Deconstructing the Surveillance State

Free Thoughts
E48 -

Julian Sanchez joins us for a discussion on privacy, the NSA, and domestic surveillance.

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Hosts
Trevor Burrus
Research Fellow, Constitutional Studies
Aaron Ross Powell
Director and Editor
Guests
Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and studies issues at the busy intersection of technology, privacy, and civil liberties, with a particular focus on national security and intelligence surveillance. Before joining Cato, Sanchez served as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, where he covered surveillance, intellectual property, and telecom policy.

Matthew Feeney

Matthew Feeney is head of technology and innovation at the Centre for Policy Studies. He was previously the director of Cato’s Project on Emerging Technologies, where he worked on issues concerning the intersection of new technologies and civil liberties, and before that, he was assistant editor of Rea​son​.com. Matthew is a dual British/​American citizen and received both his BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Reading in England.

If the government’s been spying on us for decades, what’s new now? Why is bulk data collection so particularly nefarious? What is metadata anyway, and what does the government do with it? Does the government actually catch terrorists through mass surveillance? Why do people treat terrorism differently from other violent crimes? The defenders of surveillance say that “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of,” but does this justification hold water?