This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 19, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown, protecting

the public through secret laws. The secret interpretations of the Patriot Act used by federal

agencies to engage in surveillance likely far exceeds the public understanding of the powers granted.

The problem is, how do you enforce a government's overbroad interpretation of the law without the means to

challenge it in court?

Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

For more than a year now, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been raising a raucous about what they call a secret Patriot Act.

Interpretations by the Justice Department of Powers, they were granted in the name of fighting terrorism,

they think go beyond what an ordinary person would understand to be granted to the government by the Patriot Act.

They have said that the Justice Department has read, in particular Section 215 of the Patriot Act,

the so-called Business Record Authority, in a way that goes far beyond what a normal

person would think they were entitled to do on the basis of this power.

As a result of this, civil libertarians have been pushing the Obama administration

to release legal opinions, obviously not revealing sensitive

specific operational details of who they're investigating or how precisely, but the broad

legal arguments revealing what they think the law gives them the right to do.

And reasonable people can of course disagree about how much surveillance power the government needs to keep us safe from terrorists.

But what I think everyone should be able to agree on is that in a free and democratic society,

the people need to have the right to know what the law is.

To know what the law is not just in terms of the law on the page,

but in terms of what the courts have interpreted that law to mean,

how the government itself interprets the law

...