This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 27, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

The degree to which the United States is a surveillance state is largely unknown.

The feds have admitted that Americans' rights have been violated by increasing surveillance

of our communications, but questions about the size of that violation has produced unsatisfactory

answers.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute,

discussed the issue today at a Cato Institute e-briefing.

One of the reasons I focus on government surveillance primarily is that both our own history

unfortunately and certainly the history of less free societies around the world

have made it extremely clear that the power of a government to monitor its citizens

and in particular its citizens private communications is one of the most dangerous and

susceptible to abuse,

especially without strong oversight.

And we could spend an hour just talking about the really

disturbing history of surveillance abuses in the United States in the 60s and 70s

before we saw a recognition that it was necessary to create stronger oversight structures.

And one of the problems we face is that Congress recognized that,

and we still recognize, I think, that oversight accountability to the public

is one of the strongest checks against abuse of

surveillance power and also actually an important constitutional

requirement when the Supreme Court in the 60s first started looking at government wiretapping after deciding

that it was not a constitutional problem for many years.

...