This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 31st, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Candidate Obama made several nods to transparency and the importance of civil liberties during the campaign.

President Obama, over his first year in office has taken advantage

of the previous administration's unprecedented data gathering and assertions of state secrets

to keep much government surveillance under wraps and without congressional oversight.

Cato Institute Research Fellow Julian Sanchez offers his thoughts.

I saw a cartoon recently that struck me as incredibly apt.

It shows Barack Obama clad in mythral armor,

climbing the steps to Mount Doom with Russ Feingold that is back,

grasping the one ring of executive power and state secrets and you know

Russ Feingold is urging him throw it in cast it into the flames and you know and of

course Obama says no and you know it's the fateful moment where we see that all of the

executive power all of crucially the executive secrecy that Obama swore he would cast away.

I mean, this is the man who promised that he would have the most transparent administration

in American history, and in legal battles has certainly shown he's willing to invoke the state secrets

privilege as ferociously as his predecessor and now when Congress is trying

to impose a little bit more oversight over the

intelligence communities activities than was the case during the Bush

era with its warrantless wiretapping programs and vast the anti-war groups. The attempt to crack the veil a little bit has been just utterly rebuffed.

Obama is threatening to veto an intelligence authorization bill that would require more extensive

briefings to Congress on intelligence activities and enable government

watchdogs to keep a closer track on what the intelligence community is getting up to.

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