WikiLeaks reveals vast CIA spying, cyberwar operation
8 March 2017
The bitter internecine struggle within the US state apparatus and ruling political establishment, featuring unsubstantiated Democratic claims of Russian hacking in support of Trump, on the one hand, and Trump’s own charge that his campaign was bugged by Obama, on the other, was overshadowed Tuesday by a massive release of CIA documents by WikiLeaks.
The 8,761 documents contained in what WikiLeaks has described as “the largest intelligence publication in history” have begun to lay bare a vast system of surveillance, hacking and cyberwarfare directed against the people of the United States and the entire planet.
The anti-secrecy organization called the first document trove “Year Zero” and said that further CIA data dumps are still to come under a larger project dubbed “Vault 7.”
The files were taken from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a huge and little-known command that includes some 5,000 hackers, both CIA agents and private contractors. Much as in the case of Edward Snowden’s leaking of secret documents exposing the global spying operation of the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, the CIA documents have apparently come from a former agency hacker or contractor concerned about the scope and purpose of the agency’s cyberwar operations.
The programs described in the documents indicate that the CIA, according to WikiLeaks, has developed “more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses and other ‘weaponized’ malware” allowing it to seize control of devices, including Apple iPhones, Google’s Android operating system (used by 85 percent of smart phones) and devices running Microsoft Windows. By hacking these devices, the CIA is also able to intercept information…