This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 16th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A new idea from the White House hastily assembled with some pretty dire civil liberties implications,

use consumer tech to monitor the mentally ill for signs of forthcoming violence.

The problems with such a plan are manifold.

Cato's Julian Sanchez comments.

The Trump administration has been toying with this notion that is, it's called

Safe Home, stopping aberrant fatal events by helping overcome mental extremes and this proposal

that may or may not be being taken very seriously within the administration would essentially

make use of technology to monitor people that are

deemed mentally ill to try to predict some sort of violent outburst or mass shootings, for example.

So just in general, what was your initial reaction to this idea?

I mean, this does sound like a case where more thought was put into the acronym than the

actual proposal. This is apparently just a three-page pitch that was assembled by Bob Wright, a former chairman of NBC,

who's a friend of the Trump family, as it again reportedly at

Avanca Trump's request.

It's something that I'm not sure if any actual mental health

professionals had any role in because, again,

based on public reporting, all the actual mental health professionals who have been quoted reacting to it have been sort of appalled.

You know, what it's really describing, again, you know, based on the public reporting is something for which the

technology does not exist, that is the technology to, you know, with any remotely reasonable degree of accuracy predict who is likely to become

violent or commit something like a mass shooting.

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