This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 6, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The National Security Agency had a deal with Google

to get access to information about specific accounts,

and then the NSA ignored that agreement as it tapped

Google's communications among its own servers. It's angered Google's CEO and the

larger tech industry and maybe a harbinger of more serious surveillance reform.

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

We've known since earlier this summer that the NSA has been cooperating with major technology companies like Google,

Yahoo, and Microsoft through a program called PRISM to allow for programmatic surveillance targeted

foreigners outside the United States,

but of course, given its enormous scale,

inevitably picking up large quantities

of American communications as well incidentally as

they call it and so we knew that this was happening directly from the systems

of the companies through PRISM with their cooperation and the

companies have been very insistent that they had not allowed the government

kind of free reign on their servers. They were not letting the NSA just go in and do for example

keyword searches across all of their user email accounts and that kind of thing. They were

saying no it's only when they come to us with specific

user accounts that they're suspicious of that we turn over that data and let them access

a probably very large sandbox, but still a sandbox with that data and not everyone's information.

...