All indications are that this is for real (as usual. Wikileaks AFAIK was never caught disseminating fake information). This is a huge blow to the CIA. There will be a mad scramble among software companies to fix their code. Unless the backdoors were negotiated with the CIA in the first place.
I guess this is more or less a big deal depending on how detailed these “descriptions” of the code are. While I’m sure the CIA has some heavy hitters, they are probably still merely among the elite hackers already available to governments and billion dollar companies. I doubt this leak would spawn an age of unstoppable script kiddies.
Anti US anarchists.
I never liked wikileaks. I did not like when when I was a semi neocon / liberal who voted for McCain in 2008, and I do not like them now.
People like Assange and Glenn Greenwald and Chomsky and Jeremy Scahill have this demonic view of American power and influence in the world, and they cheer on any development that potentially undermines what in their view is the great imperial power/empire.
So many people on the far left are cheering this on, and those gaggle of America haters I listed off, and it kind of sickens me.
I dunno, I’m also against illegal spying on American citizens. But hey if you’re happy with the NSA listening in on you through your smart TV, well I guess we have nothing to discuss.
Trump deflects his admiration of WikiLeaks by throwing CIA under the bus (again) in 5…4…3…
As noted, it’s illegal.
But that doesn’t mean that American childrens’ toys with cameras can’t be designed here and then sold in Mexico to Cartel members. Given that most electronic things are, at least in part, developed in the US, finding backdoors into US products is a pretty decent way to snoop in on foreigners in foreign lands.
Well, there have always been a ton of tools available for hacking out there for folks who know where to look and/or have a need to have them. I’ve used several myself in the past as demonstrators to show how hackers do what they do so other IT folks and users can understand what’s going on.
That said, if these are indeed actual (and up to date, more importantly) CIA ‘hacking tools’, it would be an incredibly bad thing for anyone to just put them out in the wild for anyone and everyone to get a hold of them. And incredibly irresponsible of the CIA and whoever released them to have done so. It’s hard to overstate how bad it would be for some tools to be in the general public’s hands.
First of all, if the CIA’s security is so pathetic that a volunteer organization is able to get their hands on these tools, then how sure are you that well-funded nation states like China or Russia couldn’t have done the same, and then turned those tools against Americans?
Furthermore, the types of vulnerabilities that the CIA is targeting here are frequently independently found and exploited by criminal organization and foreign governments; there is no guarantee that people other than the CIA wouldn’t have been able to exploit these security issues for their own ends. It may well be that overall Americans wind up becoming safer as a result of these revelations.
Well…if you read the article you’d see ‘that well-funded nation states like China or Russia’ is probably exactly where they GOT the information. 
I don’t care. Perhaps I should, if I was in Putins Russia I would care more, but therein lies part of the discord. I do not View American officials and people in the CIA as Sadists like the far left does, do not view them as these cartoon Evils just looking for excuses to start wars and pad the bottom lines of defense contractors.
Read between the lines of people like Assange and Greenwald and Chomsky and Scahil and that impression wafts through like a stench for MILES.
It is precisely because I do NOT have that poisoned view of our officials that I am more willing to give them some leeway in order to get at people who are doing things that none of us wants.
Wikileaks collects secret info, they did not necessarily do the hacking. The recent election hacking of the DNC is a prime example, that is widely believed to be perpetrated by Russia, not wikileaks. The latter was merely the conduit for the leaks.
Also, just by using exploits in the wild, you risk those exploits being discovered by foreign security officials and governments. Wasn’t Stuxnet discovered by an American anti virus company?
Just note that in the quote you posted there, the poster (who, full disclosure I don’t always agree with) said ‘I’m also against illegal spying on American citizens’ (my emphasis). The ‘illegal’ part is what you should focus on. Your reply seems to go right over that and either you ARE good with our government doing illegal spying on its citizens or you are talking past the other poster.
For my part, I’m ok with spying. We have checks and balances and our elected officials are that check…and one answerable to the people. But we also have laws, and I’m very much against ILLEGAL spying by ANY US agency against US citizens. There are enough legal means that I don’t think the government needs to resort to anything illegal to keep us safe.
THe claim lost me when it indicated that the tools are setup to look like russian spies.
The entire claim is set up to give ‘yet another’ excuse why it wasnt the russians but it was in fact the Obamas.
[QUOTE=CNN email]
To hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted hacking techniques that enabled them to appear as if they were hackers in Russia, WikiLeaks said.
[/QUOTE]
Well, one wouldn’t expect them — for spying on foreigners — to put their own distinctive CIA fingerprints on the traces.
Myself, I’m also opposed to legal spying on our own citizens. If we didn’t want government agencies spying on us, then we shouldn’t have ordered them by law to do exactly that.
The Obamas hacked the DNC, leaked the emails to Wikileaks, and used fancy hacking tools to make it look like Russia, all to get Trump elected?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but even the most witless Trump voter can see the flaw here.
Exactly. This is just another example of the Russians, through Wikileaks, propping up Trump’s administration.
Wikileaks discredited itself by taking sides in an election. They claimed to have hacked info from both sides, but only leaked one, and did so at politically opportune moments. And then continued lying about stuff they were going to do.
It’s an agenda-driven organization that will lie about what they have. The U.S. couldn’t have discredited them better than they did themselves.
And I still suspect the site is under Russian control now. So information that proves Russia innocent is particularly suspect.
Do you believe that the types of people who occupy the bureaucracy and national security agencies could change? Do you believe it’s possible that we could have a president who doesn’t value liberty and democracy and then fill administrative positions with like-minded people?
People are people. You might buy into American exceptionalism, but it would be no different than Germans who bought into the Third Reich. It was only after they had exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, and political opponents, and launched a reckless war that ended up leaving German women getting raped by invading Russian soldiers – it was only then that they realized just how much their society had changed and what the consequences were.
Yes, there are entirely too many Hitler analogies and I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. But here’s the thing: he doesn’t have to be as bad to cause extraordinary damage and irreversibly change our society. America’s had great leaders over the centuries, but honestly, we’ve also been somewhat lucky despite our best attempts at times to tear our union apart. Eventually, luck does run out.
Funny how the key revelation “the CIA and their pals can and do spy on you through your smart TV” just kind of got oh-yeahed here.