This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Congress has sent President Bush a bill that strips much judicial oversight from the President's foreign intelligence gathering and gives telecom companies

immunity for breaking federal law in the past.

Tim Lee, a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, discusses the real world impact of that legislation.

On Wednesday the Senate voted on legislation that the House passed last month

that would do retroactive immunity to companies that might have violated the law

while participating in the eavesdropping programs and it also going forward made it much easier for the

government to engage in blanket surveillance without a lot of judicial oversight and there

were a few amendments that would have stripped out the

immunity provisions and those were rejected fairly, by fairly wide margins.

I believe Don McCain didn't make it to the vote, although I think he would have voted in favor of the

legislation if he had been there.

Hillary Clinton interestingly had voted sort of with the White House back back in February when the previous version of the legislation came up,

but this time she voted with the majority of her fellow Democrats against the legislation.

In contrast, Barack Obama went the other way. He promised

to and did vote to vote against the immunity and some of these other provisions

back in February, but now in July he voted in favor of the

legislation which includes the immunity and the greater eavesdropping powers.

Okay tangibly what does this legislation do to the future of warrantless eavesdropping on Americans?

What it means is that it's much easier for the Bush administration or for the next

six months in any future administrations to engage in broad sort of dragnet surveillance of

international communications in the past if the

government wanted to intercept a call that goes from an American to somebody overseas, they

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