This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 26, 2014. I'm Kila Brown.

The White House has offered its solution to the bulk collection of millions of Americans phone records, but it's not clear how

it solves the underlying problem of the authorities that give the NSA vast power to collect

data.

Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. He comments.

So we've known since January that President Barack Obama was pledged to end the NSA's controversial bulk telephone record program as it currently

exists.

What wasn't clear was what was going to replace it because the president had left open the

possibility that perhaps the bulk

collection of billions of Americans phone records would continue with some

kind of third party custodian or contractor holding that database. Or perhaps the phone companies would keep their

own records, but there would be a new legal mandate to force them to retain those records

for much longer to ensure the NSA had access.

And this week the good news is proposals from both the White House

and the House Intelligence Committee leadership essentially reject both of those possibilities.

So bulk collection really is going to end.

And both proposals are pretty similar in terms of their proposals for

what is going to take its place. Both the White House idea and the draft

version we've seen of legislation from the House Intelligence Committee

want to basically create a kind of new hybrid authority.

It's partly the old-fashioned section 215 of the Patriot Act, Business Records Authority, and also a little bit of Pen Register Authority.

This is a kind of authority that's used to get information about a particular phone line's calling activity in real time

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