This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 24, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown. The Federal Privacy

and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has analyzed many of the

revelations about the National Security Agency and found NSA programs wanting.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, breaks down the report.

The report released this week by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, first,

confirms, and indeed with respect to the specific

215 program the NSA's telephony metadata program that it was really focused

on goes even further than the president's own hand-picked review group.

So we don't have two expert bodies that have analyzed this program, this telephony metadata program, with access to classified records and essentially

concluded that it is not providing unique value and that bulk collection of records by the

government should end.

The President's review group had suggested that perhaps if it was

thought necessary there could still be some kind of aggregation of records

by some kind of third party. That's the option the president has

suggested they may go with. That has plenty of problems of its own. So if you've got

bulk collection still happening but it's Booz Allen holding onto the records,

it's not clear why that's much better from a privacy perspective, even though it would be better in the sense that you would still now have judicial orders for individual searches of that

data for each individual phone number. But this review group report goes

further and really says it's time for this program to end. They talk about first

why it's probably not lawful, why the courts that have approved this are wrong and also looks in some detail I think really the most

detail we have yet at some of the claims made by the intelligence community as to the

efficacy of this program.

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