Julian Assange through his organization, WikiLeaks, is plugging along in his revelations about the United States government.
The latest leaks come from internal departments of the Central Intelligence Agency that rival the capabilities of the National Security Agency.
The NSA is supposed to be the agency tasked with global monitoring and data collection, however given the CIA’s alleged capabilities, there purpose is diminished.
Code Named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, the document dump is the largest ever on the CIA that contains 8,761 documents that provide details on the agency’s hacking abilities.
And folks, their abilities are frightening and it’s clear that nothing is safe from the capture of our government.
In true Orwellian fashion, the CIA even has the ability to monitor audio from Samsung (and other) smart TV’s even if the television is thought to be turned off.
We can assume the same with video feeds for Xbox and Playstation consoles.
The CIA even has a dedicated program called the “Embedded Devices Branch” that exists to hack televisions and consoles.
To no surprise, a similar “Mobile Devices Branch” exists within the spy agency to turn smart phones into monitoring devices.
They were also working on taking control of vehicle control systems (something hackers have already done with the new Jeep Cherokee).
Equally disturbing is the government’s efforts to create malware and viruses, specifically to target Microsoft Windows PC’s. While most of their work was against Windows users, they also developed exploits to attack and control Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and others.
The most ridiculous revelation of the WikiLeaks document dumps is that the CIA “horded” malware and viruses – and then lost control of the hacking arsenal.
According to WikiLeaks, the entire hacking arsenal of the CIA was “lost” within the hacking community – which means that nothing at all was technically lost, they simply lost control and any hacker can get ahold of these tools.
The depth of the hacking operations is what you would expect from a Hollywood production, however, the use of the tools is what Congress should be investigating.
While these capabilities are great when applied against our enemies, it’s likely they were used against American citizens, supporting Donald Trump’s claim that Trump Tower was “tapped” during the presidential election.
While Democrats whine about Russian influence and hackers who supposedly “hacked” John Podesta’s gmail password (which was “password”), the CIA, just a few years before, was hacking elections in France.
The CIA also operates a “hacker base” out of Frankfurt Germany – which would we can assume exists to influence the operations of other European nations.
As with all WikiLeaks releases, expect more to “drips” out over the coming weeks.