This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 20, 2017.

I'm Keelib Brown.

As Congress discusses the ways in which the Obama administration may have snooped on some

Americans in particular, consider how

government snooping on Americans occurs all the time. The implications for your own

data security are significant. He does Patrick Edington comments.

With the release of what seems to be a whole lot of CIA tools for surveillance it is you know as a speaking as an American I

wonder to what extent there are controls on this kind of technology being used by

Intel agencies to collect my information. Yeah a lot of folks have been

asking the question in the wake of this WikiLeaks dump of CIA material in March of 2017 here.

Are they turning on my TV when I don't know it? Are they doing this? Are they doing that?

And part of the problem is we just don't know. Of course, there are the usual denials and

so on and so forth. But what's interesting about this particular document dump, which amounted to over 8,000

items and WikiLeaks claims that there will be more in the future, no idea exactly

one that will happen obviously.

But this initial tranche material is actually focused on commercially available stuff to kind of

use a George Carlinism here.

We're talking about software, firmware, and hardware.

Most of the documents are really kind of delving into software for the most part.

And here we're talking about not just the operating systems for the phones and the

tablets and the computers we use whether you happen to be a Microsoft person or

an Apple person both of them are covered, as is Android and iOS.

...