Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

W. Kato.org.

Today's podcast will address the ongoing controversy over the NSA database.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies here at Cato, is our expert this morning.

Jim, haven't phone records and other personal information been available to law enforcement

agencies for years?

What makes the NSA database different?

Phone records and other personal information have been available to law enforcement for years,

but for the most part that's been under warrants or subpoenas.

Unfortunately, under a case called Smith v. Maryland,

the Supreme Court has declined to protect information about telephone

traffic, that is who you've called, the duration of calls, so on and so forth, under the Fourth

Amendment.

Because of that, the phone companies involved may have convinced

themselves that it's all right to share this information en masse with the National Security

Agency. It's very concerning, obviously, to have such a large amount of information available to the NSA

which can obviously use it to develop a lot of information about our lives.

Because of the enormous volume of phone records, the NSA database logs, individual records are all but anonymous.

Is this program really the threat to civil liberties that some people make it out to be?

Well the allegations are that only call information has gone to the NSA, but that inevitably includes

telephone numbers and that information can be re-personalized very quickly.

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