This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 12, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. Privacy has been redefined, behind closed doors and without input from Americans.

Data collection about Americans communications by the National Security Agency is far more extensive than was previously thought.

And it's time for an open debate about how the government views your privacy.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

As the programs of the National Security Agency have begun to come to light a little bit, what have government

officials been saying about the benefits to sort of deflect from the criticism of this

sort of mass surveillance?

When the first revelation about massive surveillance of all telephone communications

came out, the best speculation was, and I shared it, that this must be for data mining. Data mining won't catch terrorists

has relatively low value but maybe that's the theory they were operating on. More

recently it seems that the plan was to collect all this data, store it, warehouse it indefinitely,

so that in the future when suspicion arose about somebody, they could go and investigate that person, his or her contacts and communications.

It's a future crime unit, essentially, allowing the databases of all information about the telephone calls of all Americans. a

telephone call of all Americans so that when any of them come under suspicion

NSA officials could go and look into them.

About the time of the founding of the United States, this would have been called a general warrant and this was a very specific

problem that the founders were trying to deal with.

We're at a fascinating historical juncture because it's been

230 plus years since we saw a general warrant

and one was released to the public. You can download it and read it.

It's something that the Fourth Amendment was passed to eliminate. It's something the

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