WIKILEAKS AND THE CIA

This is about What We Know and.. What We Don’t Want To Know.

Let’s start by looking at what Wikileaks revealed about the CIA in their recent “Vault 7” document dump, which you can find here.

I am taking these leaks as real. Whether you like Julian Assange and his team or not, they have a stellar record of presenting the truth.

The ruling gangs in DC and allied media look very, very bad in comparison. I believe Wikileaks far more than I do politicians and news-readers, and I think that’s the only rational choice.

Also, please bear in mind that new batches of CIA leaks may appear at any time. According to Assange, the recent batch was less than 1% of what they have. Perhaps the remaining documents will be very mundane, but I rather doubt it.

With that said, there are five big revelations I think you should see:

#1: The CIA spends big money breaking your smart phones.

In the new leaks, there were 8,761 documents or files on hacking Androids and iPhones. They paid for a lot of hacking expertise, and you can be pretty sure that all those tricks will get around. And a significant number of these dirty tricks were hacks that would take full control of the devices.

#2: “All your encryption are belong to us.”

Cell phones are inherently insecure devices (the network itself is a central problem), but still, lots of encryption apps have been sold. The problem is, the CIA (and who knows who else after them) run right around those apps, making them almost irrelevant.

Bear in mind that the CIA hasn’t been able to crack the encryption. Instead, they simply hijack the entire phone and listen in before the applications encrypt and transmit your messages. Once they do that, it doesn’t matter if the messages were encrypted: they have the text before you encrypt it and after you decrypt it.

And yes, this applies to Signal and WhatsApp.

#3: The CIA is writing a lot of malware, targeting Windows, Mac, and even Linux.

The Wikileaks CIA dump also includes information about malicious software (aka, malware)  that can be used by the agency to steal data from computers running Windows, Mac, and even Linux operating systems. This is done by taking control of these computers.

If they take control of your whole computer, they can see whatever you do.

#4: “All your apps are belong to us.”

One set of releases called “Fine Dining” details a collection of malware for specific applications. Fine Dining can be used to weaponize the following applications:

• Skype
• Chrome Portable
• Opera Portable
• Firefox Portable
• ClamWin Portable
• Kaspersky TDSS Killer Portable
• McAfee Stinger Portable
• Sophos Virus Removal
• Sandisk Secure Access
• Thunderbird Portable
• Opera Mail
• Foxit Reader
• LibreOffice Portable
• Prezi
• Babel Pad
• Notepad++
• Iperius Backup
• U3 Software
• 2048
• LBreakout2
• 7-Zip Portable
• VLC Player Portable
• Irfanview
• Portable Linux CMD Prompt

#5: Google is part of the Intelligence Community.

The proof for this comes from previous leaks (see here and here), but it’s worth including in this list. And this really shouldn’t be too shocking. After all, Google surveils well over a billion people daily: One billion gmail users (and all their correspondents), three billion searches daily, and 900 billion YouTube views per month. Can you imagine an intel complex that wasn’t desperate to incorporate this?

So, that’s what we know at the moment. Now, I think it’s important to understand what we don’t want to know:

Rearranging Our Mental Furniture

One of the hard things about revelations of this type is that most people aren’t emotionally prepared to face them. After decades of lauding the CIA and identifying with the ‘protector’ agencies of the US government, the prospect of change calls a lot of their self-image into question. Facts often fail when pressed up against that.

Said otherwise: Millions of people face major emotional obstacles to saying that the CIA is a fallen agency. This is not an intellectual weakness on their part – of not being smart enough – but an emotional weakness.

These people (many of whom are fine friends and neighbors) have built a great deal of their mental universe on the idea of CIA agents (and the entire US ‘Intel community’) as righteous and brilliant… on the proposition that they are honorable protectors.

Whenever you present evidence of bad CIA actions, it crashes right into this belief, and generally bounces right off.

A standard response is, “they only use these things against the bad guys.” That response feels safe; it feels like a resolution. And yet the stories of horrible CIA activities are many… some of them acknowledged after the fact.

And let’s not forget that they very recently slandered a new President (Trump) without presenting any evidence whatsoever.

Again, the problem of confronting these things is not intellectual, but emotional.

At some point, however, we have to face the truth squarely and start rearranging our mental furniture. If and when we see that something we’ve built our self-image upon is not as advertised, or is no longer as advertised, if behoves us to rebuild upon better foundations.

Have we reached that moment with the CIA, or with the NSA, or with the FBI? That will be your choice to make. My suggestion is simply that you make it: A real choice, based upon facts, not your emotional inertia.

And Now…

And now we wait to see what’s leaked next. It should be interesting.

Paul Rosenberg, a long-time TTPer, is the CEO of Cryptohippie USA, and co-author of The New Age of Intelligence.