This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 25, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Cato Institute continues to try to discover the extent of warrantless

federal surveillance on Americans and the degree to which those secretive

agencies are auditing their own work.

Kato's Patrick Edington has been front and center in this effort.

We spoke earlier this week about some galling information the intelligence agencies

seem to have preferred not to reveal.

So June of 2023 I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Justice for specific documents on the Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act, Section 702, Mass Electronic Surveillance Program and what I was seeking specifically

were the internal audits

Compliance audits of this particular program.

We knew they existed, we knew they were being done.

DOJ and intelligence community officials

had talked about this publicly.

Of course, all this is an outgrowth of the number of

scandals that this FISA program has been involved in over the last 15 going on

16 years and so we were trying to get a sense as to, you know,

whether or not anything else, essentially,

was being kept from the public.

So we filed that FOIA in June,

and October rolls around, and I still don't have anything in hand.

...