This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 30th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Candidate Obama pledged to reform national security policy to greater respect civil liberties.

Now President Obama wants access to all of the IDs of everyone you communicate with,

your web browsing history and quite possibly your continuous exact GPS location all without having to ask a judge for permission.

And more than that says Cato Institute Research Fellow Julian Sanchez, the White House would like the ability to snoop through all manner

of communications, whether those means of communicating exist or not.

Just as the Washington Post was debuting their three-part investigative report on the

American Intelligence Community and its links with for-profit contractors.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported that under a veto threat from Barack Obama,

they would be removing from their version of the fiscal year 2010 intelligence authorization bill

provision that would have clarified the authority of the federal government's watchdog,

the government accountability office, to conduct reviews of intelligence community programs.

Now we know that the GAO has the capability to conduct effective reviews, really actually more thoroughly I think

than the congressional committees themselves have.

GAO has something like 200 cleared, top secret cleared staffers and I think almost half of those hold some kind of

additional secret compartmentalized information clearance, which is sort of the

most sensitive programs. And they also have a lot of people

with really specialized expertise in economics

and managerial design that I think

would provide a lot of help to a community that as the post report

showed is become so sprawling that nobody really knows how effective it is.

We know it's effective at funneling about 50 billion of its

...