This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 27th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court is allowing a vast federal surveillance program to continue tossing aside a challenge brought by journalists and others.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, argues that the reasoning of Justice

Alito's majority opinion leaves the security of our most private communications in a dangerous

catch 22. The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in Clapper v Amnesty International

has essentially announced that even if a

government surveillance program is unconstitutional, even if perhaps it

violates the Fourth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans, that doesn't matter as long as the

program is secret. As long as they never tell you that you've been spied upon

because the law says they never have to tell any of the thousands and perhaps millions of people

who are spied upon that they are in the government's database, those people have no

standing to go to a court and ask them to pass judgment on the constitutionality of that

law. This was a case brought by a group of attorneys and activists and journalists

who have regular communications with the Middle East who had

various pretty good reasons to think that their international communications were

especially likely to be intercepted on the broad vacuum cleaner authority provided by the FISA amendments

Act and the opinion for the majority said, well that doesn't matter, you are just speculating. You're speculating that you are likely to be

intercepted. You're speculating that you will be harmed by government surveillance by this

invasion of your privacy. You can't prove it. The government doesn't have to prove it and in fact as far as we're able to tell in the for now almost five years that the

FISA amendments act has been in effect. Never have they notified someone

because they intended to bring a case

...