This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 8, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Key provisions of the Patriot Act expire at the end of the year.

President Obama, when running for president, was explicit in his criticisms of the Bush

administration's national security letters warrantless wiretapping and other abuses

but Obama's record on these issues has been galling at best.

So says Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute.

So the three provisions that are set to expire

at the end of the year are the Roving Wiretap provision that lets investigators follow a target in the intelligence context from telephone to telephone or from internet account to internet account.

The Lone Wolf provision, which essentially allows the tools of foreign

intelligence law to be used against non-U.S. persons in the U.S. who are believed to be engaged in essentially nefarious activity

but without any known link to an actual foreign power or terror group.

There's a sort of a constitutional issue there because those special powers are really

justified by the involvement of a foreign power.

And the and the section 215 tangible things or business record orders,

which allow the court to compel the production by third parties of more or less whatever they want on order from the secret FISA court on a standard of mere relevance.

Also being debated and up for potential reform are national security letters which are not due to expire,

but which have been found by successive Inspector General reports to have been systematically misused.

There have been a number of issues there.

So those are also on the table.

Barack Obama was during the campaign, very critical of the Bush administration specifically on

national security letters what has he done since becoming president on

...