Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Patrick Gettington, senior fellow here at the Institute.

And I'm Maria Sophia, manager of government affairs. So we're here to talk about the ever

unpopular Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 702 program, which this April, 26, is once again up for

reexamination, renewal, whatever term of art you want to use here. And for those who may not

have the full background in this particular program, it began its life as a completely secret and totally

unconstitutional program, literally hours after the 9-11 attacks, over almost 25 years ago now,

which is really kind of astonishing. And in that particular circumstance, the then director

of the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden, ordered his folks of the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden,

ordered his folks at the National Security Agency, NSA, to go ahead and start monitoring every bit of the

traffic, the communications traffic between the United States and Afghanistan. The problem with that

order was that it was a direct violation of the 1978 edition of the foreign

intelligence surveillance act they weren't supposed to be doing that so this thing became a

classified monster uh within a month uh of hayden giving that order it actually had a specific

name that name was stellar wind and it would be the better part of four years before

the American public would find out that not just were communications between Afghanistan,

the United States being monitored, but communications between Americans and foreigners generally

were being monitored one way or the other. And that was courtesy of James Reisen and Eric Lishblow

when they were reporters at the New York

Times, and they broke that story in December 2005. And after that happened, it put the Congress on a

two-and-a-half-year odyssey of trying to take a mass electronic surveillance program and make it

comply with the Constitution's no probable cause, no warrant, no exceptions,

language, essentially. And it has never really been genuinely fully compliant. Courts have

...