This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 4th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The current fight over renewing federal surveillance authorities has a new twist.

A new executive order from the White House and an apparent effort by President Biden

to circumvent congressional debate over surveillance for at least the next year.

Cato's Patrick Eddington provides the details.

Patrick Edington, I will refer listeners to your bio page at the Cato Institute

because you have been rather busy lately as we approach the attempted

renewal of certain surveillance powers that the federal government has and to the extent that the federal government has.

And to the extent that the White House has weighed in on this,

I think it would be charitable to describe the White House statements on the surveillance renewal as

underwhelming and profoundly disappointing.

You know, some of our friends on the hill told me that the administration began lobbying Congress behind the scenes on the FISA Section 702 renewal

as early as the summer of August of 2022.

They have very much been hard at work,

trying to convince folks that a authority that has existed now for 15 years and that has been serially

abused pretty much every single one of those years to allow FBI agents to go in and essentially go on fishing expeditions looking through data of U.S. persons.

That that particular authority has been sufficiently internally audited and revised

so as to essentially preclude further abuses.

Now, I kind of take issue with the notion

that when in 2021, you know, we find out that they searched their database, their 702 database,

3.4 million times for U.S. person-related data and that by 2023 that had been reduced to a

...