Wikileaks Vault 7 Released, Contains CIA Hacking Tools

Wikileaks drops the hammer:

Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones…

In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of “Vault 7” — the CIA’s weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse.

The CIA made these systems unclassified.

Why the CIA chose to make its cyberarsenal unclassified reveals how concepts developed for military use do not easily crossover to the ‘battlefield’ of cyber ‘war’.

This sounds incredible. How could the most sensitive hacking tools, from deep in the bowels of the CIA make it to Wikileaks? If these tools were being used properly, in furtherance of established government foreign policy objectives, the CIA would have kept them in the vault, and only CIA operatives would ever have had access to them. You would never have known they existed. And why are they unclassified?

The thing is, these are probably being used on American citizens, and I do not mean radical Muslim Terrorists about to launch attacks on the US. Because they are being used in extraordinarily illegal surveillance ops on normal citizens with no criminality or illegality, keeping the government’s secrets has become a secondary priority, behind maintaining plausible deniability, and making the operation detached from the relevant agencies involved.

When Obama sent word down to hack Sharyll Atkinson’s computers, the agents who that op landed on knew if they were ever caught, their asses would be grass. Their boss knew there could be a lawsuit, and nobody could predict what discovery would turn out if their office was hit with a subpoena for relevant documents. That is an extraordinarily hot potato.

So what did they do? They hired a private contractor. What did the contractor do? He may have hired a contractor himself. If you chased it down the line, what you would have found was citizens, many probably of ill repute (but with some relationship to the community), who due to operational necessities were given the CIA hacking tools, and the objectives. Note that if you fall under coverage, it is probably going to be these scumbags monitoring your banking info and private identify information. But if the agency is sued, they actually have no documents regarding the surveillance, and technically they can say they never did it, and they won’t be lying. In reality you were hacked by some weirdo, with almost no government association.

And although Wikileaks says the actual tools are unclassified because they are installed on unsecure systems, I also suspect that since no intelligence officer wants to commit any crime, they had to be unclassified or the officer would have been guilty of passing classified data to an unvetted civilian with no security clearance when they were given to the contractors they use. This tells you that the contractors they sometimes use would never pass a security review, though in truth they would never get the opportunity since they need to be kept separate from government.

It gives you an idea how prolific these ultra-illegal spying ops are, that the most sensitive secrets of the CIA are now out and floating around on the internet. They must be so overloaded they are being forced to lend the tools to people they have barely even vetted. In the choice between possibly spending time incarcerated, or risking the nation’s most sensitive intelligence, clearly the protection of intelligence is of secondary importance.

This is part of the problem President Trump may run into in the wiretap scandal. If Obama gave the order, Brennan passed it on, and one of Brennan’s underlings gave it to a friend who ran some private sector contractors, Trump will have a hell of a time proving it was ordered by the President, because the only proof of that may be a memory of Obama telling him, in Brennan’s mind. Everything about the order may have been verbal, and the only thing you can prove is that a private sector entity, unrelated to the government, conducted the wiretap for unknown reasons. These people have been playing this game for a while, and developing all sorts of protocols to shield their activities from public view and lawsuits, and maintain their plausible deniability. The chances of a smoking memo are slim.

If you are going to take this beast on you need to play their own game, meaning gathering intel, finding weak points, and then going nuclear and hitting every point when you finally do something. Trump should have surveillance on Brennan and Obama, and on everyone who could expose them. He should be looking for blackmail material on them, and be willing to play just as dirty as his adversaries. He should even have satellite overheads of everyone who meets with them, to track them back to their homes, and be building his own database of all of their contacts and connections. He could easily claim they are a threat to national security. It would be good to be President.

The only way President Trump could prevent this in the future is to clamp down on the use of contractors in all surveillance, forcing every surveillance op to exclusively use agency operatives, and maintain records within their own agency assiduously. That would have the benefit of limiting illegal activities against American citizens such as himself, and protecting America’s most sensitive tools from public purview.

Of course that would probably entail cutting 90% of our domestic intelligence budgets.

Spread r/K Theory, because every person you tell will also inform their entire surveillance team of it