This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 26, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress is considering extending the Patriot Act and the debate features a strange reversal.

Ten years ago, the lone Senate no vote was a liberal Democrat. Today the struggle for

more debate is being led by conservative and libertarian members of the Senate.

Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Kito Institute and author of

Leashing the Surveillance State, how to reform Patriot Act surveillance authorities,

comments. So it's incredible that Senator Rand Paul has finally managed to interest the press in the Patriot Act,

not I suppose because of the incredible power of these surveillance tools and the need to place

better safeguards on them, but because finally there's a legislative battle.

So far, with the exception of Senator Paul and a handful of others,

really Democrats have had no interest in pointing out I think how closely

President Obama has followed the playbook written by George Bush and of course

Republicans are the ones who helped write that playbook, so they don't have much

interest in revisiting it.

And when we finally do get a little bit of debate on the subject, we get some really incredibly

troubling allegations, For example,

from Senators Wyden and Udall, we learn they believe that one of these expiring

provisions, almost certainly, the business records or Section 215 provision,

has been interpreted in a way that they believe the public would not have been aware of,

that a normal person would not understand was an

allowable use of this provision just from the text of the statute. I think almost

certainly that use involves some kind of large-scale geolocation tracking,

...