This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 16, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A group of hackers stole NSA malware designed to engage in surveillance of computer systems around the world.

Now those tools are up for auction.

At this point, there are a few answers about what that hack means, but it's important to get a handle on the right questions.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute,

offers his thoughts.

Who revealed this hack had taken place?

So there's a sort of mystery about the hackers themselves here.

The group purporting to have released this data

refers to itself as the Shadow Brokers, which is I think a reference to the video game Mass Effect,

in which the Shadow Broker is a kind of sci-Fi information dealer who operates this black market and contraband data.

The post they put up, which included the supposedly pilfered code, which again hasn't been

acknowledged by an essay, but which security researchers believed to be genuine or at least an incredibly elaborate hoax if it's not genuine.

And in kind of comically broken English proposed that people send them

Bitcoin to bid on the yet unreleased code they say they're holding back.

As many people have noticed there is a pretty radical disconnect between the

presumably sophistication that would be required to compromise this code from the equation group which is a

security industry sort of nickname for a incredibly sophisticated hacking group

that most people believe is effectively the NSA, the targeted

access operations division within NSA, and the sort of amateurish scheme they've proposed.

They're basically saying, send us Bitcoin,

...