This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 14th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How Governments Local, State and Federal surveil Americans Should be a matter of grave concern.

And yet so much of this surveillance is done with little oversight, let alone a judicial

warrant.

Harry Friedman is author of the new book Unwarranted Policing Without Permission.

We spoke last week.

In Compton, California, the police were approached by a private company that did aerial surveillance

and they thought it was a great idea so they

tried it out and the city was subjected to aerial surveillance over a period of time

until people found out about it and they were very angry to know that they were being spied upon without their knowing about it.

So who authorized all this?

No one. In fact, the public information officer for the department said a remarkable thing.

He said, we knew that people kind of don't like this big brother being spied on things, so

we decided to keep it hush, hush, so they wouldn't know. Hard to imagine another government

official outside of policing saying that.

At the local level, and we can get to the other stuff in a little bit, but how pervasive is surveillance without warrant or suspicion.

Extremely pervasive.

I think that the mode of policing has moved to surveillance without warrant or suspicion.

You have CCTV cameras looking down on you from almost everywhere. The NSA is collecting your data in

bulk. We don't know how much of it goes on or exactly when. We know that there are stingrays

being used and perhaps being used to suck in the phone

...