This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 13, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The NSA has impersonated Facebook and other popular sites to inject malware into thousands of computers

and thousands more have been compromised by

botnets that have subsequently been commandeered by NSA.

In an effort to catch national security threats, Cato Research Fellow Julian Sanchez argues the agency has taken a

Pokemon attitude toward global communications. You got to catch them all.

It's new surprise that the National Security Agency will sometimes want to hack computers in order to plant surveillance software on the machines of targets, specific suspected terrorists or employees of foreign governments that it needs to keep tabs on.

But what we've learned from the most recent cash of Snowden documents is that they have radically scaled this up.

Whereas once there might be a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand machines worldwide

that the NSA had targeted for hacking and malware implantation.

They have developed and since 2010 implemented an automated system called Turbine

which is capable of

implanting malware on a massive scale so we know that currently there are

hundreds of thousands of machines globally infected and the NSA

aspires to be able to have potentially millions of machines worldwide compromised by a whole array of programs that can remotely

activate webcams and microphones, basically turning a computer or a mobile device into a kind of remote spy drone for them,

as well as of course exfiltrating data from those machines. On a small scale, again, that's legitimate, that's

what the agency is there to do. But on a large scale, there are a lot of concerns, I think think about the idea that you would be deliberately creating

compromised machines by the millions and indeed one of the things we just learned from Reuters

in a follow-up report is that in fact one of the things that I say does to aid their hacking is hijack botnets.

So as we know, one of the big cyber threats we often hear about from the intelligence community is

...