DC area facilities, there were 2,76 so-called

compliance incidents, violation of either FISA rules, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rules, or executive orders,

other internal guidelines designed to protect privacy by limiting the acquisition,

retention, and dissemination of Americans communications.

Some of these seem not to have been very serious.

It may involve records of being stored for a little bit longer than we're supposed to.

Others seem to have been quite serious, in at least one case involving the intermingled collection

of foreign and domestic communications, domestic communications are supposed to require an individual warrant

from the secret FISA court in a kind of bulk collection program that went on for several

months before the secret FISA court ruled that it was

both unconstitutional and deficient on statutory grounds. We don't know much more

about that, but we know it's not the first time it's happened.

...