WikiLeaks Drops Another Bombshell, This Time on CIA

It's releasing a ton of information on agency's hacking arsenal
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 7, 2017 11:32 AM CST
WikiLeaks Drops Another Bombshell, This Time on CIA
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Feb. 5, 2016.   (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)

WikiLeaks claims to have documents revealing "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA," including its apparent ability to turn smartphones, TVs, and Windows computers into surveillance equipment. The volume of material is so great it will take awhile for media outlets to sift through them and authenticate—according to the Washington Post, WikiLeaks says the leak is larger than the dump of NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden. The 7,818 web pages and 943 attachments released so far, with information redacted, were reportedly created between 2013 and 2016, come from the Center for Cyber Intelligence, and include hundreds of millions of lines of code on more than a thousand hacking systems, reports the New York Times.

The documents show "the CIA had created, in effect, its 'own NSA' with even less accountability," says WikiLeaks, claiming the CIA used apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram to listen in on conversations, while a separate program developed with British intelligence reportedly allowed the CIA to also use Samsung TVs even when the TVs were off. WikiLeaks says the documents appear to have been shared among former government contractors before one "provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive" with the goal of sparking "a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyber weapons," per USA Today. A CIA spokesman says simply, "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents." (More WikiLeaks stories.)

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