This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 11th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court has ruled that the wholesale collection of

Americans phone records is illegal and not in line

with the text and meaning of the Patriot Act.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, breaks down what this means

for courts in the current legislative battle over surveillance.

So the Second Circuit has declared the metadata program, the infamous bulk telephone records program disclosed first by Edward Snowden

nearly two years ago to be unlawful.

They did not reach the question of whether it's constitutional, which because of some bad

precedents from the late 70s is a more difficult question than it ought to be, legally speaking.

The much easier question, I think, for a lot of folks was, did it violate the statute?

Was this a program that had been authorized even by the very broad authorities conveyed by the Patriot Act.

And even a lot of folks who are generally pretty pro-expansive surveillance powers

looked at that interpretation.

Where you had an authority, section 215 saying you can get records or tangible things that are relevant to an investigation and the secret FISA court

interpreting that to mean you can get an entire database so you can later search it for

the relevant things and said,

well that seems like an awful stretch.

Obviously James Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act,

believed that this was an abusive extension beyond what Congress had intended.

And so the Second Circuit came to that conclusion.

...