This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 18th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Viper teams are federal customs agents conducting warrantless searches of Americans up to 100 miles within the U.S. border.

They haven't stopped any terrorists and their purview is expanding.

Patrick Edington, a policy analyst in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute

says it's time for Viper teams to go.

Viper stands for visible intermodal prevention and response.

So another lovely Washington acronym

that we get to play with here.

These teams were set up starting in December 2005,

essentially in essentially that you take a combination of transportation security

administration personnel, federal air marshals, state and local law

enforcement, and you essentially do allegedly random warrantless searches, baggage inspection, things of that nature at various

transit hubs around the country.

The idea is that the so-called random nature of it helps to essentially act as a deterrent for terrorists.

There's no actual basis to believe that.

There's no scientific evidence to that effect.

There's been no studies essentially done to that effect.

And if you actually look at the track record,

for example, the shooting that took place

at Los Angeles International back in the fall of 2013

and obviously had no deterrent effect.

...