This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 7th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Since revelations about the National Security Agency spying on Americans. We are seeing some of the first pieces of

legislation emerge to reform the agency. Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute,

evaluates two proposed sets of reforms.

Since the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance began,

there have been literally dozens of bills proposed to reform some aspect of

intelligence collection. There are really two main ones that are, I think, getting

the focus of attention now seemed like the ones with the best chance of passing. We have just out of the

Senate Intelligence Committee a bill sponsored by Diane Feinstein who has long I think

been one of the most ferocious defenders of the intelligence

community and it is in many ways I think a kind of a figly for form as

Senator Ron Wyden said a Cato event on surveillance we did recently.

It is a recognition that there is enough public consternation and outcry that something needs

to be done and so it attempts to provide a few tweaks without substantively changing much

without essentially allowing the NSA and FBI to continue business as usual.

So for instance, if you look at the press release for the

the Senate legislation, you see the first item is they say,

well, this bans bulk collection except under certain procedures.

What it in fact does is just codify exactly what the NSA is already doing.

So there's a provision that says section 215 of the Patriot Act, the business records provision,

may not be used for bulk collection of communication records, only communication records,

...