This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 10th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The First Amendment is under increasing attack by zealous prosecutors using vague language in the Patriot Act.

At a Cato policy forum held recently American Civil Liberties Union President Susan Herman

detailed a few recent cases.

So here's the chief frame, it seems to me. There are a number of different assumptions

that I want to look at.

And the first one, I think, which was the assumption

underlying the Patriot Act, as well as Guantanamo

and a lot of other things that we were doing,

is very much related to what David was talking about

about risk.

And I think the most extreme version of this

was Vice President Cheney is talking about the 1% doctrine.

If there's a 1% chance that there are weapons of mass

destruction out there, we have to act as if it's true, because what if it's not,

we're taking a risk that we won't be safe.

So it seems to me that the theme of the Patriot Act

was, let's create drag nets.

Let's give the government all of these enhanced powers because we want to

reduce the risk that there might be a terrorist out there that we wouldn't be able

to catch because the government didn't have enough power. So where David started us is that there were all these

...