This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 21st, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We are now learning that the NSA has engaged in bulk surveillance of the French and has hacked the email of a former president of Mexico.

The implications of this kind of surveillance extend far beyond just politics, says Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

The NSA has always said that Americans don't need to worry because there are strong safeguards to protect American

communications from being accessed and disseminated without appropriate

rationales. That has not been terribly comforting of course to people in the

rest of the world. We learned recently thanks to the latest batch of leaks from

former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA has been engaged in large scale

spying on our ally France, apparently collecting in the course of a month something on the

order of 70 million communications, that's

apparently primarily phone calls and text messages, and also that during the

administration of former Mexican president

Felipe Calderon, the NSA was able through a targeted operation to compromise

one of the servers that provided email to both Kalirun and many of his cabinet and were able to hack that and access those communications.

Apparently, among other things, they were interested in whether Galidum was considering and

his successor, and G. K. Peña Nieto may have been considering a change in stance on the drug war.

Certainly, Nieto has expressed maybe less enthusiasm for an aggressive war on drugs policy.

And, you know, we're unsurprisingly seeing a tremendous backlash in both countries.

The U.S. Ambassador was called in and explanations were demanded.

I think here at home we view this.

I suppose a little less surprised.

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